"Christian era" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Scriptures and their interpretation, and also as {109} showing forth the belief and usage of the Church in the earliest years of its history. (See TRADITIONS, also UNDIVIDED CHURCH.) The term "Fathers" is generally confined to the writers of the first five or six hundred years of the Christian Era. They are usually grouped together according to the period in which they lived, e.g., The Apostolic Fathers are those who lived nearest to the time, and to some extent contemporary with the Apostles, viz. St. Barnabas, St. Clement, St. Ignatius, Hermas and St. Polycarp. Another class ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... Church, it has remained till the present day in the province where it had already firmly established itself at the time now under consideration. The origin of the organ is very difficult to ascertain. There are traces of some sort of wind instrument before the Christian era. The so-called hydraulic organ was probably one in which water was used to perfect the air-holding qualities of the wind chest, in the same manner as now in gas holders. One of the earliest mediaeval references to organs is to that sent King Pepin, of France, father of Charlemagne, in 742 by ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... history of the Celts and Cymry, the first inhabitants of the British Islands of whom we have any record, who had come from Asia in the first great wave of western migration; a rude, aboriginal people, whose languages, at the beginning of the Christian era, were included in one family, the Celtic, comprising the British or Cambrian, and the Gadhelic classes. In process of time these ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... to have filled up the interval—which was to him of absolutely uncertain duration—between the Gothic migration from the Baltic to the Euxine and their appearance as conquerors and ravagers in the eastern half of the Roman Empire in the middle of the third century of the Christian era. Now, soothing as it may have been to the pride of a Roman subject of Theodoric to be informed that his master's ancestors had fought at the war of Troy and humbled the pride of Perdiccas, to a scientific historian these Scytho-Getic histories ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... world on an arrow of gold, and Cassiodorus and Glycas and their like told of mechanical birds that flew and sang and even laid eggs. More credible is the story of Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights tells how Archytas, four centuries prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... of years. Fortunately for those who survive, no arrears of misery are allowed by this scourge of ancient days; [Footnote: "Of ancient days."—For it is remarkable, and it serves to mark an indubitable progress of mankind, that, before the Christian era, famines were of frequent occurrence in countries the most civilized; afterwards they became rare, and latterly have entirely altered their character into occasional dearths.] the total penalty is paid down at once. As respected ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... of humor is excellently illustrated in Greek literature, where is to be found many a joke at which we are laughing to-day, as others have laughed through the centuries. Half a thousand years before the Christian era, a platonic philosopher at Alexandria, by name Hierocles, grouped twenty-one jests in a volume under the title, "Asteia." Some of them are still current with us as typical Irish bulls. Among these were accounts of the "Safety-first" enthusiast who determined never to enter ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... rather notes in regard to the judiciary of the kingdom, made by authors of unknown names. There are internal evidences that the original compilation must have taken place from 1170 to 1180 of the Christian era, that is, before the recapture of Jerusalem, and is therefore from the best of sources. It contains, however, but a single department of the judiciary system of Jerusalem, and the deficiency must be supplied from the Venetian manuscript. Still, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... or rather the chief personage, of the drama, came to the throne very near the beginning of the Christian era, about B.C. 42. The fate of the Lady Chaoukeun is a favorite incident in history, of which painters, poets, and romancers frequently avail themselves; her "Verdant Lamb" is said to exist at the present day, and to remain green all the year round, while the vegetation of the desert in which it stands ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... political economy, is bound up with the fate and the prosperity of nations. Wheat has been cultivated from time immemorial. At first it was roughly crushed and consumed in the form of a thick soup, or in cakes baked on an ordinary hearth. Many centuries before the Christian era the Egyptians were acquainted with the means of making fermented or leavened bread; afterwards this practice spread into Greece, and it is found in esteem at Rome two centuries B.C.; from Rome the new method was introduced among the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... sought to destroy Christ at His birth. The dragon is said to be Satan;(735) he it was that moved upon Herod to put the Saviour to death. But the chief agent of Satan in making war upon Christ and His people during the first centuries of the Christian era, was the Roman empire, in which paganism was the prevailing religion. Thus while the dragon, primarily, represents Satan, it is, in a secondary sense, a ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... Japan is the same date as 660 B.C. of the Christian era, so that Japan is now in its twenty-sixth century. Then everything began. Before that date all is mystery and mythology. After that date there is something resembling history, though in the early times it is an odd mixture of history and fable. As for the gods of ancient Japan, they were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... trying experiences, we arrived at Unyamuezi—the Country of the Moon—with which the Hindus, before the Christian era, had commercial dealings in ivory and slaves. The natives are wanting in pluck and gallantry, the whole tribe are desperate smokers and greatly given to drink. Here some Arabs came to pay their respects, they told me what I had said about the N'yanza being the source of the Nile ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... says he took no earthly food, and "went with his arrow all round the world without once eating." It seems that he rode on this arrow, which, Mr. Rawlinson thinks, may possibly have been an early tradition of the magnet. All our detailed information about him is of later date than the Christian era. The fact remains that tradition says he was able to fly in the air. Pythagoras is said to have had the same power, or rather the same faculty came upon him. He was lifted up, with no will or conscious ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the loadstone was observed in China over a thousand years before the Christian era. One of their emperors, it is said, provided certain foreign ambassadors with "south-pointing chariots," so that they might not go astray on their way home. To this day the magnetic needle in China continues to be called by a name which means that it points ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... that there were great movements of population, much mingling of types and commercial interchange of products, so that we have the constant conditions of advance. A last invasion seems to have taken place some two or three thousand years before the Christian era, when the Aryans overspread Europe. After all the controversy about the Aryans it seems clear that a powerful race, representing the ancestors of most of the actual peoples of Europe and speaking the dialects which have been modified into the related languages of the Greeks, Romans, Germans, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the first morning and dad looked out the window and saw Vesuvius belching forth flame and lava and stone fences, and wanted to turn in a fire alarm, but I told him that that fire had been raging ever since the Christian era, and was not one of these incendiary barn burnings, but he opened the window and yelled fire, and the porters and chambermaids came running to our room, with buckets of water, and wanted to know where the fire was. Dad pointed out of the window towards Vesuvius and said: ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... works of Theopompus, who lived in the fourth century before the Christian era, is an account of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, the king of Phrygia, in which the former tells the king that Europe, Asia, and Africa were surrounded by the sea, but that beyond them was an island of immense size, in which were many great cities, and nations with laws and customs ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... SS. is found in great variety of {195} shapes, and at what precise time it became an ensign of equestrian nobility no one can tell. Collars were worn at least so far back as the days of Livy (i.e. the commencement of the Christian era); for he recounts that Manlius having pulled off the collar of a Gaul, took the name of Torquatus, and afterwards always wore the collar. Such being the case, there is no room for doubting that this ensign formed one of the ornaments of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... contributed some of the most passionate and fantastic of these devotional scenes, is not even suspected of a leaning to Popery. In like manner, he excuses Massinger for the grossness of one of his plots (that of the Unnatural Combat) by saying that it was supposed to take place before the Christian era; by this shallow common-place persuading himself, or fancying he could persuade others, that the crime in question (which yet on the very face of the story is made the ground of a tragic catastrophe) was first made statutory by the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a usual and fashionable species of diversion at the Persian court in the times of the younger Cyrus (about 400 years before the Christian era), to go no higher, is evident from the anecdote related by some historians of those days concerning Queen Parysatis, the mother of Cyrus, who used all her art and skill in gambling to satiate her revenge, and to accomplish her bloodthirsty projects against ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Tarentum, a celebrated Pythagorean philosopher, who flourished about four hundred years before the Christian era, is indeed said to have constructed a wooden flying pigeon; but, from the imperfect accounts transmitted to us of its machinery, there is every probability that its flight was one of the many deceptions of the magic art ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... as, The Law; the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon as, The Psalms; and all the remainder as, The Prophets.[141] Moreover, it is well known that two hundred and eighty-two years before the Christian era, these writings were translated into Greek and widely circulated in all parts of the world. They were, in fact, not only popular, but received as of divine authority by the Jews at that time, read in their synagogues in public worship, and regarded with sacred ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... they concern the early history of Spain, but enough is known to give us a fairly clear idea of the general condition of the country. The original inhabitants of the peninsula—the Iberians—antedate authentic historical records, but some centuries before the Christian era it is certain that there was a Celtic invasion from the North which resulted in a mingling of these two races and the appearance of the Celtiberians. The life of these early inhabitants was rude and filled with privations, but they were brave and hardy, having no fear of pain or danger, and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... elaborate work, of whose merits and defects I was not yet qualified to judge. According to his specious, though narrow plan, I settled my hero about the time of Solomon, in the tenth century before the Christian era. It was therefore incumbent on me, unless I would adopt Sir Isaac Newton's shorter chronology, to remove a formidable objection; and my solution, for a youth of fifteen, is not devoid of ingenuity. In his version ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... that careful breeding, but that actual selection was practised during ancient periods, and by barely civilised races of man. In the case of the fowl I can adduce no direct facts showing that selection was anciently practised; but the Romans at the commencement of the Christian era kept six or seven breeds, and Columella "particularly recommends as the best, those sorts {232} that have five toes and white ears."[369] In the fifteenth century several breeds were known and described in Europe; and in China, at nearly the same ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... is one of the most interesting problems of folk-tale diffusion; the moralizing tendency of the tale, the animistic note underlying it, all point to India, where we find it in the Bidpai literature before the Christian era and current among the folk at the present day. The case for Indian origin is strongest for drolls of ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... remain everlasting and unapproachable models of human beauty: but—to come to my third point—they wore no stays. The first mention of stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear old Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about four hundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when he was shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of the passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them a slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as you may see on the old Hindoo ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the first three centuries of the Christian era very few of the church fathers had any knowledge of Hebrew. The churches received the Scriptures of the Old Testament through the medium of the Alexandrine Greek version, which contained the apocryphal books. It is not surprising, therefore, that the distinction between ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the dawn of the Christian era, we first hear of Ireland from external sources, we learn of it as an island harboring free men, whose indomitable love of freedom was hateful to the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... not very easy to determine. One thing is certain, that the belief in some kind of spirits—either the same with the fairies, under a different name, or very nearly related to them—dates back to a very early period in British history—earlier, probably, than the Christian era. ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... and of the things "which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms," critics would have been disposed to transfer the redaction of the Bible to some period of the Christian era. So wide is the divergence of opinions on the subject that two learned critics, Ewald and Hitzig, differ in the date assigned to a certain biblical passage by no less than a ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... representatives of the ancient Kshatriyas or second caste, though the existing Rajput clans are probably derived from the Hun, Gujar and other invaders of the period before and shortly after the commencement of the Christian era, and in some cases from the indigenous or non-Aryan tribes. It does not seem possible to assert in the case of a single one of the present Rajput clans that any substantial evidence is forthcoming in favour of their descent from the Aryan Kshatriyas, and as regards ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... found it at the time he invaded Britain. Where do you find white pines growing better than in parts of New England where this tree has grown from time immemorial? Where can you find young redwoods growing more thriftily than among their giant ancestors, nearly or quite as old as the Christian era? ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... history and romance, of science and knowledge—aye, of national glory, for which so many valiant generations have fought and toiled—the youth of Britain, how are we treating them in the twentieth century of the Christian era? Are they not being exploited? Are they not being demoralised? Are they ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... time, however, music had been studied there as a science. It was imported by the first invaders of the Celestial Empire, who hailed from the borders of the Caspian Sea. The Yellow Emperor, or Huang Ti, who reigned two thousand seven hundred years before the Christian era, established a fixed base note from which musical instruments were to be measured, much as in the modern musical system we take a key-note and found our chords and scales upon it. The connection between musical and State affairs was so business-like ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... this enormous empire. For fifteen generations, for some five hundred years, did this decay, this vast revolution, proceed to its conclusion. Barbarian hosts settled down in provinces they had overrun and conquered, the old Pagan world died as it were, and the new Christian era dawned. From the latter end of the second century until the last of the Western Caesars, in A.D. 476, it is, with the exception of a short interval when the strong hand of the great Theodosius stayed the avalanche of Rome's invaders, one long story of the defeat ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... years before the birth of Christ. His ancestor, Solon, was the great law-giver of Athens 600 years before the Christian era. Solon visited Egypt. Plutarch says, "Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the wise men of Sais, and which ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... our great scholar is one with which I cheerfully coincide and would refer my readers to the fact that love-stories were written before the Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could there ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he, "is the link between the old art of the Mohammedans and the Gothic art of the Christian era. It was planned as a Byzantine church, and in it one can see many things suggesting St. Sofia's at Constantinople. When St. Mark's at Alexandria was destroyed by the Mohammedans many of its treasures fell into the hands of ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the Christian era, 200 years after the country had passed the zenith of its power and glory, the Mohammedans swept like a great avalanche upon Abyssinia, stifled but did not utterly destroy Christianity, which had been introduced ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... two-by-four station, with a cluster of worm-eaten old houses and a couple of sloppy-looking store buildings near it that looked as if they had all been erected prior to the Norman Conquest, or even possibly antedated the Christian era. ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... which the Bible speaks was that which was sung or played in praise of the Creator,—sacred music. In fact, this noble quality of the soul was very rarely called into exercise, save in the worship of the Deity, until many centuries had passed. Of music before the Christian era, both vocal and instrumental, the books of the Old Testament often speak. As to its exact character, we are left to conjecture, being, as before intimated, without materials from which to form a judgment; but, in some form or other, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the pagans and flourished many years before the Christian era. Wondrous things were wrought by the so-called pythonic spirit; evidently outside the natural order, still more evidently not by the agency of God, and of a certainty through the secret workings ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... early literature is conventional, because the spontaneous is not esteemed and is not preserved. But whatever might have happened under other conditions, the fact now is that the literature of our first Christian era is almost entirely lost. It perished in the Danish invasions. The works of Beda are, indeed, preserved, and in one sense they make a large exception to the general statement, yet the exception is not one that is of great import for our immediate ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... years of the Christian era this doctrine undoubtedly dominated the course of speculation—a speculation of which much is now forgotten and almost as much was certainly barren and unfruitful, but of which we would entertain a very mistaken notion if we were to imagine that it was not often pursued with great subtlety ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... rather was," said L'Isle, "the temple of Diana, built before the Christian era, perhaps while Sertorius yet lorded it in the Peninsula, and made Evora his headquarters. The architect," continued he, looking at it with the eye of a connoisseur, "was doubtless a Greek. Time, and the mutilations and additions of the Moor, have not effaced all the beauty of ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... dominating factors. The kneeling figures on the side Altar are similarly expressive. The torches above these Mediaeval Groups symbolize the Dawn of Understanding. The Chanticleers on the finials surrounding the Court symbolize the Christian Era. The topmost figure of the Altar symbolizes Intelligence, "Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards All" - the symbols of Learning and Industry at her feet. The topmost figure surmounting the side ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... grew. We set up our beds in a verandah, and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vast temple and its monuments—iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of Tai Shan, the ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... famous as the founder of a caravanserai, or halting-place for pilgrims on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which for at least four centuries continued to bear his name (Jer. xli. 17) and which may even, it has been conjectured, have been the same which, at the time of the Christian era "furnished shelter for two travellers with their infant child, when 'there was no room ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... be regarded as true sexual inversion can be traced in Europe from the beginning of the Christian era (though we can scarcely demonstrate the congenital element) especially among two classes—men of exceptional ability and criminals; and also, it may be added, among those neurotic and degenerate individuals who may be said to lie between ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of a famous rhetorician, the Roman philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca was born at Corduba (Cordova), in Spain, about the beginning of the Christian era. While the date of his birth is a matter for conjecture, the circumstances of his death are notorious. He was a victim of Nero's jealousy and ingratitude in 65 A.D., when the emperor seized upon a plot against himself as the pretext for sentencing ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... been my opinion, then, that there lay a vast field, rich with a harvest of material almost virgin, for the romancer's use, in the history of classic ages. And this at a period when the annals of every century and nation since the Christian era have been ransacked, and reproduced, in endless variety, for the entertainment of the hourly increasing reading world, is no ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... in finding the exact month and year referring to Hebrew Communal affairs, I have always given the Hebrew date conjointly with that of the Christian era, more especially as all the entries in the diaries invariably ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... races on the shores of the Mediterranean—Phœnicians, Pelasgians, Tyrrhenians, Ligurians, and Iberians. Herodotus, who calls the island Cyrnos, describes an attempt at colonisation by Phocæans, driven from Ionia, who founded the city of Alalia, afterwards called Aleria, 448 years before the Christian era. But the genuine history of Corsica commences with the period when the Roman republic, on the decay of the Carthaginian power, began to extend its conquests ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... hopefully. Gray anchorites in the deserts, worn pilgrims to the holy places of Jewish and Christian tradition, prayed for its coming. It inspired the gorgeous visions of the early fathers. In every age since the Christian era, from the caves, and forests, and secluded "upper chambers" of the times of the first missionaries of the cross, from the Gothic temples of the Middle Ages, from the bleak mountain gorges of the Alps, where the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds, like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... later schools of philosophy, in which Oriental theology or demonology was largely mixed. Apollonius of Tyana, a modern Pythagorean, is the most famous magician of antiquity. This great miracle-worker of paganism was born at the commencement of the Christian era; and it has been observed that his miracles, though quite independent of them, curiously coincide both in time and kind with the Christian.[17] According to his biographer Philostratus, this extraordinary man (whose travels and researches extended, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... unchanged, and suggests the following historical division of eras. (1) Pagan era; (2) Christian era; ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... are now maintaining against the philosophers of matter is as ancient as science, and was going on, nearly in the same terms, more than two thousand three hundred years ago. About five hundred years before the Christian era was born at Clazomenae, a city of Ionia, the son of Eubulus, who was to become famous by the name of Anaxagoras. He fixed his abode at Athens, and the Athenian people gave him a glorious surname,—they called him Intelligence. On ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... incomplete from want of space), is founded on the works of Semper, Bock, Rock, and the comparison of many specimens in collections and exhibitions in London and elsewhere. Auberville absolutely places before us the materials as well as the patterns of the weaving of the Christian era, as well as fragments of Egyptian textiles, in his ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... afforded to its traders by the presence of the Roman legions, but it never in those days became the capital of the province. Although a flourishing centre of commerce in the middle of the first century of the Christian era, it was not deemed of sufficient importance by Suetonius, the Roman general, to run the risk of defending against Boadicea,(7) and although thought worthy of the title of Augusta—a name bestowed only on towns of exceptional standing—the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... years must have intervened between the time when Ignatius wrote and the first trace we find of the term 'Catholic Church.' This, says Bishop Lightfoot, 'is founded on the confusion of two wholly different things'—Catholic as a technical, and Catholic as a general term. Centuries before the Christian era, the word Catholic [Greek: katholikos] is found in the sense of 'universal'; both before and after the age of Ignatius it is common in writers, classical and ecclesiastical. 'In this sense the word might have been used at ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... mine. Is it not astonishing that, in an age so refined, so free from the enormous and flagitious crimes which were the common stains of barbarous centuries, and at an epoch peculiarly enlightened by liberal views, the French nation, by all deemed the most polished since the Christian era, should have given an example of such wanton, brutal, and coarse depravity to the world, under pretences altogether chimerical, and, after unprecedented bloodshed and horror, ended at the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... any of your readers suggest a probable etymology for Totnes, the "prime town of Great Britain," as it is called by Westcote[1], who supposes it to have been built by Brutus, 1108 years before the Christian era. Mr. Polwhele, who supposed the numerous Hams in Devon to have owed their names to the worship of Jupiter Hammon, would, I imagine, have derived Totnes from the Egyptian god Thoth or Taut; or, perhaps, directly from King Thothmes. Westcote ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... at King Asoka," shouted my father triumphantly. "When, in the year 300 before the Christian era—before, mind you—he ordered the laws of Buddha to be engraved upon the rocks, what language did he employ, eh? Was it Sanscrit?—no! And why was it not Sanscrit? Because the lower orders of his subjects would not have been able to understand a word ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as much from his broad sense as from his strong affection, "when I compare the Saxon of our land and day, all enervated and decrepit by priestly superstition, with his forefathers in the first Christian era, yielding to the religion they adopted in its simple truths, but not to that rot of social happiness and free manhood which this cold and lifeless monarchism—making virtue the absence of human ties—spreads around—which the great Bede [110], ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some difficulty to the European to walk down the rough-paved street after a shower of rain, so slippery do the slabs of stone become; and he has to be alive always to the lumbering carts, whose wheels are more solid than circular, pulled by bullocks as in the days long before the dawn of the Christian Era. The wider the Chinese street the more abuses can it be put to, so that travel in the broad streets of the towns is quite as difficult as in the narrow alleys; and as these streets are never repaired, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... creatures of whose nature it had no knowledge, became a cruel, terror-stricken, persecuting delirium. Are you aware, madam, that a general massacre of men of science took place in the twenty-first century of the pseudo-Christian era, when all their laboratories were demolished, and all their ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... who have made a study of the subject. There is a constant reference to the "Mysteries" and "Inner Teachings" throughout the Epistles, particularly those of Paul, and the writings of the Early Christian Fathers are filled with references to the Secret Doctrines. In the earlier centuries of the Christian Era frequent references are found to have been made to "The Mysteries of Jesus," and that there was an Inner Circle of advanced Christians devoted to mysticism and little known doctrines there can be no doubt. Celsus attacked ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... determined to assume a little higher ground, and after repeating a few verses of the Koran, and gabbling a little Arabic, asked the Lion what he considered to be the difference between the Hegira and the Christian era, adding, that he thought the general computation was in error by about one year; and being a particularly modest person, chiefly, he believes, owing to his having been at school in Ireland, absolutely blushed ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... follows the mystical school. Both schools have been affected by Brahmanism. The Great Vehicle, founded by N[a]g[a]rjuna, was recognized at a fourth council in Kashmeer about the time of the Christian era. Compare ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... lullaby to be of the earliest Christian era. Some believe that in times of yore the Virgin herself sang it ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... estimated population of 300,000,000, attained to a considerable measure of civilization at a very remote period, but until very recently made almost no progress during the Christian era, being content to retain its old ideas, methods and institutions, which its people looked upon as far superior to those of the western nations. Great Britain gained a foothold in China as early as the seventeenth ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... centuries been very attentive students of Astronomy, but that we Westerns owe a good deal of our present knowledge in certain departments to the information stored up by Chinese observers during many centuries both before and after the Christian Era. ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... properly consult the meanings given in several standard dictionaries and lexicons, for in them we expect to find precision of statement, although in this instance I believe we shall be disappointed. Theophrastus, who lived several centuries before the Christian era, defines "Superstition" according to the translation given of his definition in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, as "A cowardly state of mind with respect to the supernatural," and supplies the following illustration: ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... he had made up his mind to study for the ministry, he had begun to read his Bible absorbingly, sweeping through that primitive dawn of life among the Hebrews and that second, brilliant one of the Christian era. He had few other books, none important; he knew nothing of modern theology or modern science. Thus he was brought wholly under the influence of that view of Man's place in Nature which was held by the earliest Biblical writers, has ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... outlines were, it seemed, but little altered from what they had been originally. I afterwards heard particulars about it. It had been originally 405 feet from the ground to the summit of the spire. It was built before the Christian era, and it is even now—most of the spire having been destroyed—250 feet in height. The radius of its base is 180 feet, which is, I believe, the same measurement as the height of the dome from the ground. I was struck by the way in which these huge structures, commemorative of ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... name or title borne by a line of kings or toparchs, apparently twenty-nine in number, who reigned in Osrhoene and had their capital at Edessa about the time of the Christian era. According to an old tradition, one of these princes, perhaps Abgar V. (Ukkama or Uchomo, "the black''), being afflicted with leprosy, sent a letter to Jesus, acknowledging his divinity, craving his help and offering him ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was feeling in an especially happy and contented mood. The day was bright and balmy, the air bracing, the scenery unfolded step by step magnificent and appealing. To be in this little corner of the old world, amid ruins antedating the Christian era, and able to wholly forget those awful stock and market reports of Wall street, was a privilege the old gentleman ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... Great of Portugal conquers Ceuta; he discards the use of the Julian period and introduces the computation of time from the Christian era. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a plan projected to connect Marseilles with a system of French canals, so as to afford direct water communication between the Mediterranean, the North Sea and thus to the English Channel. Marseilles antedates the Christian era by five hundred years. In 1782 a man-of-war mounting one hundred and eighteen guns, named "La Commerce de Marseilles" was built at the expense of the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce and presented to Louis XVI ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... changes, some of them radical and sweeping, have been made in the text of the Hebrew books since that translation was finished. But it is evident that the Scribes at an early day, certainly as early as the beginning of the Christian era, determined to have a uniform and an unchangeable text. For this purpose they chose some manuscript copy of the Scriptures, doubtless the one which seemed to them most accurate, and made that the standard; all the copies made since that time ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... pointed out to us in the grounds near the temple, believed to be the oldest historical tree in the world. It is nearly allied to the banyan species, and its record has been carefully kept since three hundred years previous to the Christian era. The temple, though wearing a most deserted and neglected aspect, is still in charge of a few yellow-robed priests, who keep up an appearance daily of regular services, such as they are, and more heathenish ones ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the famous mines of quicksilver of Almaden has not been precisely determined. Almost all the writers on the subject agree that cinnabar, from Spain, was already known in the times of Theophrastus, three hundred years before the Christian era, although there is evidence in the writings of Vitruvius that they were worked at a still earlier date, Spanish ore being sent to Rome for the manufacture of vermilion. Such ore constituted a part of the tribute which Spain paid to Rome emperors, and there ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... three hundred years before Christ, as the impression left of Buddha's foot when he visited the earth after the Deluge, with gifts and blessings for his worshippers; and in the first century of the Christian era it is recorded that a king of Cashmere went on a pilgrimage to Ceylon for the express purpose of adoring this Sri-pada, or Sacred Footprint. The Gnostics of the first Christian centuries attributed it to Ieu, the first man; and in one of the oldest manuscripts in existence, now in the British ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... served as preludes, is a mystery. The celebrated Wolf, who opened the path which leads modern Homerologists to such an extraordinary number of divergent theories, thought rightly that the great Alexandrian critics before the Christian Era, did not recognise the Hymns as "Homeric." They did not employ the Hymns as illustrations of Homeric problems; though it is certain that they knew the Hymns, for one collection did exist in the third ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... to a period to which no prudent historian will attempt to give a precise date. They speak the language and observe the same social and political customs that they did several thousand years before the Christian era, and they are the only living representatives to-day of a people and government which were contemporary with the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Jews. So far as our knowledge enables us to speak, the Chinese of the present age ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... from the open sea. Aden lies within the rainless zone, so that sometimes the inhabitants see no rainfall for three years together. The remains of an ancient and magnificent system of reservoirs hewn out of the solid rock, are seen here, the construction of which is placed at a date previous to the Christian era, and which have been adapted to ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... belief that plants are thus benefited, whether or not well founded, has been firmly maintained from the time of Columella, who wrote shortly after the Christian era, to the present day; and it now prevails in England, France, and Germany.[323] A sagacious observer, Bradley, writing in 1724,[324] says, "When we once become Masters of a good Sort of Seed, we should at least put it into Two or Three ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... accustomed to look upon each other as countrymen and brothers, and whose sympathies and feelings were in many respects in unison; it was fought manfully and fairly, as beseemed civilized men in the eighteenth century of the Christian era. Whatever wrongs, real or imaginary, the British Americans had to complain of, they had none that sufficed, even in their own eyes, to justify reprisals or cruelties beyond those which the most humanely conducted and least envenomed wars inevitably entail. But it was under strikingly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... from Cairo, and travellers who have sated themselves at Gizeh and Sakara with the contemplation of the very oldest buildings which the hands of man have constructed, become impatient of temples which are hardly older than the Christian era. Ruins which would be gazed upon with wonder and veneration in any other country are hardly noticed in Egypt. The tourists viewed with languid interest the half-Greek art of the Nubian bas-reliefs; they climbed the hill of Korosko to see the sun rise over the savage Eastern desert; they were ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... vineyards, oliveta, orchards, pastures, replaced the declining culture of grain; if ploughmen were fewer, other labourers were more. It is forgotten, besides, that the decline of Italian agriculture, never more than local, was exceedingly gradual; for two hundred and fifty years before the Christian era Italy never had depended exclusively upon herself. Sardinia and Sicily, at her own doors, were her granaries; consequently the change never had been that abrupt change which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the Great Vincent of Beauvais Thomas Aquinas Roger Bacon's beginning of the experimental method brought to nought The belief that science is futile gives place to the belief that it is dangerous The two kinds of magic Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era The Christian theory of devils Constantine's laws against magic Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft Papal enactments against them Persistence of the belief in magic Its effect on the development of science Roger Bacon Opposition of secular rulers ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... universal. It is not without good reason, therefore, that Pagan Rome is considered among Protestant commentators to be the power indicated by the great red dragon. And it may be a fact worth mentioning that during the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the Christian era, next to the eagle, the dragon was the principal standard of the Roman legions; and that ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the Orient. The points of contact between the Eastern and Western world were numerous even before the Portuguese showed the way to India. Alexandria was the seat of a lively commerce between the Roman Empire and India during the first six centuries of the Christian era; the Byzantine Empire was always in close relations, hostile or friendly, with Persia; the Arabs had settled in Spain, Southern Italy and Sicily; and the Mongols ruled for almost two centuries in Russia. All these were factors in the transmission of Oriental influence.[6] ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... cinders, once so abundant here as to have formed an important part of the materials supplied to the furnaces of the Forest, afford proof that the iron-mines were in existence as early as the commencement of the Christian era; so that the openings we now see are the results of many centuries of mining operations, with which their extent, number, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... very ancient and pious practice for the faithful to make on their person the sign of the Cross, saying at the same time: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Tertullian, who lived in the second century of the Christian era, says: "In all our actions, when we come in or go out, when we dress, when we wash, at our meals, before retiring to sleep, ... we form on our foreheads the sign of the cross. These practices are not commanded by a formal law of Scripture; but tradition teaches them, custom confirms ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... stationary. In June, 1850, Table Rock disappeared. Geologists tell us that the recession of the Canadian Falls by erosion is five feet in one year. Even judging it to be one foot in a year, the falls at the commencement of the Christian era were near Prospect Point; three thousand years ago it was at the upper steel arch bridge. Niagara shall in due time pass away. The eroding power that has made Niagara will perhaps be ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... politics. Under that name one may mean a policy directed toward world domination (Weltherrschaft.) For that kind of world politics the word "Imperialism," borrowed from the period of Roman world domination of the second century of the Christian era, fits precisely. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... with an astral pen in astral ink, "owe their origin to a circumstance which occurred in the time of Sankaracharya, erroneously supposed by the initiated to be an incarnation of Buddha. This teacher, who lived more than a century before the Christian era, dwelt chiefly upon the necessity of pursuing gnyanam in order to obtain moksha—that is to say, the importance of secret knowledge to spiritual progress, and the consummation thereof. And he ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... [62] and is said to have died in great poverty. It is doubtful whether the works we possess were written by him in his youth, or are the production of an imperfectly educated abbreviator. Bursian, quoted by Teuffel, [63] thinks it probable that in the second half of the second century of the Christian era, a grammarian made a very brief abridgment of Hyginus's work entitled Genealogiae, and to this added a treatise on the whole mythology so far as it concerned poetical literature, compiled from good sources. This mythology, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... sometimes sacrifice themselves on the husband's funeral pile. Such a victim is called Sati. It is uncertain when the custom was first introduced, but, evidently it existed before the Christian era. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... own lifetime. He was not interested in the question whether any gradual amelioration of society or increase of knowledge would mark the period of time which might still remain to run before the day of Judgment. In Augustine's system the Christian era introduced the last period of history, the old age of humanity, which would endure only so long as to enable the Deity to gather in the predestined number of saved people. This theory might be combined with the widely-spread belief ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... apprehension of future danger." Thus wrote the Roman historian, and Gibbon states that when we discount as much of this as we please as rhetorical and declamatory, the fact remains that the substance of this description is in accordance with the facts of history. Never until the Christian era was any thought given to the regular care of the helpless and the abject. Slaves were often treated like cattle, and the patricians had no bond of sympathy with the plebeians. Provisions were sometimes ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... before Christ, we read the instruction: "Ye officers of the Government, apply the compasses." Even if we begin where The Book of History ends, we find many such allusions more than seven hundred years before the Christian era. For example, in the famous canonical work, called The Great Learning, which has been referred to the fifth century B.C., we read, that a man should abstain from doing unto others what he would not they should do to ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... slowly evolved from lower and ruder forms; and when one learns that there have been many Christs, and that the evidence of the life of Jesus is very slight, and that all the acts and words of Jesus had been anticipated by other teachers long before the Christian era, then it is borne in upon one's mind that the historic basis of Christianity is very frail. And when one realises that the Christian theology, besides being borrowed from older religions, is manifestly opposed to reason and to facts, then one reaches a state of mind which entitles the orthodox ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... not far from the temples with Greek inscriptions already referred to, is a fine building of apparently later date, and supposed by the writer to have been a church from its construction, for the mines were worked steadily during the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. The structure has no roof over the main portion, but what was apparently an apse still retains its roof of long slabs of schist. The body is filled with fallen slabs. The walls show a side window and several niches, which features suggested a ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... was proverbial long before the Christian era. She supplied Nineveh and Babylon, and later Greece and Rome, with steel, zinc, pearls, precious stones, cotton, silk, sugar-cane, ivory, indigo, pepper, cinnamon, incense and other commodities. If we accept ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... facing towards Italy, another towards Greece, and the third, towards Africa, was a tempting field for conquest to the various nations surrounding it. It was successively overrun by the Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans, and later, after the Christian era, again successively by the Byzantines, the Moors, and the Normans. Almost all of the architectural remains of the older periods belong to the time of the Greeks, as neither the Carthaginians nor Romans left much to show for their occupation of the ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895 - The Cloister at Monreale, Near Palermo, Sicily • Various
... four columns and two Corinthian piers, two of the columns with spiral fluting, the others covered with fish-scaled carvings" (Handbook for Central Italy, p. 289); but in the opinion of modern archaeologists the whole of the structure belongs to the fourth or fifth century of the Christian era. It is, of course, possible, indeed probable, that ancient materials were used when the building was reconstructed. Pliny says the "numerous chapels" dedicated to other deities were scattered round ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... stones and gigantic trilitha, is one of the latest of the stone circles, and was doubtless made in the Iron Age, about two hundred years before the Christian era. Antiquarians have been very anxious about its safety. In 1900 one of the great upright stones fell, bringing down the cross-piece with it, and several learned societies have been invited by the owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, to furnish recommendations as to the best means of preserving this ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... peaks who have been the first to catch the light, but the dawn will spread until none are too lowly to share it. Let us turn, therefore, and inspect this movement which is most certainly destined to revolutionise human thought and action as none other has done within the Christian era. We shall look at it both in its strength and in its weakness, for where one is dealing with what one knows to be true one can fearlessly insist upon ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... given its name, and of which it is the principal town. Much diversity of opinion exists among antiquaries, as to whether it be of Roman or Saxon origin; but it is the opinion of Rous, as well as that of the learned Dugdale,[1] that its foundation is as remote as the earliest period of the Christian era. These authors attribute its erection to Gutheline, or Kimbeline, a British king, who called it after his own name, Caer-Guthleon, a compound of the British word Caer, (civitas,) and Gutieon, or Gutheline, which afterwards, for the sake of brevity, was usually denominated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... however, wrought to bring about the same result. This was the invasion of the Oriental religions, and the slow working, from the advent of the Great Mother of the Gods in B. C. 204 to the downfall of paganism at the end of the fourth {x} century of the Christian era, of the leaven of Oriental sentiment. The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution. The Great Mother ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... savage tribes" to whom Purna, one of the sixty, was sent, may admit of question, but it is certain that long before the Christian era the whole country north of the Himalayas was thoroughly Buddhist, and the unwearied missionaries of that great faith had penetrated so far west that they met Alexander's army and boldly told him that war was wrong; and they had penetrated east to ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the Night of the Nativity—the Star of the New Born. But modern discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they searched for the incarnation ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... reason why I have ventured on this present enquiry is that Simon Magus is invariably mentioned by the heresiologists as the founder of the first heresy of the commonly-accepted Christian era, and is believed by them to have been the originator of those systems of religio-philosophy and theosophy which are now somewhat inaccurately classed together under the heading of Gnosticism. And though this assumption of the patristic heresiologists is ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... might place him in a new relation to his Maker, and, according to Bunyan, might expel the Devil out of his heart. But for practical purposes, as Mansoul too well knows, the Devil is still in possession. At intervals—as in the first centuries of the Christian era, for a period in the middle ages, and again in Protestant countries for another period at the Reformation—mankind made noble efforts to drive him out, and make the law of God into reality. But he comes back again, and the world ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... countries is found to be very stable, and but very small variations have been detected in modern times. But that there have been important climatic changes, since the Christian era, cannot be doubted, unless we doubt history. Not many centuries ago, it was a common thing for all the British rivers to freeze up during the winter, and to remain so for several months. If space ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... due south, through the ascending passage. I have calculated the position of that circle among the stars along which lay all the points passing 26 deg. 18' above the horizon when due south, in the latitude of Ghizeh, 2170 years before the Christian era; and it does not pass near a single conspicuous star.[45] There is only one fourth magnitude star which it actually approaches—namely, Epsilon Ceti; and one fifth magnitude star, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Claudian on the Rape of Proserpine, the longest extant work connected with the story of Demeter, yet itself unfinished, closes the world of classical poetry. Writing in the fourth century of the Christian era, Claudian has his subject before him in the whole extent of its various development, and also profits by those many pictorial representations of it, which, from the famous picture of Polygnotus downwards, delighted the ancient world. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... MSS., the rarest in the world—no nation having attained the same perfection as the Irish in that department of taste—and specimens of ancient sculpture from before the Christian era, excited the attention of the lovers of antiquity, and admiration for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... to Ephesus as a town given over to sorcery and witchcraft assists in giving the impression that the time of the Play falls within the Christian era, when the ancient customs of the Pagan inhabitants gave the City a bad repute of this particular kind. Was it derived from Plautus? Note whether sorcery and witchcraft are included in his account of the discreditableness ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... epitaphs, and the precise period when they were first introduced, is involved in obscurity; but that they were in use several centuries prior to the Christian era is indisputable. The invention of them, however, has been attributed to the scholars of Linus, who, according to Diogenes, was the son of Mercury and Urania; he was born at Thebes, and instructed Hercules in the art of music; who, in a fit of anger at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... Artaxerxes; the founder of a new dynasty, which, under the name of Sassanides, governed Persia till the invasion of the Arabs. This great revolution, whose fatal influence was soon experienced by the Romans, happened in the fourth year of Alexander Severus, two hundred and twenty-six years after the Christian era. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... opens his mouth to tell us of a little incident illustrative of his personal prowess, and, by way of preface, commences at Eden, and goes laboriously through the patriarchal age, on through the Mosaic dispensation, to the Christian era, takes in Grecian and Roman history by the way, then Spain and Germany and England and colonial times, and the early history of our grand republic, the causes of and necessity for our war, and a complete history up to date, and then slowly unfolds the little matter. We always loved to hear this ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... origin to the art of chryselephantine sculpture, so called from the Greek primitives, gold and ivory. This art, which was perhaps more luxurious than tasteful, was introduced about six hundred years before the Christian era; and it was much admired for its singular beauty. It was not, however, till the days of Phidias that it attained to its full splendour. Two of the masterpieces of this sculptor—the colossal statues of Minerva in the Parthenon at Athens ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... women still wash in the streams, and they beat their clothes upon the rocks just as they did hundreds, one might say thousands, of years ago and more—for the greater part of Kalevala was most undoubtedly written long before the Christian era in Finland. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... about Europe as any of our teachers. And I never dreamed there had been such tremendous conquests in Asia, and such wonderful things in Egypt until I heard her talk about them; and she knows about the great men and generals and rulers who lived before the Christian era, and at ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... for many centuries after the beginning of the Christian era the methods of the ancient world were followed; and that private libraries were arranged upon the Roman model in presses, with busts, mottoes, and the like. Such was the library of Isidore, Bishop of Seville (601-636). He was a voluminous writer, and seems to have had a ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... preceding generations. No dynasty has distinguished itself more in this line than the present Manchau possessors of the empire. In fine, the evidence is complete that the Classical Books of China have come down from at least a century before our Christian era, substantially the same as we have them at present. 6. But it still remains to inquire in what condition we may suppose the Books were, when the scholars of the Han dynasty commenced their labors upon them. They acknowledge that the tablets — we cannot here speak of manuscripts — ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... It is strange that the origin of the wedding ring is lost in obscurity. The "fyancel," or wedding ring, is doubtless of Roman origin, and was originally given at the betrothal as a pledge of the engagement. Juvenal says that at the commencement of the Christian era a man placed a ring on the finger of the lady whom he betrothed. In olden times the delivery of a signet-ring was a sign of confidence. The ring is a symbol of eternity and constancy. That it was placed on the woman's left hand denotes ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... be the finest in Canton), you can buy burning-sticks measured to mark the time. They are extremely cheap, but perfectly accurate, and there seems little doubt that they have been used by the Chinese for thousands of years before the Christian era. Here, too, were the large spectacles so much worn; opium pipes, with all the paraphernalia for cleaning and smoking them; water pipes in pretty little shagreen cases, and many other curious articles in common use, of which ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... developed the notion that the Messiah, after his appearance on earth, would depart into the spirit-world, to consummate his preparation; and would return thence to assume full power. This had became the popular expectation by the Christian era. ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... names for the bow in Sanscrit writings dating back nearly two thousand years. If this information could be supplemented by reliable monumental evidence of the existence of a bow of some rude kind among the nations of the East about the commencement of the Christian era, its value would necessarily be complete. In the absence of such evidence we are left in doubt as to what was intended to be understood by the reported references to a bow in ancient Sanscrit literature. The difficulty ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... historical dates can furnish I have endeavoured to establish with all the certainty that the subject admitted, that the original composition of the Ramayan is to be assigned to about the twelfth century before the Christian era. Not that I believe that the epic then sprang to life in the form in which we now possess it; I think, and I have elsewhere expressed the opinion, that the poem during the course of its rhapsodical and oral propagation appropriated by ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Chichen-Itza. The almond-eyed, flat-nosed Siamese race of Copan is not to be mistaken for the long, big-nosed, flat-headed remnant of the Nahualt from Palenque, who are said to have invaded the country some time at the beginning of the Christian era; and whose advent among the Mayas, whose civilization they appear to have destroyed, has been commemorated by calling the west, the region whence they came, according to Landa, Cogolludo and other historians, NOHNIAL, ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... nothing of the effects on the mechanism of the heavens. Lord Kelvin himself urged the inadmissibility of the "extra-planetary" theory of meteoric supply on the very tangible ground that, if it were true, the year would be shorter now, actually by six weeks, than at the opening of the Christian era. The "intra-planetary" supply, however, is too scanty to be anything more than ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... foundation of Western civilization. The social contacts of the Christian religion. Social conditions at the beginning of the Christian era. The contact of Christianity with social life. Christianity influenced the legislation of the times. Christians come into conflict with civil authority. The wealth of the church accumulates. Development of the hierarchy. Attempt to dominate the temporal powers. Dogmatism. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... matchlock; and differ in nothing from those which still continue to be carried, as an article of commerce, by this nation to Cochin-China. There can be no doubt, however, of the use of gunpowder being known to the Chinese long before the Christian era. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... however, is that in India, centuries before the Christian Era, there existed both phases of Christian monasticism, the hermit[A] and ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... that is not the case. Any event which has occurred, or which will occur, at the time of the adoption of the universal day will be expressed just as exactly with reference to time as if the time had been calculated from the beginning of the Christian era. There will not only be no confusion, but it seems to me the adoption of the universal day will tend to avoid confusion hereafter, because confusion must exist where we have so many standards of time. Now, if any event which is taking place, or has taken ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... simply as a matter of reason, and from this drifted into a superstition"; that is, into what non-believers in the new doctrine characterize as a superstition. Whenever one of these driftings has found a lodgement, there has been planted a new sect. There has never been a year in the Christian era when there have not been believers ready to accept any doctrine offered to them in the name of religion. As Shakespeare expresses it, in ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... almost under the shadow of the Pyrenees, a sparkling wine of some repute is made at a place called Lagrasse, about five-and-twenty miles westward of Narbonne, the once-famous Mediterranean city, the maritime rival of Marseilles, and in its palmy days, prior to the Christian era, a miniature Rome, with its capitol, its curia, its decemvirs, its consuls, its prtors, its questors, its censors, and its ediles, and which boasted of being the birthplace of three Roman Emperors. To-day Narbonne has to content itself with the humble renown derived from its delicious honey and ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... I spent a memorable week in Koeln. The history of the city antedates the Christian era. Its cathedral is a fane of wonderful beauty. In the Reformation Koeln joined the Lutheran forces and for eighty years two of its archbishops were Lutheran pastors. The "Consultation" of Archbishop Hermann is one ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... market (R. sativus), occasionally escaped from cultivation, although credited to China, is entirely unknown in its native state. "It has long been held in high esteem," wrote Peter Henderson, "and before the Christian era a volume was written on this plant alone. The ancient Greeks, in offering their oblations to Apollo, presented turnips in lead, beets in silver, and radishes in vessels of beaten gold." Pliny describes a radish eaten in Rome as being so transparent ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... said, "You are going too fast and proving too much. In the anxiety to show that the Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the Lamb were honored by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of the Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the Bull and the baptism in bull's blood were the salient features of the Persian and Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries earlier. How can you reconcile the existence side by side of divinities belonging to such different periods, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... after Romulus—so tradition ran—founded the little village by the Tiber which was to become "Mother of Nations," "Centre of the World," "Imperial Rome." To state the time according to modern standards it was July, fifty years before the beginning of the Christian Era. The fierce Italian sun was pouring down over the tilled fields and stretches of woodland and grazing country that made up the landscape, and the atmosphere was almost aglow with the heat. The dust lay thick on the pavement of the highway, and rose in dense, stifling clouds, as ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the Christian era the commerce in this article had extended over most parts of the civilized world; and long afterwards it continued to be a principal source of wealth to the Egyptians. But at length the invention of another manufacture, and the interruption ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... for centuries to get a foothold in Thames Street. But of such infusoria History (glorying only in offenders, criminals, and robbers on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone we know, that the early rulers of London before the Christian era passed away like the wild beasts they fought and slew, and their very names have perished. One line of an old blind Greek poet might have immortalised them among the motley nations that crowded into Troy or swarmed under its walls; but, alas for ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... that I would appear pedantic to you." said Ebba, "I would tell you what Eric has told me about our Christmas festival. It appears to date back to a remote day before the Christian era. At this season our pagan ancestors celebrated the winter solstice, just as on the 25th of June they did that of summer. The early name of this festival, which we yet preserve, indicates an astronomical idea. It was ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... deliberate connivance, of priests and theologians. The history of the enfranchisement of the French communes offers constantly the spectacle of the ideas of justice and liberty spreading among the people, in spite of the combined efforts of kings, nobles, and clergy. In the year 1789 of the Christian era, the French nation, divided by caste, poor and oppressed, struggled in the triple net of royal absolutism, the tyranny of nobles and parliaments, and priestly intolerance. There was the right of the king and the right of the priest, the right of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... and to war. They were barbarians, and their warfare was barbarous, but not more barbarous than the warfare of our Saxon and Celtic ancestors. They were ignorant and superstitious, but their condition closely resembled the condition of our British forefathers at the beginning of the Christian era. Macaulay says of Britain, "Her inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich Islands." And again, "While the German princes who reigned ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... twenty-fifth day of December. The year was the second of the 193d Olympiad, or the 747th of Rome; the sixty-seventh of Herod the Great, and the thirty-fifth of his reign; the fourth before the beginning of the Christian era. The hours of the day, by Judean custom, begin with the sun, the first hour being the first after sunrise; so, to be precise; the market at the Joppa Gate during the first hour of the day stated was in full session, and very lively. The massive valves had been wide open since ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... hardened he put on another seal with the same impression. He received about ten sols (five pence) per billet, and this game lasted all his life, which was a long one; for he died at the age of seventy, being struck by lightning, near the end of the second century of the Christian era: all which may be found more at length in the book of Lucian, entitled Pseudo Manes, or the false Diviner. The priest of the oracle of Mopsus could by the same secret open the billet of the governor who consulted him, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... with a view to the teaching of the history of Europe since the Christian era by the biographic method, recommended by Mr. Carlyle as the only proper method of teaching history. The style of the book is clear, elegant, and terse. The biographies are well, and, for the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... as you approached, so vast was its diameter, like the entrance of a cave, and not a small one. Calculating upon what I have observed of the slow growth of this tree in rocky situations, and of its durability, I have often thought that the one I am describing must have been as old as the Christian era. The Tree lay in the line of a fence. Great masses of its ruins were strewn about, and some had been rolled down the hillside and lay near the road at the bottom. As you approached the tree, you were struck ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... proved by concurrent traditions of the different groups that there was a general movement of population throughout central Polynesia during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Christian Era, during which the Harvey Islands and afterwards New Zealand were colonized, and many voyages were made between the Hawaiian Islands and the Samoan and Society groups. This intercourse, however, seems to have ceased for four ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... have discussed the rice culture of the East Indies are inclined to credit its introduction to Indian colonists, [204] but Campbell [205] holds to the belief that it was practised centuries before the Christian era and prior to the Hindu invasion of Java. There seems to be no dissent, however, among these writers to the belief that its introduction antedated the arrival of the European in the Orient by several centuries. The ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... highest representatives of men who have thus endeavoured, during the Christian era, to search out these deep things, and relate them, are Dante and Milton. There are none who for earnestness of thought, for mastery of word, can be classed with these. I am not at present, mind you, speaking of persons set apart ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin |
