"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exclamations, dashed impetuously at the head of his guards and Ethiopians into the affray. The battle became obstinate and bloody. Thrice the white banner disappeared amidst the closing ranks; and thrice, like a moon from the clouds, it shone forth again—the light and guide of the Pagan power. ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... longer makes saddles. He has forgotten how. He has forgotten most things—even Bennie who stays away and sends wine on holidays— And he does not like Sadie's mother Who hides God's candles, Nor Sadie Whose young pagan breath puts out the light— That should burn always, ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... reel he joined again with joy. The slightest reference to it, and Donald was off—over the hills and far away, his guid blue bonnet on his head, his burly knees as bare as the bayonet his fathers bore, and the wild skirl of the bagpipes in his heart. Those pagan-Christian days, those shameful splendours of feud and raid and massacre, those mutual pleasantries of human pig-sticking, those civilized savageries and chivalric demonries—all ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... the illustrious boy had perlustrated three lustres, already attaining his sixteenth year, he was, with many of his-fellow-countrymen, seized by the pirates who were ravaging the borders, and was made captive and carried into Ireland, and was there sold as a slave to a certain pagan prince named Milcho, who reigned in the Northern parts of the island, even at the same age when Joseph is recorded to have been sold in Egypt. ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... tossing sea, a stiff breeze above, and a sucking tide below. Great cliffs hundreds of feet high guard it, and from the top of them the land rolls away in long ridges, brown and bare. These wild and rocky moors, full of pagan altars, stone crosses, and memorials of the Jew, the Phoenician, and the Cornu-British, are the land of our childhood's fairy-folk—the home of Blunderbore and of Jack the Giant Killer, and the ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... love you in the robes That disrobe so well your charms! Your dear breasts, twin ivory globes, And your bare sweet pagan arms. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... believed as firmly in money, as our own. What is more important for our purpose, it was questioning the truth of its religion as we are to-day questioning the truth of ours. Lucian was the most vehement of the questioners. Of what played the part then that the Christian religion plays now, the pagan religion was only one half; the other half was philosophy. The gods of Olympus had long lost their hold upon the educated, but not perhaps upon the masses; the educated, ill content to be without any guide through the maze of life, had taken to philosophy instead. Stoicism was the prevalent creed, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... be the sultan bless'd with happy love! My zeal marks gladness dawning on thy cheek, With raptures, such as fire the pagan crowds, When, pale and anxious for their years to come, They see the sun surmount the dark eclipse, And hail, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... your correspondents say in what work the following analogous passage occurs, and who is the author of it? The stamp of thought is rather of the philosophic pagan than the Christian, though the latinity is more monkish ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... could seize the women and children fleeing for hiding to the hills. The next year Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to {84} be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... pagan temples reminded the travelers that this lovely city was the home of Philip, the son of Herod the Great. He had spent much money to make it beautiful. But the disciples found ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... was an age overflowing with imposture and credulity. "Such," says Bishop Fell, "was the license of fiction in the first ages, and so easy the credulity, that testimony of the facts of that time is to be received with great caution, as not only the pagan world, but the church of God, has just reason to complain of its fabulous age." Stillingfleet says, "that antiquity is defective most where it is most important, In the awe immediately succeeding that of the apostles." Now be it recollected, that the Gospels first appeared in ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... saw ten heathen spring out of the ground for every one that was felled. The struggle grew fiercer as night came on. The Christians were fighting for life; defeat meant that they must perish to a man, by the sword or upon pagan altars; escape there was none. Upon the cliff overlooking the battle-field the archbishop and his priests were praying for success to the King's arms. Tradition that has been busy with this great battle all through the ages tells how, while the aged bishop's hands were ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... fifteenth, and a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... one side to another. We sought to induce him to confess, and repeated to him the holy gospel. This was on Friday or Saturday; on the following Sunday, when I asked for him, they told me that he was sound and well, and had gone to another island in quest of food. We were informed that another, a pagan woman, was at the point of death; at her request, we went to baptize her. I gave her this sacrament in some haste, lest she should die on my hands; but after baptism she regained her health. All these things aroused in their hearts a deep affection ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... drawing down before Elizabeth. It was really not badly done, and she saw in a moment, by the help of the names which he had scribbled below in his worst of all bad writing, that it represented the Giants, Pope and Pagan, as described in the Pilgrim's Progress, while, close to Pope, was placed a delineation very like Don Quixote, purporting to be the superannuated Giant Chivalry, biting his nails at a dapper little personification of 'Civil and Religious Liberty.' A figure whose pointed head, lame foot, and ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chamai pese daidalos aula; ouketi Phoibos echei kaluban, ou mantida daphnen, ou pagan laleousan; apesbeto ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Crucifixion of Mantegna. He had not been looking at the picture, or watching to see what impression it produced on Susy. His own momentary mood was for Correggio and Fragonard, the laughter of the Music Lesson and the bold pagan joys of the Antiope; and then he had missed her from his side, and when he came to where she stood, forgetting him, forgetting everything, had seen the glare of that tragic sky in her face, her trembling lip, the tears on ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... carpet, upon which he slept; there were trickling rills and natural basins where crystal water gave him drink, or places where he could bathe his hot and tired feet, while now and again he came upon the rude hut of some goat-herd or Pagan who, for a small coin, gladly supplied him with coarse black bread and a bowl of ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... country he had unexpectedly come upon his fate and with characteristic impetuosity had pursued and overtaken it. Other girls may have stirred his heart, but it had remained for a wild little pagan of the woods to stir his soul. He had laid bare to her the most secret places of his being, had confessed his sins, and received absolution. From this time on the frivolities of youth lay behind him, and ambition sat upon his brow. He would cut out the trip to the Orient, buy a farm and settle down ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... Indian boy, a good-looking, black-eyed little chap with as pagan a heart as ever beat under a copper-colored skin. His father and grandfathers were pagans. His ancestors for a thousand years back, and yet a thousand years back of that, had been pagans, and We-hro, with the pride of his religion and his ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... hotheads have done. The protective is not the primitive masculine instinct. Men have thought of themselves first and of women afterward since the beginning of time. Only with Christianity was chivalry born in them. And since many of our youths have elected to be pagan, ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... success led to official preferment, and he was made conseiller du roi, contrleur-gnral de l'extraordinaire des guerres, and secretary-general of the fleet of the Levant. His long epic Clovis (1657) is noteworthy because Desmarets rejected the traditional pagan background, and maintained that Christian imagery should supplant it. With this standpoint he contributed several works in defence of the moderns in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the mysteries of the old religions of the world the germs of a purer faith and a holier hope. She loved to listen, as in St. Pierre's symposium of The Coffee-House of Surat, to the confessions of faith of all sects and schools of philosophy, Christian and pagan, and gather from them the consoling truth that our Father has nowhere left his children without some witness of Himself. She loved the old mystics, and lingered with curious interest and sympathy over the writings of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... you may do (said she) I do not know, But know you this, there is a thousand waies, To finde out night before my shamelesse brow, Shall meet that day in guilt of such misrayes. Oh how vniust art thou? the pagan sayes, To him which sues for a respecting eye, And no ignoble action doth allow, But honor, and thy faires ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... passengers. With Abraham, Murray, and Regimental Sergeant-Major Hedley (from the Bucks) those departments of the Battalion not purely tactical were sure to be well managed. I felt quite confident in the command of this force of men, and General Pagan, the new Brigadier, was kind enough to express his confidence in ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... nor a gaudy flower of summer gave to the air the perfume, or to the earth the colour of sweet life, to soothe and lighten the dreariness of the dead: such thoughts in the Middle Ages would have been almost pagan. Then the darkness of death was like the darkness of night here in this necropolis hewn in the side of the ancient rock, whose very substance is made up chiefly of other and older forms of life. Moreover, the hope that was then so firmly ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... nineteen years before Christ, the kingdom of Israel was rapidly tending to idolatry. Jeroboam had set up golden calves chiefly for a political end, but Ahab built a temple to Baal, the sun-god, the chief divinity of the Phoenicians, and erected an altar therein for pagan sacrifices, thus abjuring Jehovah as the Supreme and only God. The established religion was now idolatry in its worst form; it was simply the worship of the powers of Nature, under the auspices of a foreign woman stained with every ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... carried him somewhat beyond the bounds of religious instruction; that he had quoted profane writers too complacently; that he had even experienced a dangerous pleasure in roaming with his disciple through the fields of the past, plucking pagan flowers unsprinkled by the waters of baptism, flowers in whose fragrance a priest should ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... no sooner out of his mouth than I fell at his Grace's feet, quite overwhelmed with gratitude. I embraced his elliptical legs with almost pagan idolatry, and considered myself as a man on the high-road to a very handsome fortune. "Yes, my child," resumed the archbishop, whose speech had been cut short by the rapidity of my prostration, "I mean to make you the receiver-general of all my inmost ruminations. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... seeming in great wrath. "Is there no fighting to be read from Holy Writ that you must take these pagan vanities from where you ought not? Go to! Yet, by reason of your care for the bishop's thane, your penance shall be light now and not heavy hereafter. Brother Guthlac shall read aloud in refectory today the story of David and Goliath, and you brother," pointing to one, "that ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... our things in a readiness to be sent to our new house. To my Lord's, where he was in bed very late. So with Major Tollhurst and others to Harper's, and I sent for my barrel of pickled oysters and there ate them; while we were doing so, comes in Mr. Pagan Fisher; the poet, and promises me what he had long ago done, a book in praise of the King of France, with my armes, and a dedication to me very handsome. After him comes Mr. Sheply come from sea yesterday, whom I was glad to see that he may ease me of the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... called Prussia, there was then a barbaric pagan race, against whom the pope had published a crusade. Into this war the excommunicated Rhodolph plunged with all the impetuosity of his nature; he resolved to work out absolution, by converting, with all the potency of fire and sword, the barbarians to the Church. His penitence and zeal ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Protestant 2%, Jewish 1%, Muslim 5%-10%, unaffiliated 4% overseas departments: Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, pagan ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... with it a charity which is its highest expression, without which justice remains only an organised wrong. Of justice without charity we have a classic illustration in Plato's Republic and in general in the pagan world. An end is assumed, in this case an end which involves radical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then an organism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, and political justice is defined as the harmonious ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises. And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by those writers who have treated it pre-eminently as the [25] "Age of Faith"—this rebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the ruler of Society. Thousands and thousands of guineas were given by the nation that the Prince of Wales, the Regent, the King, might be, in the best sense of the word, ornamental. It is not for us, at this moment, to consider whether Royalty, as a wholly Pagan institution, is not out of place in a community of Christians. It is enough that we should inquire whether the god, whom our grand-fathers set up and worshipped and crowned with offerings, gave ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... domes of Lucknow, Moslem mosque and Pagan shrine, Breathed the air to Britons dearest, The air of Auld Lang Syne. O'er the cruel roll of war-drums Rose that sweet and homelike strain; And the tartan clove the turban, As ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... true only with a condition. Thus, the admirable nature of Justice, and the happiness of the Just man, are a proper theme to be extolled with all the power of eloquence. It has been so with every civilized people, pagan as well as Christian. In the dialogues of Plato, justice is a prominent subject, and is adorned with the full splendour of his genius. Aristotle, in one of the few moments when he rises to poetry, pronounces ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... in this sense; but an inquiry dealing with the history of religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Hence I came to define atheism in Pagan antiquity as the point of view which denies the existence of the ancient gods. It is in this sense that the word will be ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... although unsightly, offensive, and, perhaps, in every way pernicious, it has, in the short period of about three centuries, subdued not one particular nation, but the whole world, Christian and Pagan, into a bondage more abject and irremediable than was ever known to tyranny or superstition. Kings have forbidden it; popes have anathematized it; and physicians have warned against it. Even ministers of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... "Are you a pagan, madame?" inquired Pierre, at last, with eager solemnity of face and voice. His blue eyes were fastened ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... apostle, to make their escape if possible.[C] If not, they must in every way regard the master with respect—bowing to his authority, working his will, subserving his interests so far as might be consistent with Christian character.[D] And this, to prevent blasphemy—to prevent the pagan master from heaping profane reproaches upon the name of God and the doctrines of the gospel. They should beware of rousing his passions, which, as his helpless victims, they might be unable to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never measured, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... himself as a sort of divine (pagan) emanation, the deputy-Neptune for the circumambient seas. If he did not actually rule the waves, he pretended to rule the fate of the mortals whose lives ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... bagatelle!" Which charmed our days in each AEgean clime, As oft at home, with revelry and rhyme. Then may Euphrosyne, who sped the past, Soothe thy Life's scenes, nor leave thee in the last; But find in thine—like pagan Plato's bed, [lv] [31] Some merry Manuscript of Mimes, when ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... filled the master's house. Renovales insisted on having them everywhere; he had sent to Valencia and Murcia for them in reckless quantities; they hung on the door-frames, and along the cornices; they lay in huge clusters on the tables and in the corners. They even swung in pagan garlands from one column of the facade to another, arousing the curiosity of the passers-by, who crowded outside of the iron fence,—women in shawls, boys with great baskets on their heads who stood in open-mouthed wonder before the strange sight, waiting to see what ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons, and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church. When I say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply—or, if you like, exply—that the Church of England has had no religious musicians worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety of the men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts. Their intentions may have been of the noblest, and they may ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... necessary to restrain the bad converts by making example of the obstinate; hence arose an inundation of horrors in which we see, as Saint Simon says, "the orthodox imitating against heretics the acts of pagan tyrants against confessors and martyrs." Everything, in fact, was allowed the soldiers but rape and murder; and even this restriction was not always respected; besides, many of the unfortunate died or were maimed for life in consequence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... pagan, and this partly explains his laxity. It would doubtless be going too far to say that he remained faithful to paganism all his life. It is not likely that this urban councillor of Thagaste was a particularly assured pagan. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the River Avon, near the town of Amesbury. It is needless that I should enter here into any part of the dispute about which our learned antiquaries have so puzzled themselves that several books (and one of them in folio) have been published about it; some alleging it to be a heathen or pagan temple and altar, or place of sacrifice, as Mr. Jones; others a monument or trophy of victory; others a monument for the dead, as Mr. Aubrey, and the like. Again, some will have it be British, some Danish, some Saxon, some Roman, and some, before ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... which you may be sure that whatever he got hold of he stuck to. More than this, he had teeth fit to masticate iron, a stomach to dissolve it, a duodenum to digest it, a sphincter to let it out again without tearing, and shoulders that would bear a universe upon them, like that pagan gentleman to whom the job was confided, and whom the timely arrival of Jesus Christ discharged from the duty. He was, in fact, a man made with one stroke, and they are the best, for those who have to be touched are worth nothing, being patched up ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... inaccessible virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints which follow immediately upon the comparison ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... know very little, in detail, of the life of any city other than Rome during those years of the great Peace in which we see the empire change from a Pagan to a Christian state. Those centuries which saw Christendom slowly emerge, in which Europe was founded, still lack a modern historian, and the magnitude and splendour of their achievement are too generally misconceived or ignored. We are largely unaware still ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... witchcraft, and dealt with familiar spirits and with wizards. These passages seem to concur with the former, in classing witchcraft among other desertions of the prophets of the Deity, in order to obtain responses by the superstitious practices of the pagan nations around them. To understand the texts otherwise seems to confound the modern system of witchcraft, with all its unnatural and improbable outrages on common sense, with the crime of the person who, in classical days, consulted ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... that the word Norman means man of the north, that it is a Scandinavian, and not a French word, that it originated in the invasions of the followers of Rollo and and other Norwegians, and that just as part of England was overrun by Pagan buccaneers called Danes, part of France was occupied by similar Northmen, we see the likelihood of certain Norse words finding their way into the French language, where they would be superadded to its original Celtic ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... a sermon a good church-hour in length to gratify him, enriched with compliments from all authors, Christian and Pagan, informing him at the conclusion that, although he had been crowned in the Capitol, he must die, being born mortal, Ser Francesco rode homeward. The sermon seemed to have sunk deeply into him, and even into the horse ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder gods: not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude,—a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... alcaiceria, where the Sangleys have their shops—that it might be sightly even in Espana, and in it the Sangleys have generously assisted. [86] For they had a common fund for current expenses, and they amass in it yearly about twenty thousand pesos. Each Sangley, pagan or Christian, pays, if he wear a cue, three reals of four to the peso, in two payments. For this fund there are Spanish collectors with a sufficient salary. What I regret is that, in all these cunning devices to obtain their money, and the exaction of these contributions, the money is taken ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... the self-deception of his kind, he thought he was broad and liberal in his views, when in reality he had lost all distinction between truth and error, and was narrowing his mind down to things only. Jew or Gentile, Christian or Pagan, it was becoming all one to him. Men changed their creeds and religions with other fashions, but all looked after what they believed to be the main chance, and he proposed to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... simple people and humble souls. Although she has called herself "a back-door sort of bard," she is particularly effective in the old ballad measure and in her quaint portrayal of Irish peasants rather than of Gaelic kings and pagan heroes. She has also written three novels, five books for children, a later volume of Poems of the War and, during the conflict, served as a nurse at ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... twenty he planned an appeal to eternity. He knew "Emaux et Camees" as pious folk their Bible; he felt that naught endured but art. So he became a pagan, and sought for firmness and delicacy in the texture, while aiming to fill his verse with the fire of Swinburne, the subtlety of Rossetti and the great, clear day-flame of Gautier. A well-nigh impossible ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the opposite sexes, Chapter xxi. [598] which constitutes more than one-half of the book, treats largely of those unspeakable vices which as St. Paul and St. Jude show, and the pages of Petronius and other ancient authors prove, were so common in the pagan world, and which, as Burton and other travellers inform us, are still ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... reason for it." To Hetty, on the other hand, beauty—beauty in language, in music, in all forms of art, no less than the beauty of a spring day— was an ultimate thing and lay beyond questions: and Mr. Wesley, though as a divine he checked her somewhat pagan impulses and recalled them to give account of their ground of choice, as a scholar could not help admiring them. For they seldom led her to choose wrongly. In Hetty dwelt something of the Attic instinct which, in days of literary artifice and literary ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... doctrine of Arminius can be traced back as far as the time of Alexandrinus, and seems to have been held by many of the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries." He attributes this to the corrupting influence of Pagan philosophy (Hist. Theo., Vol. II., p. 374). This is not a direct contradiction to Eadie, but it shows that truth compelled this sturdy Calvinist to admit that non-Calvinistic views were held in ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... were fewer people. Out of this room there was a still smaller one with several palms in it, and out of the palms arising a great bronze reproduction of the Hermes of Praxiteles. Lady Seagraves playfully called this little room her Pagan parlour. Here people who knew the house well found their way when they wanted quiet conversation. There was nobody in it when Miss Langley and the Dictator arrived. Helena sat down on a sofa with a sigh of relief, and Ericson ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... ignorant of doubt, everywhere he has sought to cure the wound of that insect which had stung his youth. But no; his scepticism pierces through all his enthusiasm, and the very variety of his inspirations proves his indifference. He is neither philosopher, nor devotee, nor Christian, nor pagan, nor courtier, nor citizen, nor of times ancient or modern, nor of the north, nor of the south-or rather, he is all these at once. He is the echo of nature, he repeats to us all her harmonies; but he fails to add that utterance, which unites ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... us means victory for religion. And they could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate "living room" for both Hitler and God. In proof of that, the Nazis have now announced their plan for enforcing their new German, pagan religion all over the world—a plan by which the Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy would be displaced by Mein Kampf and the swastika ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... you like to see hanging in your room the picture of the Good Shepherd with the little lamb, so they began to long for pictures from their Bible. Every heathen Roman had his house decorated with pictures and carvings from his pagan religion, but it was in the dim underground galleries that the ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... observes Fray Antonio Agapida, "was humbling himself before the cross and devoutly praying for the destruction of his enemies, that fierce pagan, El Zagal, depending merely on arm of flesh and sword of steel, pursued his diabolical outrages upon the Christians." No sooner was the invading army disbanded than he sallied forth from his stronghold, and carried fire and sword into all those parts which ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... writings, and actually interprets them also in this new and unorthodox way. So bold a departure from traditional usage proves the independence and originality of the young painter. These two little pictures thus become historically the first-fruits of the neo-pagan spirit which was gradually supplanting the older ecclesiastical thought, and Giorgione, once having cast conventionalism aside, readily turns to classical mythology to find subjects for the free play of fancy. The ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... This utterly pagan outlook on the proprieties positively stirred Drew to unholy mirth. But it did something else—it made him realize that the girl before him was quite outside the reach of any of his preconceived ideas. He could afford to sit down upon her plane and feel no moral indignation. Perhaps, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... necessary to add sixty or seventy years to the Trojan date, in order to obtain that of oedipus and the Sphinx. Out of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is nothing purely historic so old as this.] story in the Pagan records, older by two generations than the story of Troy, is that of oedipus and his mysterious fate, which wrapt in ruin both himself and all his kindred. No story whatever continued so long to impress the Greek sensibilities with religious ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... his soot- dark paletot were the outlines of his person obscured; on the contrary, his figure (such as it was, I don't boast of it) was well set off by a civilized coat and a silken vest quite pretty to behold. The defiant and pagan bonnet-grec had vanished: bare-headed, he came upon us, carrying a Christian hat in his gloved hand. The little man looked well, very well; there was a clearness of amity in his blue eye, and a glow of good feeling on his dark complexion, which passed perfectly in the place of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... had the leavings of knowledge which we throw to the floor and tread upon in our spirit of surfeit. To take our education at their hands and use it to devise ways by which we can continue to live on them, seems disquieting even to a pagan conscience. It ought to be insufferable to a sense of social responsibility ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... dome, 'neath which in former days Grim idols marked the pagan shrine, Has swelled the notes of pious praise, Attuned to themes ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... and its bruised fragrance filled the entire building... There followed the problem of its trimming. At first some one suggested that it was more beautiful untricked with gauds, but to Fred, unlighted by any human touch its loveliness seemed too cold and impersonal and cruelly pagan. Presently the long afternoons were rilled with a pathetic bustle. Everyone became interested. They popped corn and strung it in snow-white garlands and some one from the kitchen sent in a bowl of cranberries which were woven into ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "Life of Apollonius" takes the view that the account of the miracles of Apollonius is derived from the narrative of Christ's miracles, and has been concocted by people anxious to degrade the character of the Saviour. The attempt to make him appear as a pagan Christ has ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... dull shores of Liberia, canopied by unclean skies and based on dirty-looking seas. The natives, who, as usual, are new upon the coast, and who preserve curious traditions about their predecessors, are the Vai (not Vei), a Mandengan race still pagan. They call, however, the world 'duniya,' and the wife 'namusi,' words which show whence their ideas are derived. Their colour is lighter than the Kruman's; there are pretty faces, especially amongst ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... with her real sorrows? That fitting of certain words was a mere chance; the rest was all vague—nay, those words themselves were vague; they were determined by nothing but her brother's memories and beliefs. He believed there was something fatal in pagan learning; he believed that celibacy was more holy than marriage; he remembered their home, and all the objects in the library; and of these threads the vision was woven. What reasonable warrant ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... betake themselves to the less temperate climate and the rugged soil of a mountainous region? Plainly there must have been some very urgent cause, and that cause may be readily perceived in the record of the persecutions against the Christians under the Pagan emperors during the second, ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... and coward tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of the cloth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country, rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the Church's martyrs ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... writing this nearly a thousand miles north of my Philadelphia starting-point (by way of Montreal and Quebec) in the midst of regions that go to a further extreme of grimness, wildness of beauty, and a sort of still and pagan scaredness, while yet Christian, inhabitable, and partially fertile, than perhaps any other on earth. The weather remains perfect; some might call it a little cool, but I wear my old gray overcoat and find it just right. The days are full of sunbeams and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that such an idea of marriage should be gaining foothold in America. It has its root in an ignoble view of life,—an utter and pagan darkness as to all that man and woman are called to do in that highest relation where they act as one. It is a mean and low contrivance on both sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and heroic toils of home education—that education ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... from Ward C as Margaret MacLean entered. It was lusty enough to have come from the throats of healthy children, and it would have sounded happily to the most impartial ears; to the nurse in charge it was a very pagan of gladness. ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... ornaments, its multiplicity of episodes, its infinite variety of details, the central, maternal principle was ever visible. Every thing pointed upwards, from the spire in the clouds to the arch which enshrined the smallest sculptured saint in the chapels below. It was a sanctuary, not like pagan temples, to enclose a visible deity, but an edifice where mortals might worship an unseen Being in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pagan,' said the landlady. 'For that matter, they are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the drama have been inseparably connected from the most remote date. Even in the cart of Thespis some corner must have been found for the musician. The custom of chanting in churches has been traced to the practice of the ancient and pagan stage. Music pervaded the whole of the classical drama, was the adjunct of the poetry: the play being a kind of recitation, the declamation composed and written in notes, and the gesticulations even ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... watching the coarse faces of the drunken men. The Tahitians, fitting so well into the beauty of their island, gold of skin and crowned with flowers, carrying themselves with dignity, were as far removed as could be imagined from the idea of pagan men. They contrasted sharply at that moment with those from "civilization," who in filthy rags of clothes and wild disorder of gestures and voices staggered about aimlessly gorging food and drinking. The watching pagans glanced ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... land was mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan. Men said, tells Gregory, that "if a man has to pass between pagan altars and God's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both," and the lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve God ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... she became as utter a sceptic in regard to human love, and happiness flowing from it, as her father had taught her to be respecting God and the joy of believing. Though seemingly a fair young girl, her father had made her worse than a pagan. She believed in nothing save art and her father's wisdom. He seemed to embody the culture and worldly philosophy that now became, in her judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became her great desire. But this had received a severe shock. Mr. Ludolph ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... use a certain conjuring of God"; the kneeling at the Communion; the use of the cross in baptism, and of the ring in marriage, clearly a thing of human, if not of diabolical invention, and the "imposition of hands" in confirmation. The churching of women, they said, is both Pagan and Jewish. "Other things not so much shame itself as a certain kind of pity compelleth us to ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... think, that just as the Jewish cities were easily got at from all parts of Palestine, so from all parts of the world, may people go to the Greater and more Glorious Gospel Refuge. Poor Pagan of the far East! cast away your idols; the gates of the Gospel-City stand ready to welcome you. Indian of the far West! cast aside your warrior spear and your offerings of blood, and flee to the ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... righteousness. My dear son was a good and honorable man, but he was not a religious man. He had yet to learn the incomparable and vital value of the practice of Christian faith. Hardcastle invited his own doom. He admitted—he even appeared to pride himself upon a crude and pagan rationalism. It is not surprising that such a man should be called away to learn the lessons of which he stood so gravely ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... this agitation the Southern States had been quietly minding their own business, regardless of all the turmoil abroad. They had never investigated the subject theoretically, but they were well acquainted with all its practical workings. They had received from Africa a few hundred thousand pagan savages, and had developed them into millions of civilized Christians, happy in themselves, and useful to the world. They had never made the inquiry whether the system were fundamentally wrong, but they judged it by its fruits, which ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of Ilaria at Lucca; and she became, as time after time he revisited Venice for her sake, a personality, a spiritual presence, a living ideal, exactly as the Queen of the Air might have been to the sincere Athenian in the pagan age of faith. The story of her life and death became an example, the conception of her character, as read in Carpaccio's picture, became a standard for his own life and action in many a time of distress and discouragement. The ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... the churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most disgusting and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... up his situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it closely. It had ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... say for the most part, for we do not forget the self-denying labors of the Roman Catholics in propagating their doctrines in various parts of the world; indeed this has always been the bright redeeming feature of that system of semi-pagan Christianity. Well would it be if protestant Christians would imitate their zeal and self-devotion! How strange that centuries passed, even after the Reformation, before Christians began to recognize as binding that solemn injunction, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... have been a fine, resolute fellow, that Harald the Stern, although, in spite of much church-building and a certain amount of Pagan-persecuting, his character did not in any way emulate that of his saintly brother. The early part of his history reads like a fairy tale, and is a favourite subject for Scald songs; more especially his romantic adventures ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... is recorded that the profession of medicine originated in idolatry with pagan priests, who besought the gods to 158:3 heal the sick and designated Apollo as "the god of medicine." He was supposed to have dic- tated the first prescription, according to the 158:6 "History of Four Thousand Years of Medicine." It is here noticeable that ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... missionaries in the north and east among the Angles, theological and secular studies were pursued with avidity. By the end of the seventh century we find Anglo-Saxon missionaries, with St. Boniface at their head, carrying Christianity and enlightenment to the pagan ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... agency of more varied and coarser emotions, if he wishes to take rank with the seducing poets of this or of former generations. There is something very curious too, we think, in the way in which he, and Mr. Barry Cornwall also, have dealt with the Pagan mythology, of which they have made so much use in their poetry. Instead of presenting its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more is borrowed from these than the general conception ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... as you do the old pagan view of Providence, you are quite right not to tempt it. The loss is mine. I hope you will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... the real and visible fruit of organized German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that can come from the congestion of the pagan with the parvenu; all the knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something which always ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... remarkable poem. But elsewhere there is, in rather narrow and usual limits, a good deal else. Charlemagne's daughter, and the daughters of peers and paladins, figure: and their characteristics are not very different from those of the pagan damsels. It is, indeed, unnecessary to convert them,—a process to which their miscreant sisters usually submit with great goodwill,—and they are also relieved from the necessity of showing the extreme undutifulness to their more religiously constant sires, which ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... earth, or anywhere else; and there was not in or about them any hint whatever of myth or antique belief. In the pre-Christian days the work of the poet and sculptor taught a kind of history in the statues of the pagan divinities. Bacchus told of some ancient race that had introduced the vine into Europe and Africa. Ceres, with her wheat-plant, recited a similar story as to agriculture. And Zeus, Hercules, Saturn and all the rest were, in all probability—as Socrates declared—deified men. And, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... that had been broken with volleys, and they told me that a father who was praying in the window had been killed. The father rector of the residence there had a carved image of the child Jesus asleep in a little gilded bed, which had been sent him by a pagan Malabar pirate, who stole it from a Portuguese, believing it to be gold. But when he had carried it to his house, he found that it was only gilded wood, and gave it to his children for a toy. The sleeping Child, however, did not allow his owner to sleep, for according to his account, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled," said Stangrave,—he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... paper, eulogising the Licensed Victuallers' fete at Vauxhall Gardens, on Tuesday evening, bursts into the following magnificent flight:—"Wit has been profanely said, like the Pagan, to deify the brute" (the writer will never increase the mythology); "but here," (that is, in the royal property,) "while intellect and skill" (together with Roman candles) "exhibit their various manifestations, Charity" (arrack punch and blue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... think I am presuming to have written this on the strength of a childish acquaintance. I wish you all honors that can come to you on such a quest as yours, and I had almost said all good luck, only that that word sounds too frivolous and pagan for such a serious matter; so I will say all safety for a swift accomplishment of your task and a swift homecoming. I used to think when I was a little child that nothing could ever hurt you or make you afraid, and ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... too, of the tempests which throw on the shores of Zeeland's little isles the bodies of strange mummied monsters, part man, part boat; and of still, clear dawnings when the fisherfolk of Domburg can discern, far down under the green water, pagan temples of marble, and gleaming statues more perfect than any fashioned by known sculptors, even the greatest masters, when Greek art was in its prime. He told of the great dyke building, and how, at high tide, the North Sea beats fiercely on Zeeland's locked door. He told of the inundations, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... beliefs, though it is supposed that he took the idea of the Sirat or narrow bridge over the midst of hell, sharper than the edge of a sword, over which all must pass, while the wicked fall from it into hell, from Zoroastrianism. Muhammad recognised a devil, known as Iblis, while the Jinns or Genii of pagan Arabia became bad angels. The great difference between Islam and Judaism arose from Muhammad's position in being obliged continually to fight for his own existence and the preservation of his sect This circumstance coloured the later parts of the Koran and gave ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... these, perhaps immortal, fallacies, which live on, Tithonus-like, when sense and force have long deserted them, is that which charges Mr. Darwin with having attempted to reinstate the old pagan goddess, Chance. It is said that he supposes variations to come about "by chance," and that the fittest survive the "chances" of the struggle for existence, and thus "chance" is substituted ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... recoiling with a blow, Have forced my swimming brain to undergo Their doubt and dread, and blindly to forsake Thy purity of likeness and distort Thy worthiest love to a worthless counterfeit: As if a shipwrecked Pagan, safe in port, His guardian sea-god to commemorate, Should set a sculptured porpoise, gills a-snort And vibrant tail, within ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... age of unrivaled intellectual splendor and of unexampled sufferings through war. By diplomacy and debate it prescribed laws for a new age of unexpected ecclesiastical energy and of national peace procured at the price of slavery. Illustrious survivors from the period of the pagan Renaissance met here with young men destined to inaugurate the Catholic Revival. The compact struck between Emperor and Pope in private conferences, laid a basis for that firm alliance between Spain and Rome which seriously ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... to every other communion. Such zeal of proselytism actuates that sect, that its missionaries have penetrated into every nation of the globe; and, in one sense, there is a Popish plot perpetually carrying on against all states, Protestant, Pagan, and Mahometan. It is likewise very probable, that the conversion of the duke, and the favor of the king, had inspired the Catholic priests with new hopes of recovering in these islands their lost dominion, and gave fresh vigor to that intemperate zeal by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... thus command obedience to the State, even to a pagan Government, such as the Roman was at the time they wrote, it will scarcely be denied by any Christian that obedience is due to the Church, and to the ecclesiastical government, altogether apart from any question of infallibility. In fact, though both ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan |
