"Immolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... girl of fifteen, it did not appeal to many readers, but it contained a vivid description of the inspired heroism and self-sacrifice of the men whose deeds crowned the history of Texas with the sanctity of the supreme glory of self-immolation upon the altar of patriotism. We have fallen upon commercial days now, and the traditions of the old Alamo circle around a warehouse. Alamo Plaza is now the scene of the annual "Battle of the Flowers," a joyous and beautiful ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... professors of the culinary art, like Cloth-fair for Woollen-drapers, Paternoster-Row for Booksellers, and Clerkenwell for Watch-makers, &c. "This," said Dashall, "is His Majesty's Gaol of Newgate, and from this door ascend the numerous victims to the fatal scaffold, in immolation to the offended laws of their country. Let us enter this temporary abode of crime and wretchedness. It has been much meliorated by the humane and indefatigable attentions of an excellent lady, Mrs. Elizabeth ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... fathers stood at the risk of their lives for the sovereignty of Jesus Christ! What devotion, what courage, what self-immolation! How great the moral grandeur of those lives, lifted up in the service of Christ far above the fear of man! They felt deeply the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, giving them wisdom, peace, joy, ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... from invasion and subjugation, willingly devoted herself a sacrifice upon the altar of the gods. Ah, Russell! that were an easy task, in comparison with the offering I am called upon to make. I cannot, like Macaria, by self-immolation, redeem my country—from that great privilege I am debarred—but I yield up more than she ever possessed. I give my all on earth—my father and yourself—to our beloved and suffering country. My God! accept the sacrifice, and crown the South ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis is not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of the widow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by the Vedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. All these, it may be held, are later corruptions. The Vedic religion is a bright and happy system, and the primitive beliefs ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... of legislation. What can justify the breaking up of our institutions into belligerent fractions? Better this marble Capitol were levelled to the dust; better were this Congress struck dead in its deliberations; better an immolation of every ambition and passion which here have met to shake the foundations of society than the hazard of these consequences! * * * I appeal to Southern men,who contemplate a step so fraught with hazard and strife, to pause. Clouds are about us! There is lightning in their frown! Cannot ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing is the product of quick observation and sympathetic intuition. She does not write "tendency" novels, but appeals to simple emotions of love, hate, revenge, or self-immolation, which sometimes, as in the case of her last book, 'A Lady of Quality' (1895), verge on sensationalism. In 1873 Miss Hodgson married Dr. Burnett of Washington. Her longest novel, 'Through One Administration,' is a story of the political and social life of the Capital. 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... she was to usher in a new era for them—and for that she had offered herself up.... And now, having bound herself forever to this boy that she did not love—loving another man—the possibility of achievement was snatched from her and her immolation made futile. It was as if she plunged into a rapids, offering her life to save a child that struggled there, to find, when she reached the little body, and it was too late to save herself, that it was a wax figure from some shop window.... ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... them to the expiatory place, restored them unto salvation. And he, being often made the contemplator of the divine mysteries, beheld the heavens opened, and the Lord Jesus standing in the middle of the multitude of angels; and this, while he offered the holy immolation of the Son of God, and devoutly sang the Apocalypse of John, did Patrick merit to behold. For while in his meditations he admired these admirable visions, unto the sight of their similitude was he lifted up ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... purpose, she found a melancholy satisfaction. If, as she thought to herself, the iron was to enter her soul, the sooner the affair was accomplished the better. The process of self-sacrifice was not pleasant in the execution, however glorious it might appear in the conception. Self-immolation might be a duty, but, as every martyrdom, it was more satisfactory as an ideal than ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... left him with a quarrel on his hands. Yet his smile, as he considered her, was very sweet, so sweet that her ladyship, guessing nothing of the bitterness it was used to cover, went as near a smirk as it was possible for one so elegant. He was, she judged, another victim ripe for immolation on the altar of her goddessship. And Mr. Caryll, who had taken her measure very thoroughly, seeing something of how her thoughts were running, bethought him of ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... During the immolation of Dunster the Rev. Mr. Mitchell had made up his mind that he "would have an argument able to remove a mountain" before he would swerve from his orthodoxy; he had since confirmed his faith by preaching "more than half a score ungainsayable sermons" ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... the Captain strongly objected. After an angry correspondence the J.P. sent a challenge, which the other did not seem to stomach, for he sent an apology by a subordinate with full permission to continue the immolation of the birds. If a cruiser had to capitulate to this bold blockade runner, the Captain himself had to endure a similar humiliation at the hands of an indignant Kerry man, though he ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... literary calamity, too protracted a period of human life: he outlived himself and his fame. This great and original mind sacrificed all his genius to that secret principle we have endeavoured to develope—it was a self-immolation! ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... in an hour all interests were merged in the interest of all, and that all lives were together offered in willing immolation? Not that the State is worth more, essentially, than the individual or the family, seeing that the good of the family and of the individual is the cause and reason of the organization of the State. Not that our country is a Moloch ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... she needed was a veiled love, support mingled with tenderness,—that, in short, which she gave to others. Then, need I tell you, who are so truly feminine? this situation brought with it hours of delightful languor, moments of divine sweetness and content which followed by secret immolation. Her conscience was, if I may call it so, contagious; her self-devotion without earthly recompense awed me by its persistence; the living, inward piety which was the bond of her other virtues filled the air about her with spiritual incense. Besides, I was young,—young enough to concentrate ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... gathered for fuel around him in a circle. All the while, as they labored at their fiendish task, they chanted a funeral dirge, which was almost as depressing to their captive as their sinister preparations for his immediate immolation. ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... his article was the identity of Severac Bablon, whom Sheard was endeavouring to prove to be not an individual, but a society; a society, so he argued, formed for the immolation of Capital upon ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Amanda, old memories had been crowding back upon his heart, and he had begun to perceive how Amanda's mother must have felt when she saw his love decaying visibly before her, and to suspect that it was in the self-immolation of love that she had left him. His own character had been hitherto so uniformly pervaded with a refined selfishness as to afford no standpoint of a different soil, whence by contrast to recognize ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... a creative temperament yoke itself to a destructive criticism without self-immolation? Immersed in these brooding forebodings, he came heavily up the Dickinson stairs to the communal room. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Medes and Babylonians, the former commanded by Cyaxares, the latter by Nabopolassar or Nebuchadnezzar, and that it was terminated, when all hope was lost, by the suicide of the Assyrian monarch. The self-immolation of Saracus is related by Abydenus, who almost certainly follows Berosus in this part of his history. We may therefore accept it as a fact about which there ought to be no question. Actuated by a feeling which has more than once caused a vanquished monarch to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... sense the argument and condemnation that was passing behind McKay's unsmiling eyes. He did not move, but lay squatted on his belly, with his nose straight out on the ground between his forepaws. It was his attitude of self-immolation. His acknowledgment of the other's right to strike with lash or club. Yet in his eyes, bright and steady behind his mop of whiskers, Jolly Roger ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... when she hears of the death of her husband, she must go to the king as if in the greatest grief, and ask for permission to burn herself together with the dead body. When this request is granted, as no doubt it will be, she must prepare the funeral pile, and make ready for self-immolation, laying the apparently dead body on a couch in a private room till I come, when I will tell her what ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... defend his people from the charge of offering such sacrifices to Jehovah by reducing instances of it to a minimum. He says, however: "Yet we have at least two clear and unquestionable instances of human sacrifices offered to Jehovah. The first is the immolation of Jephthah's daughter." He then analyses the account, pointing out that it was clearly a sacrifice to Jehovah, and that Jephthah's "intention of sacrificing his daughter was publicly known for two full months; no priest, no prophet, no elder, no magistrate interfered, or even remonstrated." ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... well matured, bore unresisted sway through the great Eastern world, long before Moses slept in his little ark of bulrushes on the shore of the Egyptian river; Alexander the Great gazed with amazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired the Gymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us, "without any ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that he was ignorant of Christ's future Passion, for he had already said (John 1:39): "Behold the Lamb of God, behold Him who taketh away the sins [Vulg.: 'sin'] of the world," thus foretelling His future immolation; and since other prophets had foretold it, as may be seen especially in Isaias 53. We may therefore say with Gregory (Hom. xxvi in Evang.) that he asked this question, being in ignorance as to whether Christ would descend into hell in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... to protect her. On the morning of the day finally fixed for the ordeal, she was led from lodge to lodge throughout the village, begging wood and paint, not knowing that these articles were for her own immolation. Whenever a stick of wood or portion of red or black paint was given her, it was taken by the medicine-men attending, and sent to the spot selected for the final rite. A sufficient quantity of these materials having been collected, the ceremony ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... will do all in my power to save you." The counsellors and lawyers, desirous also of saving him, said: "He had already sacrificed in the Phrontisterium, (or academy for the exercises of literature.") Phileas cried out: "I have not by any immolation; but say barely that I have sacrificed, and you will say no more than the truth." Having been confined there some time, he might perhaps have said mass in ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... weary thee with my too fond and foolish tears and kisses of farewell! I owe to thee the gift of freedom, and while I thank thee for that gift, I do employ it now to serve me as a sacrifice to Love,—an immolation of myself upon the altars of my own desire! For thou knowest I have loved thee, O Sah-luma—not too well but most unwisely,—for what am I that thou shouldst stoop to cover my unworthiness with the royal purple of thy poet-passion? ... what could I ever be save the poor trembling ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... capable for human frailty to attain; and when we consider that each day is a day of penance, and that, too, a monotonous penance, with not a prospect beyond their walls, and none within, save their burial-ground, perhaps there is nothing in the character of man so unaccountable as such overwhelming immolation, unless it be that they esteem this life as so insignificant, such a nothingness in comparison to eternity, and that endless glories are to be earned by, comparatively speaking, momentary deprivation, that they endure it ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... crimes, he turned Christian, and, to obliterate the memory of his youthful ill practices, divided his inheritance among the people. Ultimately he burned himself to death in public at the Olympic games, A.D. 165. Lucan has held up this immolation to ridicule in his Death of Peregrinus; and C. M. Wieland has an historic romance in German entitled Peregrinus ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... warning. Bruennhilde now appears, takes the ring, and proclaims herself his true wife. She mounts her steed, and dashes into the funeral pyre of Siegfried after returning the ring to the Rhine-daughters. This supreme act of immolation breaks forever the power of the gods, as is shown by the blazing Walhalla in the sky; but at the same time justice has been satisfied, reparation has been made for the original wrong, and the free will of man becomes established ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... known of a sister's assuming vows of special severity, as in the case of Jean Le Ber, of the Congregation de Notre Dame, a daughter of a merchant in the town, who voluntarily lived in solitary confinement from the year 1695 to 1714—nineteen years of self-immolation, when her couch was a pallet of straw, and her prayers and fastings unceasing. She denied herself everything that to us would make life desirable or even endurable—sacrificed the dearest ties of kindred, and pursued with intense fervour the self-imposed rigours of ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that rises in the finale of "Goetterdaemmerung" ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... occurs to me, which is that among New England people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still lingers some blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary inclination to make this life as disagreeable as possible by self-immolation. Their ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed bull baiting, not because it hurt the bull, but because it gave pleasure to the people. Here in New England they refused the Roman dogma of Purgatory and then ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... voice softened, became caressing, "after our recent little explanation. And you shan't kill yourself. I won't have it. I won't allow it. Therefore be reasonable, my good dear. Put away your mania of self-immolation—or keep it exclusively for my benefit. Write and tell the Barking man to hurry up with his liver and his gout. Tell him you're being sweated to death dragging his rotten old banking cart, and that he's just got to come ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and therefore thus classified by the driving predominance. Those of the one party, then, finding no proof to be had but that in testimony, and anxious to have all they can—delighting too in a certain holy wilfulness of intellectual self-immolation, accept the testimony in the mass, and become Roman Catholics. Nor is it difficult to see how they then find rest. It is not the dogma, but the contact with Christ the truth, with Christ the man, which the dogma, in pacifying the troubles of the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... conformed, and before he left the place there were hopes of larger numbers. On his way back to Calcutta, he visited the horrible pagoda of Juggernaut (properly Jaghanatha, Lord of the World), which was still the centre of worship and pilgrimage; and though the self-immolation of the pilgrims beneath the car had been prohibited, yet the Company's Government still fancied themselves justified in receiving a toll from the visitors to this shrine of cruelty and all uncleanness, up to 1839, when the disgrace was done ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... white-hot goad to him. After such an experience there would be several months of toil and penance, and of savage self-immolation. It was hard to punish a man who had so little; but Thyrsis managed to find ways. For several months at a time he would go without those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going to bed at one o'clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for an hour. He would ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... use of sacrifices, which he declared to be criminal as well as infamous; and if the terms of his edicts more strictly condemned the impious curiosity which examined the entrails of the victim, [26] every subsequent explanation tended to involve in the same guilt the general practice of immolation, which essentially constituted the religion of the Pagans. As the temples had been erected for the purpose of sacrifice, it was the duty of a benevolent prince to remove from his subjects the dangerous ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... &c. (punishment) 975; man-eater, apache[obs3], hatchet man [U.S.], highbinder [obs3][U.S.]. regicide, parricide, matricide, fratricide, infanticide, feticide, foeticide[obs3], uxoricide[obs3], vaticide[obs3]. suicide, felo de se[obs3], hara-kiri, suttee, Juggernath[obs3]; immolation, auto da fe, holocaust. suffocation, strangulation, garrote; hanging &c. v.; lapidation[obs3]. deadly weapon &c. (arms) 727; Aceldama[obs3]. [Destruction of animals] slaughtering; phthisozoics[obs3]; sport, sporting; the chase, venery; hunting, coursing, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his bride. It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the religious passion of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... These ran to the hut of one of the assassins, with whom they had lived on terms of amity. There they were bound, and, amidst their groans, cries, and tears—men, and women with children at the breast—they were led off to a spot selected for the immolation. Great pains were taken to conceal the crime; but through a fall of rain the day preceding, their tracks were visible, and birds of prey attracted attention to the slaughter! The strongest suspicion existed, that the murderers were the miserable agents ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... that which happened to Oedipus, the Theban who tore out his eyes after discovering that in marrying Jocasta, the queen, he had married his own mother. Le Sage's hero, however, mourns because he had not been able to commit the crime, which gives the case of Ninon's son a similar tinge, his self-immolation being due, not to the horror of having indulged in criminal love for his own mother, but to the regret at not having been able ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... is the response of human nature to the whole of things considered as an order; morality is the living of the individual life in such a way as to be and do the most for humanity as a whole; it is making the most of one's self for the sake of the whole. Morality is not self-immolation. To jump off London Bridge would be self-immolation, but it would not be an act conducive to the welfare of the community; it might indeed be a very selfish and cowardly act. True morality involves the duty of self-formation and the exercise of judgment and self-discipline ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... along with them into their public work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were considered women's chief duties. Personally these good sisters are blameless. But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that such overdevotion is an uneconomical ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... that he could do so; but as soon as he was again alone he would again accuse himself of suicide. This was his frame of mind even while he was yet at Allington, and his ideas on the subject had become stronger during his sojourn at Courcy. But the self-immolation had not been completed, and he now began to think that he could save himself. I need hardly say that this was not all triumph to him. Even had there been no material difficulty as to his desertion of Lily,—no uncle, cousin, and mother ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs. Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason to refuse it ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... claims were to be transferred to her uncle Chrysippus. She added a request to the Church, to which she belonged with her whole heart, that every year on her saint's day and her mother's they should be prayed for in every church in the land. A chapel was to be erected on the scene of her self-immolation, and if the patriarch thought her worthy of the honor, it was to bear the name of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "the light is come! I see the sign. I am directed, and I will follow it. There is yet ONE hope. The immolation! I shall be saved, yet so as by fire. It is for this my hair has become white;—the sublime warning for my self-sacrifice! The colour of ashes!—white—white! It is so!—I will sacrifice my body in material fire, to save my soul ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... inherited from our savage ancestors. There is no darker chapter in the history of our country than that which tells of the weak pandering to the modern representatives of the priests of Bacchus, Astarte, and the shameless Venus. The religious aspect of the horrible immolation may have passed away, but wealth and social attractions have taken its place, and the evil works out its destroying way as ever. To save the children from this worse than death, women must fight, and they will win; for once the barbarity, the enormity, the inhumanity of this child-sacrifice ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... holy sacrifice of the mass, identical as it is with the sacrifice of Calvary, all the merits of Christ's life and death are applied to our souls. By His physical and bloody immolation on Calvary, Christ purchased for us infinite treasures of grace, and it is His will that these graces shall be dispensed to us, even till the end of the world, through the august sacrament of the altar. Moreover, except for the mass, ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... not mere belief, gain the ear and right hand of omnipotence, and call down blessings infinite. "Faith without works is dead." The foundation of enlightened faith is Christ's teachings and practice. It was our Master's self-immolation, his life-giving love, healing both mind and body, that raised the deadened conscience, paralyzed by inactive faith, to a quickened sense of mortal's necessities,—and God's power and purpose to supply them. It was, in the words of the Psalmist, He "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... Buddhism; though, unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists; and our police, less wise than the Hellenodicae, would probably not permit the Immolation of the Quack. Like your Alexander, they deal in marvels and miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy stories as those of your "Philopseudes," and the ghost of the lady who took to table- rapping because one of her best slippers had not been burned with her body, are gravely investigated ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... tremendous! I turned cold and trembled as I listened. The court was hushed, trying to catch each word. It was something unexampled. Even from such a self-willed and contemptuously proud girl as she was, such an extremely frank avowal, such sacrifice, such self-immolation, seemed incredible. And for what, for whom? To save the man who had deceived and insulted her and to help, in however small a degree, in saving him, by creating a strong impression in his favor. And, indeed, the figure of the young ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me. Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and become ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of transient duration, Are filled with some work in humanity's name, Some uplifting effort, or self-immolation, Our memories shall live ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... tree-sheltered and skulking foe, three or four times their number. . . . In an hour, in less than an hour, the field was a hell of fire raging from every side. The battle was lost before it was begun. It was from the outset a mere sacrifice, a sheer immolation, without a promise of success or a hope of escape." . . . "On the same side of the river with Leesburg," said Mr. Conkling, "within a day's march of that place, lay General McCall commanding a division containing fifteen regiments which marched fully ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... whether of cattle or of men within a specified period were presented to the gods. If acts of this nature are to be called human sacrifices, then such sacrifices belonged to the essence of the Latin faith; but we are bound to add that, far back as our view reaches into the past, this immolation, so far as life was concerned, was limited to the guilty who had been convicted before a civil tribunal, or to the innocent who voluntarily chose to die. Human sacrifices of a different description run counter to the fundamental idea of a sacrificial act, and, wherever they occur among the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of the individuals which at a given moment compose it; so distinct in fact that they may even be in opposition. Hence the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society; hence the true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by the liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... which the two horns resemble those of an ox, and he uses these horns, which are the wisdom of the Two Testaments, to rip up heretics. Still, in spite of these more or less ingenious interpretations, the ox is in fact the beast of immolation and sacrifice. ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... his eyes. This, a sad certainty told him, was love, the love that is unthinking. She was suffocated by the pure desire to give the earth to him and herself with it. What disaster might come from it to her or to the earth, her lulled brain did not consider. The self-immolation of passion had benumbed her. And now she looked at him beseechingly, as if to beg him only not to scorn her gift. Her emotion transferred itself to him. He must be the one to act; but disappointingly, he knew, with the mind coming in to school disastrous ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... captives. It has softened the administration of despotic, or of nominally despotic governments. It has abolished polygamy. It has restrained the licentiousness of divorces. It has put an end to the exposure of children and the immolation of slaves. It has suppressed the combats of gladiators,* and the impurities of religions rites. It has banished, if not unnatural vices, at least the toleration of them. It has greatly meliorated ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... this Cramped under worse than South-sea-isle taboo, Dwarfs of the gynaeceum, fail so far In high desire, they know not, cannot guess How much their welfare is a passion to us. If we could give them surer, quicker proof— Oh if our end were less achievable By slow approaches, than by single act Of immolation, any phase of death, We were as prompt to spring against the pikes, Or down the fiery gulf as talk of it, To compass our ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... sufficiently established the facts; otherwise the whole would have been ascribed to the treachery of Ali or his son.] After this followed as many separate tragedies as there were separate parties of Suliotes; when all hope and all retreat were clearly cut off, then the women led the great scene of self- immolation, by throwing their children headlong from the summit of precipices; which done, they and their husbands, their fathers and their sons, hand in hand, ran up to the brink of the declivity, and followed those whom they had sent before. In other situations, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sanction his sacrifice to Annie Hyde. Justice, honour, gratitude! these were fine names of his father's invention to adorn a ceremony which would celebrate his life-long misery, and he rebelled against such an immolation of his youth and happiness. When he reached the house, he found that his mother had gone to the pond to feed her swans; and he decided to ride a little out of his way in order to see her there. Presently ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... also prisoners of war. Gradually the savagery of this primitive rite was modified until finally nothing but a circus play was left. During the Alexandrian period people were satisfied with organizing a corrida in the arena, in the course of which the victim intended for immolation was seized. This is the proper meaning of the terms taurobolium and criobolium ([Greek: taurobolion, kriobolion.]), which had long been enigmas,[34] and which denoted the act of catching a steer or a ram by means of a hurled weapon, probably the thong of a lasso. Without doubt even this act was ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation—these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses co-operate—as perhaps ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... and stopped. Her big brown eyes were watching him, still and resigned and loving; she lay as if she had given herself up to sacrifice: there was her body for him; but the look at the back of her eyes, like a creature awaiting immolation, arrested him, and all ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... thing up to? This was the question which he incessantly asked himself, without being able to answer it. His respect for her genius was too great to allow him for one moment to suppose that it was possible for her to act without some deep motive. Her immolation of self, her assiduity, her tenderness, her skill, all seemed to this man so many elements in the game which she was playing. And for all these things he only admired her the more fervently. That she would succeed he never for a moment doubted; though what it was that she might be ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The thought ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... centered at last upon the thighs and then the whole person of one girl in particular. My first sexually tinged dream was of her—that while she stood near I impinged my penis upon a red-hot anvil and then, in beatific self-immolation, exhibited the charred stump to her wondering, round eyes. This love, however, abated at the coming of a new girl to the school, who, not more beautiful, but more buxom, made stronger appeal to my nascent sexuality. One ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... love-heroic leap. He knew that he was violating a taboo of life, just as he knew he was violating a taboo if he sprang into Meringe Lagoon where swam the dreadful crocodiles. Great love is always capable of expressing itself in sacrifice and self-immolation. And only for love, and for no lesser reason, could ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... pleasure in so doing, and her philosophy of life seems to be that people should do as they like. The morality she commends to our sympathy and admiration is a morality of instinct and emotion, not of reason and principle. Self-renunciation, immolation of desire in obedience to accepted precept, is ignored. Sentiment is supreme. Duty, as a motive power, is ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of the spirit. Her outlook was blacker than his, for it offered none and drew together to a point where her tribulations focused in a final act of self-immolation. There was a pause, and he said, drowsiness now plain ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner |
