"Blasphemous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variety in it: now he would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that the increase in food production did not keep pace with increase of population; then a quieting down, a breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs at Weyhill Fair, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... "A blasphemous remonstrance," Ideala put in. "Oh, I don't deny that there is just enough to be said in favour of all these things to make them sell—and this one has two unusual points of interest. It opens with a riddle, and the lady's lover is a priest, which gives ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... my Redeemer, as I sit here in my green haven, with the stormy sea of my troubles afar off, beating in vain against the walls of contentment, that through all my vicissitudes I was never tempted to stray into such blasphemous imaginations. Fool as I have been, and fool as I have declared myself upon the forefront of this very book, I have never said in my heart, THERE IS NO GOD; but much and loudly have maintained the affirmative. And although I have been sadly, wickedly, detestably errant from ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... enjoy all the fulness of fellowship with God without a great deal of retirement from men, that we should like to have The General's inner life fairly exhibited, if it were only in order for ever to bury this monstrous and, we might also say blasphemous, superstition, which has so often been supported by one or two quotations from the Gospel, though in defiance of the whole story of Christ, and of every promise He ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before Alberich, however, has caught the words—his deafness perhaps it is which saves his life—Loge has called Wotan back to his reason. Practising on Alberich's not completely outlived simplicity, he by the ruse of feigning himself very ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... stalwart Sikh watchmen from the hemp and sugar godowns, squat Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists, customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies, Scotch mechanics with parched throats, and all the underlings who have to do with ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow, in the infinite entanglement ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... world. But this kind of striving is but a beating the air, and will come to nothing at last-(Bunyan's Strait Gate, vol. 1, p. 866). Coming souls will have opposition from Satan. He casts his fiery darts at them; wanderings in prayer, enticements to old sins, and even blasphemous thoughts, assail the trembling penitent, when striving to enter into the strait gate, to drive him from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... half-witted people into their individual folds has been telling them that they were in danger of committing the most dreadful of all sins, the "sin against the Holy Ghost." The utterly "unpardonable sin" of all sins. This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has frightened numbers of half-baked folks, and they have pestered their small modicum of brains over this mysterious say-so of priests and parsons even to the point of committing suicide, or of landing themselves ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... in the priests' power that meets us everywhere in the pages of Colgan and Ward. The reason is, that they admit Christianity without reserve; and in its entirety it is supernatural. The criticisms of human reason on holy things hold in their eyes something of the sacrilegious and blasphemous; such criticisms are for them open disrespect for divine things; and, inasmuch as divine things are, in fact, more real than any phenomena under natural laws can be, skepticism in the former case is always more unreasonable than in the latter, supposing always that the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... seem to be various orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth are truer than others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these sorts are the very ones that have the greatest use-value to life that desires to realise and live. At once, O untravelled reader, you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying to describe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutely shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads that lead to life. For there ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... king of the Daityas celebrated for his blasphemous impieties. When his pious son Prahlada praised Vishnu the Daitya tried to kill him, when the God appeared in the incarnation of the man-lion and tore the tyrant ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... narrate the offenses of the adversaries, which, indeed, we have no desire to do, it would be a terrible list: what an abominable, blasphemous fair the adversaries have made of the Mass; what unchaste living has been instituted by their celibacy; how the Popes have for more than 400 years been engaged in wars against the emperors, have forgotten the Gospel, and only sought to ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... who have understood the French zest for shocking the bourgeois. He had little of his own to express, but he discovered the heretic's gospel in Gautier, and Baudelaire and set it forth in English in music that he might have learned from the Sirens who sang to Ulysses. He revelled in blasphemous and licentious fancies that would have made Byron's hair stand on end. Nowadays, much of the blasphemy and licentiousness seems flat and unprofitable as Government beer. But in those days it seemed heady as wine and beautiful as a mediaeval tale. There was always in Swinburne more ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... delivered Samaria out of mine hand? Who are they among all the gods of the countries that have delivered their country out of mine hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of mine hand?" A letter was afterward sent to the king to the same effect, commencing with this blasphemous sentence, "Let not thy God, in whom thou trustest, deceive thee." Hezekiah instantly repairs to the temple, opens his letter in the immediate presence of the Eternal, and supplicates his great name for that interference in the present extremity, which ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... gone. He looked innocent, bright, and contented as usual. "If God be at peace," he would say to himself, "why should not I?" Once he said this aloud, almost unconsciously, and was overheard: it strengthened the regard with which worldly church-goers regarded him: he was to them an irreverent yea, blasphemous man! They did not know God enough to understand the cobbler's words, and all the interpretation they could give them was after their kind. Their long Sunday faces indicated their reward; the cobbler's cheery, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... overwhelmed with shame, contrition, and reproaches. A humbled man with a broken heart within him—such was our labourer, penitent in prison; and when he contrasted his peaceful, pure, and Christian course those forty years of poverty, with his blasphemous and infidel career for the one bad week of wealth, he had no patience with himself—only felt his fall the greater; and his judgment of his own guilt, with a natural exaggeration, went the length ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... face in her mother's breast and tried to smother her sobs. Charles sat mumbling blasphemous oaths. At the expiration of half an hour, a page announced the Bishop of Cambrai and other gentlemen. The duke signified that they were to be admitted; and when the bishop entered the room, Charles, who was smarting from his late defeat, ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... Brief time I expended in making my arrangements to quit, having first seen Mr. Arcubus carted away to a hospital, where by skilful treatment he slowly recovered. For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that I had departed from lodgings forever,—lodgings for single ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way, an eccentricity ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... a fatiguing walk (for the brothers had thought it prudent to lay aside their dignity, and as safest to disguise themselves in mean habits) over a wild country, arrived at last within sight of a large city, inhabited by blasphemous Jews, near which, in a superb synagogue, he laid himself down on a carpet to repose, being quite exhausted with toil and hunger. He had not rested long, when a Jew rabbi entering the building, the prince begged for the love of God a little refreshment; but the wicked infidel, who hated true believers, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Sir Henry in astonishment—"What! John Milton, the blasphemous and bloody-minded author of the Defensio Populi Anglicani!—the advocate of the infernal High Court of Fiends; the creature and parasite of that grand impostor, that loathsome hypocrite, that detestable monster, that prodigy of the universe, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of a French tradesman who, like Captain Booth, had infringed the laws of strict chastity and virtue. He brooded on this till he became deranged, and thought that Satan had him. He was convulsed, anaesthetic, suicidal, involuntarily blasphemous. He was not 'exorcised' by a prayer or by a command, but after a long course of mental and physical treatment. His cure does not explain the cures in which Dr. Nevius believed. His case did not present the features of which Dr. Nevius asked science for an explanation. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to take a quick look at this relic from the past—and caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror above the windshield. He said just one word—"Jesus!" Nor was he blasphemous in saying it. ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... has for its avowed object the restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... involved is that of expectation or, when the expectation is controlled by our feelings, we may class it under the mental function of imagination. The melodrama shows us how the young millionaire wastes his nights in a dissipated life, and when he drinks his blasphemous toast at a champagne feast with shameless women, we suddenly see on the screen the vision of twenty years later when the bartender of a most miserable saloon pushes the penniless tramp out into the gutter. The ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... mourned in secret over his miserable upbringing, but who, having no store of words to tell her thoughts, could only be dumbly kind to him, and careful of his childish hurts and ailments; the boy ate and drank with the men, and aped their swaggering and blasphemous ways, which made them laugh and praise his cunning. The Lord Marmaduke had been nursed back into a sort of poor life, and sate all day in a fur gown in the solar, with a velvet cap on his head to hide his wound, ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the entire length, and called for bread and milk, which was soon set before us. The lady was washing and the man was playing with a child on the porch. The little thing was trying to walk, the man would swear terribly at it—not in an angry way, but in a sort of careless, blasphemous style that was terribly shocking. I thought of the child being reared in the midst of such bad language and reflected on the kind of people we were meeting in this far away place. They seemed more wicked and profane the farther west we walked. I had always lived in a more moral and temperate atmosphere, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... foreground "Minos standeth horribly and gnasheth," condemning the miserable souls before him each to his different circle, his tail wound twice about his middle. Farther back, the Pistoiese, Vanno Fucci, with blasphemous gesture, yells out his challenge to God; Charon plies his boat; and in the background despairing souls follow a mocking demon who runs before them with ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... upon another slender figure, speeding after these, afoot. Desperately she clung to it in spite of savage blows and strainings. And so they found her, as forth they came,—a rush of shrieking, startled, candle-bearing women,—of bewildered and unconsciously blasphemous men of the guard—her arms locked firmly about a girl in semi-savage garb. The villain of the drama had been whisked away, leaving the woman who sought to save him to the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... blasphemous. No wonder you shiver while you talk. New York is full of noble Christians, of generous charming people, and there must be some wickedness everywhere. Don't you know that God will ultimately overrule all, and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... than the ambiguous predictions of Jesus.... But notwithstanding all this superiority, I cannot assert Divinity or Sonship of God." He claims "to have been sent by God to reform the true religion of God, now corrupted by Jews, Christians, and Mahomedans." Doubly blasphemous as his claims sound in the ears of orthodox Mahomedans, who reckon both Christ and Mahomed as prophets, his sect is now estimated to number at least 10,000, including many educated Mahomedans. Whatever its fate—a mere comet or a new planet in the Indian ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... blasphemous belief had taken such deep hold of my mind, that looked upon all religious exercises as perfectly useless. I could not fancy myself one of the elect, and so went from that extreme to the other. If I were to be saved, I should be saved; if a vessel of wrath, only fitted ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... than a dozen wildcat stills. Then all at once, here about five years ago she turned good, 'lowed she'd heerd from God. It was blasphemous. Seems she hadn't went to church since she was a gal. I don't say she ain't behavin' herself and all that, but 'tain't orthodox for a person like that to jest set down before her do' in the grass and git religion without ever goin' ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... army of the degraded swarm. Here is the loose-lipped rakish wit, who tells stories in the common lodging-house kitchen. He has a certain brilliancy about him which lasts until the glassy gleam comes over his eyes, and then he becomes merely blasphemous and offensive. He might be an influential writer or politician, but he never gets beyond spouting in a pot-house debating club, and even that chance of distinction does not come unless he has written an unusually successful begging-letter. Here too is the broken professional man. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... As the blasphemous devil thus went on, all were silent round her. Even Dorothea Stettin had not a word—for, though her wrath was great, her fear was yet greater. Only Anna Apenborg, who had her eyes always about, cried out—"See there, dear sisters, there ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... say right, else, as I am persuaded, men would not so usually belch out their blasphemous oaths as they do; they take a pride in it; they think that to swear is gentleman-like; and, having once accustomed themselves unto it, they hardly leave it all the days ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... might well mean an hour's running to and fro before the scattered flock could be herded once more. An hour of panting and blasphemous pursuit, at the very outset of an overbusy day. And all because of one ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... the principles of theology itself, whether natural or revealed, every new revelation ought to be considered false; every change in a religion which had emanated from the Deity ought to be refuted as ungodly and blasphemous. Does not every reform suppose that God did not know how at the start to give His religion the required solidity and perfection? To say that God in giving a first law accommodated Himself to the gross ideas of a people whom He wished to enlighten, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... left on the veld had belonged to him once. Well, it should be his again. He swore that with a blasphemous oath. Thenceforward he proceeded warily, feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human tarantula, evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the loss of his sons. God Himself had charged the prophet to offer sympathy to Hiel, whose position demanded that honor be paid him. Elijah at first refused to seek out the sinner who had violated the Divine injunction against rebuilding Jericho, for he said that the blasphemous talk of such evil-doers always called forth his rage. Thereupon God promised Elijah that fulfilment should attend whatever imprecation might in his wrath escape him against the godless for their unholy speech. As the prophet entered the general's house, he heard Hiel utter these ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... massacre; that you served two terms in the penitentiary before you were born; that you are a renegade Jew and an Italian Jesuit, that for 30 years you were a Baptist preacher, but were bounced out of the ministry for drunkenness and immorality; that you have been a blasphemous Atheist from your youth up; that you deserted from the federal army in the same year that you were four years old; that you have been discharged from all the Texas dailies for incompetency, and are the author of editorials in the Chicago Inter-Ocean ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo-Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything not strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the debris at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuviae of a stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were going on within its gritty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... as the light of day," replied Asad. "Thy marriage with that woman made an impious mock of the True Faith. It was no marriage. It was a blasphemous pretence, thine only aim to thwart me, abusing my regard for the Prophet's Holy Law, and to set her beyond my reach." He turned to Vigitello, who stood a little behind Sakr-el-Bahr. "Bid thy men put me this traitor into irons," ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... case was absolutely a deceiver! one, transcendantly unrighteous! in advancing pretensions to miracles, by the 'Finger of God,' which he never performed; and by asserting claims, (as a man) in the most aggravated sense, blasphemous. These consequences, Socinians, to be consistent, must allow, and which impious arrogation of Divinity in Christ, according to their faith, as well as his false assumption of a community of 'glory' ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... government and officers of the armed force, attest on their honour the truth of these impudent impositions upon the credulity of mankind, affirm the accuracy and bona fide character of these winking, blinking, blasphemous, lachrymal representations? ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Dresden china, Turkish chibouques, maccaroni, and Lord Byron, with whose poems this lady seemed sufficiently familiar. I improved the occasion, as the right thing to do, when talking with ladies about Byron, to find fault with his impiety, his blasphemous scepticism, his cutting sarcasm, and the unhappy frivolity which defaces the works of the man, who, with all his faults, was undoubtedly the greatest poet the nineteenth century has ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... without controule 800 Had audience, when among the Seraphim Abdiel, then whom none with more zeale ador'd The Deitie, and divine commands obei'd, Stood up, and in a flame of zeale severe The current of his fury thus oppos'd. O argument blasphemous, false and proud! Words which no eare ever to hear in Heav'n Expected, least of all from thee, ingrate In place thy self so high above thy Peeres. Canst thou with impious obloquie condemne 810 The just Decree of God, pronounc't and sworn, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... America the Jew becomes "The Duke" in a version picked up by Mr. Newells, from the recitation of a street boy in New York. The daughter of a Jew is not more likely than the daughter of a duke to have been concerned in the cruel and blasphemous imitation of the horrors attributed by Horace to the witch Canidia. But some such survivals of pagan sorcery did exist in the Middle Ages, ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... pages deal very honestly and fully with their subjects. The essays of Dr. Jessopp and Mr. Paul are of course merely Essays, of a score or two of pages: though the first is pretty wide in its scope. There would be nothing but good to be said of either, if both had not been, not perhaps blasphemous but parsimonious of praise, towards "Our Lady of the Rocks." It cannot be too often or too solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sevigne as a letter-writer is not crotchet or fashion or affectation—is no result of merely taking authority ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the people, not with a notion of maintaining our ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Markham inscribed to Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's glorious fight off the Azores. Markham was not content to acknowledge with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with blasphemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God. Markham's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... him out. And apparently the people did not care. No doubt even the poor people in whose cause Amos had so eloquently spoken were shocked by his words. "What, are not our sacrifices holy and pleasing to Jehovah? Would he have us stop offering up burnt-offerings? That is almost blasphemous." ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... not make a man a heretic or an apostate. Therefore it must also be false, that it is a divine command to be in connection with the Roman Church.[28] For whosoever keepeth one divine command, keepeth them all, and none can be kept without keeping the others[30]. Therefore it is an open and blasphemous lie against the Holy Ghost to say that the external unity under Roman authority is the fulfilment of a divine commandment, since there are so many in that unity who neither regard nor fulfil any of the Divine commandments. ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... horrible and blasphemous oath, the initiated was required to sign a compact with his own blood, when he was duly pronounced a member of the Order, which might truly be termed hellish. ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... to me—dretful dubersome. It don't look reasonable to me, that He, the mighty King of heaven and earth, would speak to His children through a senseless Indian jargon, or impossible and blasphemous speeches through a ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... they turned their anger into ridiculing the man and his sorrow for his wife and children; taunting him with want of courage to leap into the great pit and go to heaven, as they jeeringly expressed it, along with them; adding some profane and blasphemous expressions. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... his howls lights soon flickered in windows and fanlights; and with prompt, eager, anxious, and awed bush first-aid and assistance, they carried a very sober, battered and blasphemous driver inside and spread mattresses on the floor. And, some six weeks afterwards, an image, mostly of plaster-of-Paris and bandages, reclined, much against its will, on a be-cushioned cane lounge on the hospital veranda; and, from the only free and ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... fault with the matrix of this opal is probably blasphemous. But I own that I could do without the Shandean prologue and epilogue of the narrator and his man-servant Daniel Cameron. And though, as a tomfool myself, I would fain not find any of the actions of my kind alien from me, I do find some of the tomfoolery ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... synagogue so called of the Freedmen[6:9], and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, disputing with Stephen. (10)And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke. (11)Then they suborned men, who said: We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... find some way out when he has been stupid. Just the same, it was ordered that the money should come to us in this special way, and it was you that must take it on yourself to go meddling with the designs of Providence—and who gave you the right? It was wicked, that is what it was—just blasphemous presumption, and no more becoming to a meek ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... ill become me, however, to set down the extravagant and often blasphemous harangue in which, styling M. de Guise the martyr of God, he told the story now so familiar—the story of that dark wintry morning at Blois, when the king's messenger, knocking early at the duke's door, bade him hurry, for ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... of the third century. Calvin's character of this Supreme Being seems chiefly copied from that of the Jews. But the reformation of these blasphemous attributes, and substitution of those more worthy, pure, and sublime, seems to have been the chief object of Jesus in his discourses to the Jews: and his doctrine of the cosmogony of the world is very clearly laid down in the three first verses of the first chapter of John, in these ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... brought Its baneful lesson, they had filled the world With their abominations; while its tribes, Trodden to earth, imbruted, and despoiled, Had knelt to them in worship; sacrifice Had smoked on many an altar, temple-roofs Had echoed with the blasphemous prayer and hymn: But thou, the great reformer of the world, Tak'st off the sons of violence and fraud In their green pupilage, their lore half learned— Ere guilt had quite o'errun the simple heart God gave them at their birth, and blotted out His image. Thou dost mark them ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... There are two ways in which blasphemy may occur unawares and without deliberation. In the first way, by a man failing to advert to the blasphemous nature of his words, and this may happen through his being moved suddenly by passion so as to break out into words suggested by his imagination, without heeding to the meaning of those words: this is a venial sin, and is not a blasphemy properly so called. In the second way, by adverting to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... recover Peter was up and away, springing lightly into the rickshaw. They turned and darted up one narrow, dirty alley into a narrower and dirtier one, the two coolies shouting in blasphemous chorus to clear ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... mildly, "what good is progress?" The old man, he assured himself after a moment's reflection, wasn't actually saying anything blasphemous. After all, the Gods didn't expect their worshippers ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Oh, my poor young man, repentance, repentance with us here in nature's sanctuary, where the grandeur of God's works, without any of the disfigurement of man, is all that remains to you now. I welcome you, my poor fallen son;' and he stretched out his hand. But our hero simply gave the blasphemous vagabond a look ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... "It is more blasphemous than that thing which is swiping our meat," I replied, for whatever the thing was, it had leaped upon our deer and was devouring it in great mouthfuls which it swallowed without mastication. The creature appeared to be a great lizard ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he went on with quivering voice, "I began to see things red. The lust of blood was beating in every stroke of my heart. In vivid flashes of blasphemous fury I saw life from a new point of view. I began to ask where God lived that such things could be in his world. I saw the bruised bodies of my fellow beings flung before such men as Bivens and ground ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of greed and cold cruelty decked out with blasphemous phrase is viler, I think, than anything attributed by Shakespeare to the worst of his villains. But surely some hint of Richard's incredible vileness should have come earlier in the play, should have preceded at least his banishment ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... tortured him without his being able to evolve a satisfactory method of removing the blasphemous poster. A direct attack was quite out of the question, for manifestly the Tennessee Shad would demand an adequate explanation for the destruction of his treasured possession. There could be no explanation except the true one, and such a confession was unthinkable, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... other, which they would (I hope) be ashamed to say and do for their own private gain. Now what is this, but worshipping the evil spirit, in order to get power over this world, that they may (as they fancy) amend it? And what is this but self- conceit—ruinous, I had almost said, blasphemous? These people think themselves so certainly in the right, and their plans so absolutely necessary to the good of the world, that God has given them a special licence to do what they like in carrying them out; that He will excuse in them falsehoods and meannesses, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... into a 'shooter,"' he muttered, escaping to his room. He put on the 'shooter,' a higher collar, a pearl pin, and his neatest grey spats, to a somewhat blasphemous accompaniment. Looking at himself in the glass, he said, "Well, I'm damned if I'm going to show anything!" and went down. He found his grandfather's carriage at the door, and his mother in furs, with the appearance of one going to a Mansion House Assembly. They seated themselves ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... blasphemous, Price, whatever else you are!" admonished the doctor. He was choking ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... gather on the high summits of religion and philosophy, blackening the mental horizon; sooner or later, they break out on the lower plains of the economic social and political world, spreading everywhere revolution and destruction. The blasphemous Proudhon gave utterance to a great truth when he wrote: "It is surprising how at the bottom of every political problem we always find some theology involved." We lay stress upon this aspect of universities, for, in our mind, from a catholic view-point, it is of the greatest importance ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... FROM THE TRUTH, and shall be turned unto fables." 2 Tim. 4:4, 5. The religious world has apostatized much more since Paul's day, even to the extent in this modern age that professors of Christianity are proclaiming the blasphemous "God ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... the dying are heard all around you, And heartrending sights every day are displayed; While blasphemous curses may well nigh astound you, And dangers fast thicken; yet be not dismayed. Lend, lend a hand! Lend, lend a hand! If these things appal you your ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... futile efforts the steward's patience gave way; but certain members of the crew had impressed him with the conviction that the hurricane that was being encountered and the disasters that had befallen us were sent as a judgment on him for the blasphemous language he was accustomed to use at all times, whenever the slightest thing crossed his devilish nature. He put his hands on the table, his eyes were upturned, and with a softness of speech he ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... shall my eyes open to the true Olympus, where thy gods really dwell? Am I to believe with this man, that none whom for so many centuries my fathers worshipped have a being or a name? Am I to break down, as something blasphemous and profane, the very altars which I have deemed most sacred? or am I to think with Arbaces—what?' He paused, and strode rapidly away in the impatience of a man who strives to get rid of himself. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... on that morning presented itself from the poop of the crippled ship was one to make the stoutest heart quail, to impress the onlooker with an overpowering sense of his own insignificance compared with Him who holds the ocean in the hollow of His hand, and of the blasphemous arrogance of those who would presume to take upon themselves one of the functions of the Almighty, and, in the blindness of their anger, attempt to mete out to their fellow-men that justice which it is ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... Suso, and (with modifications by) Tauler, and became one of their chief tenets.[247] This spark is the organ by which our personality holds communion with God and knows Him. It is with reference to it that Eckhart uses the phrase which has so often been quoted to convict him of blasphemous self-deification—"the eye with which I see God is the same as that with which He sees me.[248]" The "uncreated spark" is really the same as the grace of God, which raises us into a Godlike state. But this grace, according to Eckhart (at least in his later period), is God Himself ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... emphasis. An insolent attempt, by the priest of Beth-el, to silence the Prophet, and the fiery answer which he got for his pains, come between. The stream of Amos's prophecy flows on, uninterrupted by the boulder which had tried to dam it up. Some courage was needed to treat Amaziah and his blasphemous bluster ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... governor over the first of these was one Spite-God, a most blasphemous wretch: he came with the whole rabble of them that came against Mansoul at first, and was himself one of themselves. He that was made the governor of Midnight Hold was one Love-no-Light; he was also of them that came ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... disputed his right to these pretentious claims at every point. Especially did they challenge his authority over the Church, and testify against his blasphemous presumption. They looked with horror upon his attempt to grasp the crown of Christ, that he himself might wear it. This they resented and resisted as treason against the KING OF KINGS. They could not submit to the man who clothed himself with Christ's supremacy; that robe of royal priesthood ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... the Doctor, more than ever satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous speech. "Adaly is delirious,—fearfully excited; it would destroy her. The only hope is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... could not be so properly styled a sect, as the disciples of an original, who had invented a new system of religion. Their chief adoration was paid to the second person in the Trinity; the first they treated with the most shocking neglect. Some of their tenets were blasphemous, some indecent, and others ridiculously absurd. Their discipline was a strange mixture of devotion and impurity. Their exterior worship consisted of hymns, prayers, and sermons; the hymns extremely ludicrous, and often indecent, alluding to the side-hole or ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... prevailed. But it was only by the death of Frederick II. that the supremacy of the Church was secured; and when Innocent IV., who had written, on hearing of that death, to his Sicilian clergy, in words of blasphemous exultation, entered Milan, on his journey from Lyons to Perugia, the road, for ten miles before he reached the gates, was lined by the entire population of the city, drawn forth in enthusiastic welcome; as they had invented a sacred car for the advance of their standard in battle, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... heaven, the toung prophanes the sacred name Of Ferdinand with any villany, Ile cut it out or stop his throate with bloud And so dam in his blasphemous upbraydes. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... sailed home, however, and Winthrop was Governor once more, the elders of the community decided that Mrs. Hutchinson was a danger to the colony, and must be silenced. So all the elders and leaders met together in assembly, and condemned her opinions, some as being "blasphemous, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... frightened, held on desperately to his berth, and passed the time in screaming for the "stewrt," cursing his evil surroundings, calling everybody he could think of pigs, dogs, etc., and praying to saints and angels. Coronado, not less sick and blasphemous, had more command over his fears, and kept his prayers for the last pinch. Clara, a much better sailor, and indeed an uncommonly good one, was so far beaten by the motion that she did not get up, but lay as quiet as the brig would let her, patiently awaiting results, now and then smiling ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... know it, you and I. So Harold was baptized in the Christian faith, he and his children; but Persis, his wife, was not baptized, for she was the daughter of a Pagan king, and she feared to bring evil upon those she loved by doing any blasphemous thing. Right sorely grieved was Harold because of this, and oftentimes he spake with her thereof, and oftentimes he prayed unto his God and ours to incline her mind toward the cross, which saveth all alike. But Persis would say: "My best beloved, let me not do this thing ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... and xvi: 16. And then in another place quote Col. ii: 8-17, for the same point of time. How could Christ annul any law twice. First, at his preaching and second at his death, three and a half years apart. Your argument is groundless and futile; therefore the uncalled for blasphemous language of yours, that the Jews were right in killing him (the Son of God) as a notorious Sabbath breaker, will fall on your guilty head. Hear the proof: "They that forsake the law praise the wicked.—He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... blustering orchestration, and the execrable voice-killing vocal writing! The Ring is an amorphous impossibility. That is now critically admitted. It ruins voices, managers, the public purse, and our patience. Its stories are indecent, blasphemous, silly, absurd, trivial, tiresome. To talk of the Ring and Beethoven's symphonies is to put wind and wisdom in the same category. Wagner vulgarized Beethoven's symphonic methods—noticeably his powers of development. Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... a recruit of just that sturdily conscientious temper which has made the most formidable soldiers known to history. I am bound to add, however, that the attesting officer, on being told that the oath would be a blasphemous farce to the conscience of the recruit, made no difficulty about that, and was quite willing to accept him if he, on his part, would oblige by professing what he did not believe. Thus a Ghoorka's religious conscience is respected: an Englishman's is ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the two houses; but that dissenters from it should enjoy liberty of conscience, and the free exercise of their worship, unless they should reject the mystery of the Trinity, or the inspiration of the Scriptures, or profess prelatic, or popish, or blasphemous doctrines. The yearly revenue was fixed at one million three hundred thousand pounds, of which no part was to be raised by a land-tax; and of this sum one million was devoted to the support of the army and navy, and ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... evenings passed pleasantly, whilst Henri read the Bible aloud and the Marchioness sewed. In the meantime the work of grace seemed to advance in the heart of the Marquis, and he who but a year ago was proud, insolent, self-indulgent, boasting, blasphemous, was now humble, gentle, polite, in honour preferring all men. His behaviour to the Marchioness was quite changed: he was tender and affectionate towards her, bearing with patience many of her little ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... its poisonous fruit. But it was at this period of our history that he became a frequent attendant at their reunions, returning at midnight, half intoxicated, to pour into the horrified ears of his wife and children the issue of the last blasphemous and revolutionary debate that marked the progress and ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... witness to the misconception which ruled in the minds of these priests as to the relation of His claims to the Cross. They thought that it had finally burst the bubble, and disposed once for all of these absurd and blasphemous pretensions. Was it credible that a man who possessed miraculous power should not, in this supreme moment, use it to deliver Himself? Did not 'Physician, heal Thyself,' come in properly there? Would any of the most besotted followers of this ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... tea—a stroke of luck—with a company of boys (all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the night here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little comfort and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense of humor, cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there was a yearning for the end of a business which was too close ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ball-room. Here he saw a great many sailors and bad women, who danced together, and laughed, and shouted, and cursed, and drank, until long past midnight. Rodney had never witnessed such a scene. He had never heard such filthy and blasphemous language, nor ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... important, we don't care. What we do know is, that we are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there is every chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" is the one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of the Universe is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is not accelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimate questions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centuries ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... army-wagons, the half-dozen yellow ambulances, and the scraggy lot of mules in the pasture-lot across the dusty highway. The stream is close at hand, only a stone's-throw from the picturesque old farmhouse, and the animated talk among the groups of bathers has that peculiarly blasphemous flavor which seems inseparable from the average teamster. That the camp is under military tutelage is apparent from the fact that a tall young man in the loose, ill-fitting blue fatigue-dress of our volunteers, with war-worn belts and a business-like look to the long "Springfield" over ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... us to move up and make room, and then took down his whip and started up. Pochette pirouetted out of the way, and stood holding to the low plank railing while he went on saying things that, properly pronounced, must have been very blasphemous. ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... became more and more apparent. Long before the end, the record was frankly profane, and saddest of all was the evidence that under the stress of annoyance the great love for "my Rebecca" was slowly, but surely, becoming tainted. From simple profanity, Uncle Ebeneezer descended into blasphemous comment, modified at times by ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... adj., profane, desecrate, blaspheme, revile, scoff; swear &c (malediction) 908; commit sacrilege. snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c 989; desecrating &c v.; profane, irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, un-regenerate; hardened, perverted, reprobate. hypocritical &c (false) 544; canting, pietistical^, sanctimonious, unctuous, pharisaical, overrighteous^, righteous over much. bigoted, fanatical; priest-ridden. Adv. under the mask of religion, under the cloak of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... religious ideas that had caused Mrs. Hutchinson and John Wheelwright to be driven into exile, revived anew the old issue and roused the orthodox colonies to deny admission to ranters, heretics, Quakers, and the like. Boston burned their books as "corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous," flung these people into prison with every mark of indignity, branded them as enemies of the established order in church and commonwealth, and tried to prove that they were witches and emissaries of ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... A blasphemous outcry floated up from the launch, while heads protruded from the deck-house openings, the faces white in the slanting glare. "Why don't you ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... nature, they are too weak to maintain the spirit of mutiny for any length of time. Suffused with idiotic tears, they will confess that He who created them rebellious undoubtedly did so but to mock them. They will pronounce these words in despair, and such blasphemous utterances will but add to their misery—for human nature cannot endure blasphemy, and takes her own ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... scrawl from Althorp—where we spent six weeks. That there are 60,000 volumes you know. I read them all, excepting a pamphlet in a patois of the Sanscrit, written by a learned, but, I regret to add, profane Hindoo Sectarian, the blasphemous drift of which was to prove that Bramah's locks ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... daughter, privately and by mutual agreement. Because By us thou art esteemed the most illustrious Of noble husbands; and Sakoontala Virtue herself in human form revealed. Great Brahma hath in equal yoke united A bride unto a husband worthy of her:— Henceforth let none make blasphemous complaint That he is pleased with ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... later still. The collections said to have been destroyed by Caliph Omar when Amru took Alexandria in 640 A.D., on the ground that if they agreed with the Koran they were superfluous and if they contradicted it they were blasphemous, were later ones; but the whole story is discredited by modern scholarship. The world has not ceased mourning for this untold and irreparable loss of the choicest ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan or Dana[:e] and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, as almost ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... of other religious works) with unmitigated severity. They must not be too hasty. Mr. Stephens is a genius, and cannot, therefore, be held accountable for the meaning of his ravings, be they even blasphemous; more than that he is a Syncretic genius, and his associates, by the designation they have chosen, by the terms of their agreement, are bound to cry each other up—to defend one another from the virulent attacks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of architecture and painting, and passed much of his time in Italy and at Rome. When he was at Pisa he preached in a private room in the basement story of the house in Pisa where Shelley was living, and fell under Byron's displeasure for attacking the Satanic school, and denouncing Cain as a blasphemous production. "The parsons," he told Moore (letter, February 20, 1820), "preached at it [Cain] from Kentish Town to Pisa." Hence the apostrophe to Dr. Nott. (See Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, by E.T. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... to the Christian temple, and, treating the priests with violence, tore the image from its shrine and conveyed it to his own place of worship. The necromancer then muttered before it his blasphemous enchantment. But the light of morning no sooner appeared in the mosque, than the official to whose charge the palladium had been committed missed it from its place, and in vain searched every other to ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... article, which concerned her recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as containing errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future events, was characterised as "superstitious and presumptuous divination." The fifth, concerning her dress, declared her to be "blasphemous and contemptuous of God in His Sacraments." The sixth, by which she was accused of loving bloodshed, because she made war against those who did not obey the summons in her letters bearing the name Jhesus Maria, was declared to ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... generally said) to ennoble his actions, gilding his errors with the excellent gold of vigor and rhetoric. Some of them, however, refrain almost entirely from discussing this contention, which gave the Dutch of Batavia much matter for blasphemous talk. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... Joe Weir didn't know, so how can this fellow know? Don't get scared at a shadow." It was the bearded, rough-tongued Burkhardt who spoke, concluding his words with a blasphemous oath. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the Blasphemous and Soul-destroying system advocated and taught by the Redemptorist Fathers of Clapham. By C.H. ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... and put on my nightcap. What should a fellow do with two wives, were he twenty times an Earl? Answer me that, Tony boy, you old reprobate, hypocritical dog, whom God struck out of the book of life, but tormented with the constant wish to be restored to it—you old bishop-burning, blasphemous ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Assure your grace, 'tis superstition To stand so strictly on dispensive faith; And, should we lose the opportunity That God hath given to venge our Christians' death, And scourge their foul blasphemous paganism, As fell to Saul, to Balaam, and the rest, That would not kill and curse at God's command, So surely will the vengeance of the Highest, And jealous anger of his fearful arm, Be pour'd with rigour on our sinful heads, If we ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... and at length, on the 31st of May 1653, a formal condemnation of them was obtained from the Court of Rome. There was no longer any doubt as to the attitude of the Holy See. All the propositions were declared to be distinctly heretical, and the first and the fifth, moreover, to be blasphemous and impious. This result was not reached without much debate and delay. No sooner had Cornet’s propositions appeared than Arnauld assailed them and all who supported them. A congregation of four cardinals and eleven theological assessors had been ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of the objects they fulfilled. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... dog's careless up-bound, The conscience thereto of a ravening hound. Like a stately noble he answers all speakers From a memory full as a Chronicle-maker's, With the suave behaviour of Abbot or Prior, Yet the blasphemous tongue of a horse-thief liar And he wise as false in every grey hair, Violent, garrulous, devil-may-care. When he cries, 'The case is settled and over!' Though you were a saint, I swear ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... The very first object in this valley that appeared upon our canvas was a magnificent work of art. It was a temple—a fane of devotion or of science, which, when consecrated to the Creator, is devotion of the loftiest order, for it exhibits His attributes purely, free from the masquerade attire and blasphemous caricature of controversial creeds, and has the seal and signature of His own hand to sanction its aspirations. It was an equi-angular temple, built of polished sapphire, or of some resplendent blue stone, which, like it, displayed a myriad point of golden light twinkling ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... is stated, Mr. C, in that paragraph,' says the minister, 'that when Mr. Hone failed in business as a bookseller, he was persuaded by me to try the pulpit; which is false, incorrect, unchristian, in a manner blasphemous, and in all respects contemptible. Let us pray.' With which, and in the same breath, I give you my word, he knelt down, as we all did, and began a very miserable jumble of an extemporary prayer. I was really penetrated with sorrow for the family" (he exerted ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... by experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself. 'There was no crime so barbarous, no murder so bloody, no oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that I could readily recite where I learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.' Here, indeed, is ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... great wrath, ordered the architects to be put to death, and the sea to be bound with fetters and scourged. The scourgers faithfully performed their duty, at the same time gratuitously cursing the traitorous and rebellious Hellespont with what Herodotus calls "non-Hellenic and blasphemous terms." ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... ears! 'Twas plain enough that her village peers In the ways of vice were no raw beginners; For whenever she raised the tube to her drum Such sounds were transmitted as only come From the very Brass Band of human sinners! Ribald jest and blasphemous curse (Bunyan never vented worse), With all those weeds, not flowers, of speech Which the Seven Dialecticians teach; Filthy Conjunctions, and Dissolute Nouns, And Particles picked from the kennels of towns, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... the laws by which the universe is upheld, and snatch the secrets of the Creator from the darkness in which, to all other men, it is enveloped. For the last twenty or thirty years these daring and blasphemous notions have flourished in rank luxuriance; and men of station in society, learning, and apparent good sense in all the usual affairs of life, have publicly given in their adhesion, and encouraged the doctrine by their example, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... which my bosom has fuel—I thought I might not again have felt the impulse of earthly passion, and it is thy voice which once more calls me to the expression of human anger! yes, it is thy voice that comest to insult me in my hour of sorrow, with these blasphemous accusations of that church which hath kept the light of Christianity alive from the times of the Apostles ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the old-school Americanism in which he had been bred, the Americanism of individual rights, of respect for the convention of property, had suddenly sprung into flame. He was ready to fight for it, to die for it. The curses he hurled at these people sounded blasphemous in Janet's ears. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the love excitement. This erotic appeal to the senses is the chief reason why the church has generally taken a hostile attitude. For a long while the dance was denounced as irreligious and sinful on account of Salome's blasphemous dancing. Certainly the rigid guardians of morality always look askance on the contact of the sexes in the ballroom. To be sure, the standards are relative. What appeared to one period the climax of immorality may be considered quite natural and harmless ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... a second invitation to proceed upon his favourite topic. He was soon launched, and as the little room filled, his pale and sunken cheeks grew red with excitement, his tongue was unloosed, and he poured out a continuous stream of blasphemous ribaldry such as would have shocked the ears of a revolutionist of the year '89 or of a petroleuse of the nineteenth century. It seemed as though the spring once opened would never dry. His eyes flashed, his fingers writhed convulsively on the table, and his voice rang out, ironical and cutting, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... and philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly, and made friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and Uncle Joe. There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... names besides! And it was to carry this wicked libel I had been sped on this journey, decked with my brave cloak, and commended to that Welsh varlet, who, no doubt, was the author, and counted on me as the tool to help him to disseminate his blasphemous treason! He little knew Humphrey Dexter. Although I had put a queen's officer in the duck-pond; although I had assaulted a mayor; although I had defied a bishop's warrant, and made off on a bishop's horse, I yet was a loyal subject of Her Majesty, and hated schismatics as I hated the Pope ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... of literal application of texts to the living men and women in a congregation is not only in bad taste, but presumptuous and blasphemous. What right has a clergyman to sit in judgment on me, for instance? To give forced constructions to parables and vague generalities in Scripture, about the actual meaning of which divines in all ages have differed; and, pointing his finger to me or to you, say—'The ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... prefect had been unexpectedly expelled the House was soothed with the strains of Peace, Perfect Peace. But those days were over. A new headmaster had come with an ear for music, and the riot of melody that surged from the V. A table seemed to him not only blasphemous, but also inartistic. And so hymn-singing stopped, and only a few prayers ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... soon seen, for a pitiless hardness of heart, and energetic delight in deeds of cruelty that, even in that blood-thirsty company, was equaled by few; with them met all those as yet most notorious for ferocity—Danton and Legendre, the founders of the Cordeliers; Marat, daily, in his obscene and blasphemous newspaper, clamoring for wholesale bloodshed; Santerre, odious as the sanguinary leader of the very first outbreaks of the Revolution; Rotondo, already, as we have seen, detected in attempting to assassinate the queen; and ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... villainies, terribly brazen when detected; he desired everything, envied everything, and wished to seize everything. It was known afterwards, when he no longer could restrain himself, to what an extent he was selfish, debauched, inconsistent, ignorant of everything, passionate, headstrong, blasphemous and mad, and to what an extent he publicly despised his master, the state, and all the world, never hesitating to sacrifice everybody and everything to his credit, his power, his absolute authority, his greatness, his avarice, his fears, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the world." But he continues exonerating and excusing the Emperor: "Let no one tremble on account of this edict which they so shamefully invent and publish in the name of the pious Emperor. And should they not publish their lies in the name of a pious Emperor, when their entire blasphemous, abominable affair was begun and maintained for over six hundred years in the name of God and the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... man of his surroundings. It was entirely free from all bluster or bravado. He seldom spoke himself unless requested to do so. His conversation, strange to say, never bordered either on the vulgar or blasphemous. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded, his word was law; and many are the personal quarrels and disturbances which he has checked among his comrades by his simple announcement that 'This has gone far enough,'—if need be followed by the ominous warning that when persisted in ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... visit his friend Mery, a poet and author of some celebrity; and here he managed to collect materials for a volume which we can recommend to the perusal of the daily increasing class of our countrymen who think that a book, although written in French, may be witty and amusing without being either blasphemous or indecent. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... more than willing to make his ribald drollery the fool's mask from behind which he might aim safely his shafts of ridicule at what he despised and hated, is indeed probable. But in this is supplied to him no sufficient excuse for his obscene and blasphemous pleasantry. Nor yet are the manners of the age an excuse sufficient. Erasmus belonged to the same age, and he disliked the monks not less. But what a contrast, in point of decency, between ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... however, cite such statements [opinions] of men in order that men should believe in their horrible, blasphemous, and cursed traffic in masses for souls in purgatory [or in sacrifices for the dead and oblations], etc. But they will never prove these things from Augustine. Now, when they have abolished the traffic in masses for purgatory, of which Augustine never dreamt, ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... Commandment, the sin of profane swearing, the calling upon God to witness the truth of every second word we utter. It betrays in a man a very weak sense of his own honesty when he cannot let his words stand for themselves. It betokens a blasphemous disrespect for God Himself, represented by that name which is made a convenient tool to further every vulgar end. It is therefore criminal and degrading, and the guilt thereby incurred cannot be palliated by the plea of habit. A sin is none the less a sin ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Christ. But their moral feet would get badly messed that night, mired and slimed by passionate betrayal and blasphemous denial and cowardly flight. The man going to the bath-house was clean on returning home except where his sandalled feet had gathered some soil from the road. These men were cleansed in heart through Christ. But the foot-soilings must be cleansed. These two things ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... at least they would spare the works of God, the most sacred symbols of divine revelation to suffering humanity. But yesterday there occurred in this city a performance which for shameless insolence and blasphemous perversion exceeds anything but the wildest flight of a devil's imagination, and reveals the bosses of the Labor Trust as wanton defilers of everything that decent people ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... The depths and extent of her misery could be measured by the strange sense of a bitter gladness invading the very recesses of her maternal instinct, and replacing what had been the heartfelt sorrow of six years. "It is a mercy I have no child!" she cried, and the cry seemed to herself almost blasphemous. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... After one of these blasphemous performances in a public-house, on the words, "Are you Saved?" he was challenged to go to the Salvation Barracks. He went, and the Captain, who knew him well, at once made for him, to plead for his soul, but ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... "Allein Gott in der Hoeh' sei Ehr," which is serenely beautiful in its clearly flowing harmony. The martyrdom of Stephen follows. The basses in vigorous recitative accuse him of blasphemy, and the people break out in an angry chorus ("Now this Man ceaseth not to utter blasphemous Words"). At its close Stephen sings a brief but beautiful solo ("Men, Brethren, and Fathers!"); and as the calm protest dies away, again the full chorus gives vent to a tumultuous shout of indignation ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Is it blasphemous to describe this God as malicious? You know that laughter is a good index of the character of a man. You like and rejoice with the man whose laugh is free and joyous and full of good will. You fear and dislike him of the sneering laugh. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... very ruins are precious, to be guarded with jealous care. How sacred the spot where lie the parents that tended us, the bosom that shielded our infancy, the hands that carried our weakness everywhither. Men will always deem the desecration of the body or the grave blasphemous. The physical house, standing, is the temple of God; falling, it must forever ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and seemed again to hear his father's voice as it roughly warned him that the woman he loved was a mere plotter, who cared not for him, but was scheming for his fortune and his name. Then he had been furiously indignant and looked upon the words as almost blasphemous, but now he saw that his father was right. How was it that he had not before seen that Diana was flinging herself in his way, and that all her affected openness and simplicity were merely the perfections of art, and that step by step she had led him to the brink of the terrible precipice ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau |
