"Idolatrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inspire the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom. It was given amidst fire and smoke, thunders and lightnings, and whatever else could fill the minds of the Jews with fear and wonder. Compelled, as it were, by the idolatrous acts of His chosen people, by their repeated rebellions, and their endless murmurings, God showed Himself to them as the almighty Sovereign, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, whose holiness, power, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... All that appeals to the eye in the rites and ceremonies impresses them—the glamour and pomp of the procession attract them; they are very fervent in outward observances, but ever prone to stray towards the idolatrous. A pretended apparition of the Blessed Virgin is an old profitable trick of the natives, practised as recently as December, 1904, in the village of Namacpacan (Ilocos), where a woman, who declared the Virgin had appeared to her in the form of the Immaculate ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the Boer war. Miss Hobbhouse invited the Boers to keep up the fight. The betrayal of India is much worse than the injustice done to the Boers. The Boers fought and bled for their rights. When therefore, we are prepared to bleed, the right will have become embodied, and idolatrous world will perceive it and do homage ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression—the wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The wisdom of ages bids us beware ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... place in the eyes of Mussulmans, and as dear to them, as it was to the Christians, and that they could on no account give it up. In respect to the true cross, the Christians, he said, if they could obtain it, would worship it in an idolatrous manner, as they did their other relics; and as the law of the Prophet in the Koran forbade idolatry, they could not conscientiously give it up. "By so doing," said he, "we should be accessories to ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... laugh at the effusion of thy tenderness, it would be to see the idolatrous language thou frequently usest to me. Thou makest an idol and then worshippest it, and, like some of the inhabitants of the East, thou also bestowest a little castigation occasionally, just to let the ugly deity know the value of thy devotion. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... another son whom he had loved "not wisely, but too well." Then we see the buildings of the temple rising high above palace and homestead, and mark the glory, and the wisdom, and the weakness of Solomon. Later we see clouds of sin and sorrow gathering thick over Zion. Idolatrous kings have set up their heathen altars and high places. Of nearly every monarch the same dark sentence is recorded—he did "that which was evil in the sight of the Lord." The days come when we see ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... had come at which the Roman Empire of the West was to collapse and Gaul was to become France, God did not allow such a noble part of Christendom to remain long under idolatrous princes; and wishing to hand over to the kings of the French the keeping of his Church, which he had formerly intrusted to the emperors, he gave not to France only, but to the whole Western world, a new Constantine in the person of Clovis. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... publication—which, in its details, appears to be ingenious, learned, and satisfactory. The highest praise is given to the Statue, as a work of art of the second century.[177] Its identity seems to be yet a subject of disputation:—but M. Revet considers it as "the representation of some idolatrous divinity." The opinion of its being a representation of Bacchus, or of Apollo, or of a Constellation, he thinks might be regulated by a discovery of some emblem, or attribute, found in the vicinity of the Statue. Two other plates—lithographised—relating ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... his boyish days. As a lad of eight or nine he remembered the parts of Our Mutual Friend coming to the house, and could recall the smile of welcome with which they were infallibly received. In the dining-room at home was a handsomely framed picture which he regarded with an almost idolatrous veneration. It was an engraved portrait of Charles Dickens. Some of the best work of George Eliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith and Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning models during ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... battle, lovingly fondled the murderous machines of war, responding to the appeal "call me pet names, dearest." The unrelenting gun was the stern cannoneer's lady love. He kissed it with unwashed, mustached lip. In rude and rough devotion he was ready to die rather than abandon the only object of his idolatrous homage. Consistently he baptized the life-devouring monster with blood. Affectionately he named it Mary, Emma, Lizzie. In crossing he Alps, dark night came on as some cannoneers were floundering through drifts of snow, toiling at their gun. They would not leave ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... similar exile! And you, my dear friend, who have listened to the oracles of Plymouth pulpits, take a Sabbath afternoon, and calmly consider how far you may venture to place your faith upon it, whether you can subscribe to the idolatrous worship of that ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and—the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the conversion of the idolatrous Indians, the Spanish monks who accompanied Pizarro's army, sought to render the Christian religion as attractive as possible in the eyes of the heathen aborigines of Peru. With this view they conceived the idea of dramatizing certain scenes in the life of Christ, and having them represented ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... particle of it should remain.[64] In all this there was no mention made of St. Vitus, or any of the other mediatory saints, which is accounted for by the circumstance, that, at this time, an open rebellion against the Romish Church had begun, and the worship of saints was by many rejected as idolatrous. For the second kind of St. Vitus' dance, Paracelsus recommended harsh treatment and strict fasting. He directed that the patients should be deprived of their liberty, placed in solitary confinement, and made to sit in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Nearly all of them had the handiness then required for life in a new country. And, what with conviction and what with prejudice, they were also quite disposed to look upon the expedition as a sort of Crusade against idolatrous papists, and therefore as a very proper climax to the Great Awakening which had recently roused New England to the heights of religious zealotry under the leadership of the ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... Circumstances had changed; I had come to Petersburg again and could live here openly. I was no longer afraid of being and seeming sentimental, and gave myself up entirely to the fatherly, or rather idolatrous feeling roused in me by Sonya, Zinaida Fyodorovna's child. I fed her with my own hands, gave her her bath, put her to bed, never took my eyes off her for nights together, and screamed when it seemed to me that the nurse was just going to drop her. My thirst for normal ordinary life ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the university holidays, addressed to and largely attended by pastors, they declared the Old Testament history to "be a series of legends, and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob mythical persons." Israel, they declared, was an idolatrous people, Jehovah being nothing more than a "God of the Jewish Nation." This radical outbreak of criticism and interpretation has aroused considerable attention throughout Germany, and a declaration against it and other teachings of the kind has been signed by some ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... attended her as a clergyman to prepare her for death; and Delany mentions it not with doubt, but only with regret. Swift never mentioned her without a sigh. The rest of his life was spent in Ireland, in a country to which not even power almost despotic, nor flattery almost idolatrous, could reconcile him. He sometimes wished to visit England, but always found some reason of delay. He tells Pope, in the decline of life, that he hopes once more to see him; "but if not," says he, "we must part as all human beings ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... probable that the magnificent enterprises of the Portuguese and Spaniards, would, ere this, have colonised and converted to Christianity, all the eligible spots of idolatrous Africa, if their attention to this grand object had not been diverted by the discovery of America, and their establishments in Brazil, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... out to the land of the Indians, preaching the Gospel of Salvation. "The Lord working with him and confirming the word with signs following," the darkness of superstition was banished; and men were delivered from idolatrous sacrifices and abominations, and added to the true Faith, and being thus transformed by the hands of the Apostle, were made members of Christ's household by Baptism, and, waxing ever with fresh increase, made advancement ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... upon him. Thus we see that Roman Catholicism is more zealous, more enthusiastic, more turbulent, in Ireland, more artistic in Italy, more philosophic in Germany, more literary and discursive in France, more idolatrous in the States of South America, more reserved and modest, more decent and tolerant, less ambitious in its aspirations, and less audacious in its polemics, in England than in any other ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... wildly around, while others bore torches aloft, making altogether a very gorgeous display. Priests stood at each side performing mysterious rites as the cortege proceeded. It was my first sight of an idolatrous procession, and it made a deep impression upon me, carrying me back to Sunday- school days, and the terrible car of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Theological College of Andover), in his vindication of this Bill, reminds his readers that "many Southern slaveholders are true CHRISTIANS." That "sending back a fugitive to them is not like restoring one to an idolatrous people." That "though we may PITY the fugitive, yet the Mosaic Law does not authorize the rejection of the claims of the slaveholders to ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... inconsistent it would be to accept an earthly crown, while denouncing the tyranny of kings, and how much more enduring is that fame which is cherished in a nation's heart than that which is blared by the trumpet of idolatrous soldiers indifferent to those rights which form the basis of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... a fact which accounted for many of her trials and mortifications. Mainly owing to the powerful preaching of John Knox, many of the people of Scotland, both of high and low degree, had become fierce opponents of that form of religion, which they considered idolatrous. The first Sunday after her arrival was St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24th, and preparations had been made to celebrate mass in the Chapel Royal, at which the Queen was to be present. But no sooner was this known, than a mob rushed towards ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Jodelle; and another, entitled "Our travels to Arcueil." However, this Bacchaualian freak did not finish as it ought, where it had begun, among the poets. Several ecclesiastics sounded the alarm, and one Chandieu accused Ronsard with having performed an idolatrous sacrifice; and it was easy to accuse the moral habits of fifty poets assembled together, who were far, doubtless, from being irreproachable. They repented for some time of their classical sacrifice ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... preach, not having the Holy Ghost, without which none are the ministers of Christ." "Having lost the sense of God's true worship, which is in spirit and in truth, they began to worship in outward observances, which is not the worship of God, but superstitious and idolatrous." "When singing in the spirit and with the understanding ceased, then people began to introduce the form of singing David's experiences, in rhyme and metre; and thus, in the apostacy, the form grew as ...
— On Singing and Music • Society of Friends
... voice that hitherto had fallen upon his ear like the warble of a summer bird, filled him with consternation. The idea of having offended her, of having seriously offended her, of being to her, to Henrietta, to Henrietta, that divinity to whom his idolatrous fancy clung with such rapturous devotion, in whose very smiles and accents it is no exaggeration to say he lived and had his being, the idea of being to her, even for a transient moment, an object of repugnance, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... with it. He delivered a most idolatrous discourse when the plague was stayed. He took for his text: "The wise man that delivered the city." I could have given him a better, such as: "There is ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... have, therefore, a letter of introduction. Failing that, he should write a letter introducing himself—a fervid, an idolatrous letter, not without some excuse for the writing of it: the hero's seventieth birthday, for instance, or a desire for light on some obscure point in one of his earlier works. Heroes are very human, most of them; ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the deadly earnest of both preacher and people after Beatoun's well-deserved but terrible end which cut all compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he look on with a secret smile at ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the shew, together with coloured umbrellas and canopies, carrying their principal idol, which they call Joostie de Batavia, under one of their canopies. Their tombs are some of them very magnificent. They follow the idolatrous religion of their native country, and have a pagoda, or idol temple, about the distance of a league from the city, where they assemble for worship. They are perhaps the grossest idolaters, and the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... his little fat hands. "Brave maid! you have cheated Satan this time," quoth he; while Yeo advised that the idolatrous relic should be forthwith ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... pariah king, thy outcast father, should want a hand to lead him in his darkness, or a voice to whisper comfort in his misery; angel, that badst depart for ever the glories of thy own bridal day, lest he that had shared thy nursery in childhood, should want the honors of a funeral; idolatrous, yet Christian Lady, that in the spirit of martyrdom trodst alone the yawning billows of the grave, flying from earthly hopes, lest everlasting despair should settle upon the grave of thy brother,' &c. In fact, though all ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... not mean what they say; but that helps matters very little, for the fault lies precisely in saying what they do say; the language used is idolatrous. And a queer thing about it is that they do mean more than half of what they say. When degenerate love runs riot, it dethrones the Almighty, makes gods of clay and ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... unfrequented, and desolate, under the rude jurisdiction of the heads of the great Highland houses, whose clansmen, as savage and as desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees, offered their lords an almost idolatrous devotion. Nominally the clans were under the authority of the English Crown and the Scottish law; actually they recognized no rule but the rule of their chiefs, who wielded a power as despotic as that of any feudal seigneur in the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... open and gutting of houses, your rummaging of cellars, your demolishing of Christian temples, and bearing off, in triumph, the superstitious plate and pictures, the ornaments of their wicked altars, when all rich moveables were sentenced for idolatrous, and all that was idolatrous was seized? Answer first, for your remembrance of all these sweetnesses of mutiny; for upon those grounds ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... diversion of the worship due to God alone, when the dying martyr outside the city wall cried and said, 'Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.' Nor is it any departure from the solemnest obligations laid upon us by the unity of the divine nature, nor are we bringing idolatrous petitions to another than the Father, when we draw near to Christ and ask Him to give us that which He gives as the Father's gift, and to work on us that which the Father that dwelleth in Him works through ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... festival in the pagan shrine, to find to their dismay that they had omitted to bring either chalice or wine for the Eucharist. Several of the monks were sent into the town to buy these, but in all Corseul they could find no one willing to sell either cup or wine, because of the hostility of the idolatrous folk of the place. At last the Saint performed a miracle to provide these necessaries, but he never forgave the insult to his religion, and while he founded monasteries broadcast over his diocese he ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... called pontiffs, had the entire management of all matters connected with religion. The post of head pontiff, or Pontifex Maximus, had been assumed by Julius Caesar and his successors. They had probably no real belief in the idolatrous system they supported; such secret faith as they had was centred in Astarte, the divinity of the ancient Babylonians, whose worship had been introduced at an early period into Etruria, as it had been previously into Egypt and Greece. They were, in ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... leave their descendants higher than themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families. Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams. But in the eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... certain degree of consideration on that account. In the religious instinct which led the Buddhists to build, at such enormous expense of time and money, the cave-temples of Elephanta, Ellora, and Carlee; in the idolatrous Hindoo temples of Madura and Tanjore, the shrines of Ceylon, the pagodas of China, and the temples of Japan, one detects an underlying and elevating sentiment, a grand and reverential idea, in which there may be more of acceptable veneration than we can fully appreciate; ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Beaupere examined Jeanne concerning her childhood in her village. He essayed to show that she had been cruel, had displayed a homicidal tendency from her earliest years, and had been addicted to those idolatrous practices which had given the folk of Domremy ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the word? A man who by words and gestures pretends to act on supernatural beings, and compel them to descend at his call and obey his orders. Such was the conduct of the ancient priests, and such is still that of all priests in idolatrous nations; for which reason we have given them the denomination ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... "gay religions full of pomp and gold," in order to blunt the edge of that sharp spiritual conception of God which was continually cutting and lacerating his wicked and sensual heart. Hiding himself amidst the columns of his idolatrous temples, and under the smoke of his idolatrous incense, he thought like Adam to escape from the view and inspection of that Infinite One who, from the creation of the world downward, makes known to all men his ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... idolatrous chief priest of the heathen, standing on a lofty mound, strove like Balaam to curse the people of God, and to bind their hands by his ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... had she not to fear! and for the child that he might be slain or reserved for a fate esteemed by the Vaudois worse than death, in being carried off to Pignerol and brought up in an idolatrous faith. ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... simply as a poet, they endeavor to enter into his views and to decide upon his merits, I must separate myself from them entirely. I have hardly ever found either truth or profundity in their remarks; and these critics seem to me to be but stammering interpreters of the general and almost idolatrous admiration of his countrymen. There may be people in England who entertain the same views of them with myself, at least it is a well-known fact that a satirical poet has represented Shakespeare, under the hands of his commentators, by Actaeon worried to death by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... some of those who were best able to judge it was held to have been a mercy that he did die without having been restored to consciousness. And, presently, tales began to be whispered, about some idolatrous sect, which was stated to have its headquarters somewhere in the interior of the country—some located it in this neighbourhood, and some in that—which was stated to still practise, and to always have ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... to promote the propagation of the notions of monotheism; of the divine origin of man, and of the duties incumbent upon him to practice justice, charity, rectitude, and piety; they had to protest incessantly against polytheism, and against all and every idolatrous and superstitious creed, as adverse and injurious to the development of the principles of revealed religion; they had to confirm these theories by making themselves the exemplars of a religious life, and by bearing witness to them, when necessary, by their ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... death was the passion of life; among a people who were even then carrying the remains of their great ancestor, Joseph, to rest with his fathers, he yet conquered the last natural yearning and withdrew from the sight and sympathy of men to die alone and unattended, lest the idolatrous feeling, always ready to break forth, should in death accord him the superstitious reverence he had refused ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... succession of months. For visitors there was not much to see. At the beginning, hours were given up to desultory talking with the natives, but perseverance was rewarded. Those who came to talk would return to take lessons, and some impression was gradually made even on the older men attached to their idolatrous rites. Many years after Patteson's death it was still the most civilized of the islands with a population almost ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... they would, in that idolatrous country. The accounts of heathendom are appalling. And that car of Juggernaut, and drowning their poor little babies! They do not seem to make much of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... worshipping heathen gods . . . the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... her most was to give up her room,—so nice for poor Loulou! She looked at him in despair and implored the Holy Ghost, and it was this way that she contracted the idolatrous habit of saying her prayers kneeling in front of the bird. Sometimes the sun fell through the window on his glass eye, and lighted a great spark in it which ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... the State was in an uproar. "Toombs is attempting a new revolution," was alleged. He was charged with leading an idolatrous majority into war upon the rights of property. Conservative men like Jenkins deprecated the agitation. Atlanta was filled with a powerful railroad lobby, and the press resounded with warning that development of the waste ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... ceremonies. To this petition Ambrose replied in a letter to Valentinian, arguing that the devoted worshippers of idols had often been forsaken by their deities; that the native valour of the Roman soldiers had gained their victories, and not the pretended influence of pagan priests; that these idolatrous worshippers requested for themselves what they refused to Christians; that voluntary was more honourable than constrained virginity; that as the Christian ministers declined to receive temporal emoluments, they should also be denied to pagan priests; that it was absurd to suppose that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... even symbolic; the rule by which a parliamentarian possesses a constituency but not a surname; or the rule by which he becomes a minister in order to cease to be a member. All this would seem the most superstitious and idolatrous mummery to the simple worshippers in the shrines of Jerusalem. You may think what they say fantastic, or what they mean fanatical, but they do not say one thing and mean another. The Greek may or may not have a right to say he is Orthodox, but he means that he is Orthodox; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... commotion soon spread to Mosul, where the terrified workman, "entering breathless into the bazars, announced to every one he met that Nimrod had appeared." The authorities of the town were alarmed, put their heads together and decided that such idolatrous proceedings were an outrage to religion. The consequence was that Layard was requested by his friend Ismail-Pasha to suspend operations for awhile, until the excitement should have subsided, a request with which he thought it wisest ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... be loved in that way. I do not wish it, for it is wrong—idolatrous," she said, in a ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... beside him,—a preacher of the new sect, in every wrinkled line of whose visage we can read the stormy passions that have chosen religion for their outlet. Woe to the wretch that shall seek mercy there! At his back is slung an axe, wherewith he goes to hew down the carved altars and idolatrous images in the Popish churches; and over his head he rears a banner, which, as the wind unfolds it, displays the motto given by Whitefield,—Christo Duce,—in letters red as blood. But the tide is now ebbing; and the general makes ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in his lectures, to teaching men by means of the menagerie, which was a sly burlesque of the courtiers of Louis XIV., perhaps he might have made idolatrous partisans there as elsewhere; but it seems as if in the exposition of his theory, he posed rather as a censor than a teacher; he delighted in baffling the mind by paradoxes. By annexes superimposed and ill-blended with his system, he sometimes compromised those scientific ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... needed. The church, as the tradition-bearing community, contains both poles and should not subordinate one to the other. When the content of the tradition is lost, the meaning of the encounter is lost, and in the end even the encounter itself. Then tradition becomes idolatrous and sterile. Both are necessary to the community of faith, and both are meaningless, even dangerous, if separated. Christian teaching is ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... Chinese is made before the authorities at Manila by Archbishop Benavides, supported by the depositions of several witnesses. The Parian in that city, destroyed in the insurrection of 1603, has been rebuilt, and is again peopled by "infidel Sangleys." These Chinese are idolatrous, and exceedingly licentious and vicious; and in both these respects are demoralizing the Indian natives, and drawing them away from the Catholic faith. The Chinese, moreover, are inclined to revenge themselves on the Spaniards for the slaughter of their countrymen in the insurrection of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... sixty a reaction came over Laurier; first noticeable in less enthusiasm and more reticence at the Imperial Conferences. The French-Canadian who had lost a segment of his idolatrous following in Quebec because of clashes with the clergy and the sending of a contingent to the South African War, began to resist the cold machinations of the Chamberlain group. He began to see Empire, not as a commonwealth of democracies, but as domination from Downing Street. At home he ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... heard of some Kurdish tribes to the south-west of that place who, he was told, "are still idolatrous, worshipping venerable oaks, great trees, huge solitary rocks, and other grand features of nature." Discoveries, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... mirth, and seemed to recognize no one present, though he regarded all that was passing with a peculiar air of still and earnest attention; and wherever he moved, his calm, penetrating gaze seemed to diffuse a singular uneasiness about him. Now his eye was fixed with a quiet scrutiny on the idolatrous statues, with their votive adornments—now it followed earnestly the young forms that were wreathing in the graceful waves of the dance; and then he turned towards the tables, loaded with every luxury ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a superabundance, good for nobody, of all other advantages; and that thus, instead of being the preservers of a beautiful and genial flame, good for all, and in due season partakeable by all, they would hoard and make an idolatrous treasure of it, sacred to one class alone, and such as the diffusion of knowledge renders it alike useless and exasperating to endeavour ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... Lucy Robarts? Could she give up her chair of state in order to place thereon the little girl from the parsonage? Could she take to her heart, and treat with absolute loving confidence, with the confidence of an almost idolatrous mother, that little chit who, a few months since, had sat awkwardly in one corner of her drawing-room, afraid to speak to any one? And yet it seemed that it must come to this—to this—or else those day-dreams of hers would in nowise come to pass. She sat herself down, trying to think ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... incomprehensible to the girl was the idolatrous regard in which MacNair was held by his own Indians. To them he was a superman—the one great man among all white men. His word was accepted without question. Upon leaving for the southward MacNair had told the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... any slight suggestion of imperfection, how I turn upon myself and defend my god. Before going to bed, I often stand, candle in hand, before the Roman lady and enumerate the adorable perfections of the drawing. I am aware of my weakness, I have pleaded guilty to an idolatrous worship, but, if I have expressed myself as I intended, my great love will seem neither vain nor unreasonable. For surely for quality of beautiful line this man stands nearer to the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... that was said of God seemed imperfect, and never to apply to God Himself but only to the idea which the human mind had formed of Him. To me even the Hindu, if he spoke of Brahman or Krishna, seemed to have aimed at the true God, in spite of the idolatrous epithets which he used; then how could a man like Frederic Maurice be said to have worshipped a different God, considering that we all can but feel after Him in the dark, not being able to do more than exclude all that seems to us ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... be in the same darkness as all the rest of this idolatrous city. Death to the Christian, Prefect, is life! Crush me by thy engines, and in the twinkling of an eye is my soul dwelling with God, and looking down with compassion upon thy ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... and adorns our sanctuaries. We venerate it as the emblem of our salvation. "Far be it from me," says the Apostle, "to glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."(11) We do not, of course, attach any intrinsic virtue to the Cross; this would be sinful and idolatrous. Our veneration is referred to Him ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... oaths, and as a channel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, the answer is easy: religion was degrading: but heavier degradations would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous peoples, viz. the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very use of their word religlo, their testimony to the degradation wrought by any religion that Paganism could yield. Rarely indeed is this ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of the deists by his recognition of the fact that the positive religions contain truth in a gradual process of purification, by his free criticism, on the other hand, he broke with the orthodox, whose idolatrous reverence for the Bible was to him an abomination. The letter is not the spirit, the Bible is not religion, nor yet its foundation, but only its records. Contingent historical truths can never serve as a proof of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... opinion which he thus acquired of his own worth made him credit the excessive and almost idolatrous adoration that was paid to his understanding; which but for this increased self-complacency, must have necessarily recalled him from his aberrations. For the present, however, this universal voice was only a confirmation of what his complacent vanity whispered in his ear; a tribute ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sufficiently portentous thesis, as follows:—that Freemasonry is connected with Satanism by the fact that it has the Jews for its true authors, and the Jewish Kabbalah for the key of its mysteries; that the Kabbalah is magical, idolatrous, and essentially diabolical; that Freemasonry, considered as a religion, is therefore a judaized devil-worship, and considered as a political institution, it is an engine designed for the attainment of universal empire, which has been the dream of ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... reading the Bible, or of propagating or entertaining any opinions contrary to the Church of Rome—he may be thrown into prison, and put to torture, for refusing to subscribe to its dogmas, or to worship according to forms which he holds to be idolatrous—and yet he enjoys freedom of conscience. So, according to the teachings of modern Calvinism, man is a free agent, notwithstanding all the circumstances which surround him, with all his sensations, ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... tell me that the city was the metropolis of a kingdom now governed by his father; that the former king and all his subjects were Magi, worshipers of fire and of Nardoun. the ancient king of the giants who rebelled against God. 'Though I was born,' continued he, 'of idolatrous parents, it was my good fortune to have a woman governess who was a strict observer of the Mohammedan religion. She taught me Arabic from Al Koran; by her I was instructed in the true religion, which I would never afterward ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... a Roundhead in buff, From roaring Jack Cavee, with money little enough, From beads and such idolatrous stuff, Libera, etc. ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... he had of the existing state of affairs was when the Court Chamberlain (a recent and very ardent addition to the Christian community) brought for his approval the outlines of a projected ceremonial cutting-down of the idolatrous serpent-grove. ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... downright battle to the commons, rather than their kirk should coup the crans, as others had done elsewhere. It wasna for luve o' Paperie—na, na!—nane could ever say that o' the trades o' Glasgow—Sae they sune came to an agreement to take a' the idolatrous statues of sants (sorrow be on them!) out o' their neuks—And sae the bits o' stane idols were broken in pieces by Scripture warrant, and flung into the Molendinar burn, and the auld kirk stood as crouse as a cat ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Paul, many of the Ephesians "which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it 50,000 pieces of silver" (Acts xix, 19). Doubtless these books of idolatrous divination and alchemy, of enchantments and witchcraft, were righteously destroyed by those to whom they had been and might again be spiritually injurious; and doubtless had they escaped the fire then, not one of them would have survived to the present ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... which garr'd it taste aye since of brimstane—but she dared to say that was a' papist nonsense, for she was tell't by him that kend weel, and that was the minister himsell, that St. Ronan was nane of your idolatrous Roman saunts, but a Chaldee," (meaning probably a Culdee,) "whilk was doubtless a ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... mean that M. Venizelos had as yet lost caste altogether. On that fateful 5th of October his reputation as a serious statesman among his countrymen had received a severe blow. The idolatrous admiration with which he had been surrounded until then gave way to disenchantment, disenchantment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to dismay: the national prophet from whom fresh miracles had been expected, was no prophet at all, but a mere mortal—and an ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... a thing once entered into her mind there was no getting it out again. Mary to others might be a fantastical woman, heartless, a fiend incarnate if they liked, but the simple faith in her goodness, the old idolatrous affection still ruled in her heart. The thoughts and feelings which had swayed her in childhood swayed her still; and the gospel of the carpenter Cawood was the only gospel she knew. And as to Merton, the contemptuous ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Tom awoke from his idolatrous dream. He brought Nellie to a seat and sat awkwardly beside her. His old self-complacency had left him. Nellie was talking to him, but he did not hear what she said. He was not looking at her, but at himself. Before he knew it she had ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... to the lions of old By the priest and the praetor, combined to uphold An idolatrous cause, Forth they came while the vast Colosseum throughout Gathered thousands looked on, and they fell 'mid the shout Of "the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... the Governor, "pardon me, if with sacrilegious, though unwitting hand, I have touched the sacred ark of your faith. But I were meaner than a stock or a stone; I were duller than an insensible clod; I were worse than an idolatrous heathen or a beast, if I were unwilling to encounter any danger, even to the hazard of losing your friendship, for the sake of a man, who, at the risk of ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Dominicans, meeting with some of the half-christianized converts, soon gave them to understand that nothing less than eternal damnation would be the lot of all such as did not forsake their ancient superstitious and idolatrous practices; and especially that of sacrificing to their deceased relations in the Hall of Ancestors. The Franciscans having joined the Dominicans they represented to the Pope the abominable practices of the Jesuits, who had persuaded the Chinese they were ...
— 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
... inconceivable to me, according to any laws of the human intellect which I have seen at work, that savage or half-savage folk should have invented idolatries. I do not believe that Fetishism is the parent of idolatry; but rather—as I have said elsewhere—that it is the dregs and remnants of idolatry. The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not the savage nations; but those who profess a very ancient and decaying civilisation. The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non- idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... vindicate the laws of their country, which had been a long time in disesteem. He also threatened, that if any one of them escaped, their own lives should go for them. So they slew them all with the sword, and burnt the house of Baal, and by that means purged Samaria of foreign customs [idolatrous worship]. Now this Baal was the god of the Tyrians; and Ahab, in order to gratify his father-in-law, Ethbaal, who was the king of Tyre and Sidon, built a temple for him in Samaria, and appointed him prophets, and worshipped him with all ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... held up on a little bronze pedestal. The fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one might see, were fixed upon this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a well-practised, familiar rite. At last ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... PRECISIANS, dismembering our images, and scratching at our paintings, disturbed the uniformity of the religious service. A clergyman in a surplice was turned out of the church. Some wore square caps, some round, some abhorred all caps. The communion-table placed in the East was considered as an idolatrous altar, and was now dragged into the middle of the church, where, to show their contempt, it was always made the filthiest seat in the church. They used to kneel at the sacrament; now they would sit, because that was a proper attitude for a supper; then they would not sit, but ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... used to stand in the church at Ruthwell; it escaped injury at the time of general destruction in the sixteenth century, but the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland ordered the "many idolatrous monuments erected and made for religious worship" to be "taken down, demolished, and destroyed." It was not till two years later, however, that the cross was taken down when an Act was passed "anent ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... tennis-ball, upset the throne of Artaxerxes, countersigned haughtily the elevation of a new Basileus more friendly to herself, and then recrossed the Tigris homewards, after having torn forcibly out of the heart and palpitating entrails of Persia, whatever trophies that idolatrous empire had formerly wrested from herself. These were not the acts of an effeminate kingdom. In the language ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of Scotland's evangelization is pre-historic. The records fail to give any satisfaction concerning the entrance of the Gospel into that lovely land. The ruins of numerous altars of stone bear grim testimony to the idolatrous worship practiced by the early inhabitants. These are known in history as the Druids. They held their religious meetings in groves, and evidently offered human sacrifices to their gods. The oak was accounted by them a sacred tree, and the mistletoe, ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... had an idolatrous husband; for even in Arcadia she could not, or would not, keep her coquetry within decent bounds. She flirted outrageously with the neighbouring squires and with such men of rank as drifted her way; but the baronet saw no cause for alarm or resentment. He was frankly delighted ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... foresees the future, that "all the vast countries of South America will one day belong to the English nation."* (* "I showed them her Majesty's picture, which the Casigui so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof. And I further remember that Berreo confessed to me and others (which I protest before the majesty of God to be true), that there was found among prophecies at Peru (at such a time as the empire was reduced ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... meaning, yet so unforced and natural, that the rudest mind intuitively perceives their meaning, and yet which no study could improve or imitate. This constitutes the most striking peculiarity of the Shakspearean language, and while it justifies the almost idolatrous veneration of his countrymen, renders him, of all writers, the most untranslatable. Of all authors, Shakspeare has least imitated or repeated himself. While he gives us, in many places, portraits of the same passion, the delineations are as distinct and dissimilar as they are in nature; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... gospel, because the orators of Greece and Rome were regarded as blind guides of erring reason and seducers to the paths of sin and destruction. Virgil and Horace were looked upon merely as the advocates of a profane and idolatrous mythology, and Cicero was regarded as a vain declaimer, impiously elated with the talent of Pagan eloquence, but the infidel charge that the church has always been in the way of scientific education, expressed ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... will." Giving the bishop the alternative of compliance or expulsion, he withdrew after an episcopate of twelve years and retired across the Channel. Returning in answer to the entreaties of Laurentius, "the Londoners would not receive Bishop Mellitus, choosing rather to be under their idolatrous high priests." Eventually he succeeded Laurentius at Canterbury. And for a second ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... Poussin's genius. He was treated severely by his father, who thought that every vigorous, well-made boy ought of necessity to become a soldier—secretly consoled and encouraged by his mother, who loved him with an almost idolatrous affection, and who approved of his pursuits, not from any abstract love of art, but because she thought the profession of painting might be pursued by her darling without obliging him to leave ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... promise much hope of reconciliation. He had grounded his attack upon the letters A.M.D.G., which he had seen outside a Roman Catholic chapel, and which of course stood for Ad Mariam Dei Genetricem. Could anything be more idolatrous? ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... pilgrimage. At Walsingham, a fine green road was made for the pilgrims, and there was a holy well and cross adjacent, at which pilgrims used to kneel while drinking the water. It is remarkable that the Anglo-Saxon laws had proscribed this as idolatrous. Such springs were consecrated upon the discovery of cures effected by them. In fact," Fosbrooke adds, "these consecrated wells merely imply a knowledge of the properties of mineral waters, but, through ignorance, a religious ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... of this mountain is a little hill which the idolatrous Agaus have in great veneration; their priest calls them together at this place once a year, and having sacrificed a cow, throws the head into one of the springs of the Nile; after which ceremony, every one sacrifices ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... might as well ask why Saul was not arrested and redeemed before he made such a havoc of the church, and went down to such a low depth of infamy. Or we might inquire why he was arrested at all. Or we might inquire why God went to that idolatrous people in Ur of the Chaldees, and took Abraham from among them, and made him not only the progenitor of the chosen race, but one of the greatest and most noble men in history. Yet God in his sovereign pleasure took ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... wonderful man has such a hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression at the head of the oppressed. When he's in power again, he will be as subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nation. But her whole life constituted Kate's supreme distinction. There can be no doubt, therefore, that, from the year 1624 (that is, the last year of our James I.), she became the object of an admiration in her own country that was almost idolatrous. And this admiration was not of a kind that rested upon any partisan-schism amongst her countrymen. So long as it was kept alive by her bodily presence amongst them, it was an admiration equally aristocratic and popular,—shared ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beings, a mutual fusion of sentiments and ideas destined to last till death. This kind of morality reverts to dual egoism, and in no way represents the ideal of human happiness. However beautiful conjugal fidelity, its exaggeration is deplorable, when it only results in the idolatrous worship of a single being, living or dead, and regards the rest of the world with indifference, if ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... a disciple of Mr. George Wishart (as the reader has already seen in the account of his life), which procured him the hatred of the Popish clergy, who could not endure that light which, discovered their idolatrous darkness. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... first commencement of Christianity.' He explained that 'there were nations still existing in a distant portion of the globe in a state of the wildest barbarism. Ignorant savages were they, with many cruel and idolatrous customs, who were cannibals and murderers, and given up to the worst vices of the heathen. Their abject and pitiable state, he told us, the Lord God had witnessed with Divine commiseration, and had determined that the ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... against the continuance of these amusements. Few of the priests had the liberal views of Father Duran, already quoted; most of them were of the opinion of Torquemada, who urges the clergy "to forbid the singing of the ancient songs, because all of them are full of idolatrous memories, or of diabolical and suspicious ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... arrangement. It was not Jacob's fault that, through the stratagem of Laban, he became the husband of Leah. The plurality of wives in this instance was not so much the choice of Jacob as the fault of the wily, semi-idolatrous Laban. ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... God of Israel [Let the voice of praise, uttered from the thousands of Israel, resound to distant nations, so that Gentile princes and potentates may hear of the miracles of mercy wrought for the covenanted people of God. Ye idolatrous rulers of the world, reject forever your gods of wood and stone, for I am called to celebrate the majesty of Jehovah, who has triumphed over them; and will sing to the honour of him, who, though no local divinity, has chosen the children of Israel ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... came to a fair large River—doubtless the Ancient River Adonis, so famous for the Idolatrous Rites performed here in Lamentation of Adonis. We had the Fortune to see what may be supposed to be the Occasion of that Opinion which Lucian relates, concerning this River, viz. That this Stream, at certain Seasons of the Year, especially about the Feast of Adonis, is of a bloody ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
