"Desecration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the weakest perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents. Pegasus harnessed to the Thracian herdsman's plough was no more of a desecration. I fancy the poor dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is PLAY; and I have seen a little "colley" running along, barking, and endeavoring to leap ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... efforts to complete the grand temple upon which they had not ceased to work through all the storms of persecution. This structure, solemnly dedicated to their God, they entered, and there received their anointings and their blessings; then they abandoned it to the desecration and self-condemning outrages of their foes. For the mob's decree had gone forth, that the "Mormons" must leave Illinois. After a few sanguinary encounters, the leaders of the people acceded to the demands of their assailants, and agreed to leave ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... present, providing very minutely for the defence of the town and for the supplies of the garrison. Stories of the Parliamentary troops quartering themselves in churches are sometimes told, with the unfair implication that they alone were guilty of such desecration; for where need was urgent the Royalists took the same course. Here we find orders: 'Captain Haughton ... with forty men shall lie in Townstall church, for the fortifying thereof against the enemy, and that the said captain, his officers and company, shall have their ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... live helpfully and happily together. A selfish marriage, for its merely animal gratifications—a marriage in which strength, health, usefulness, often life itself, are sacrificed to sensuality and lust—is a desecration of a holy institution, and somewhat worse in its consequences than promiscuous profligacy, for the consequences of that may not fall upon one's children ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... once thou hast seen the life of the great city and the strife of faction there," answered his companion, lapsing into the familiar "thou" as he spoke with increased earnestness. "In thy hermit's life thou hast had no knowledge of the robbery, the desecration, the pollution which our Holy Mother Church has undergone from these pestilent heretics, who have thought to denude her of her beauty and her glory, whilst striving to retain such things as jump with their crabbed humours, and may be pared ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,—professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,—to ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... strong measures. He once more speaks strongly and hotly to the nobles, for they had led the van in Sabbath desecration. They liked the freshest fruit and the daintiest dishes for their Sabbath feast, and they had, therefore, encouraged the market-people to go on with their Sabbath trade. Then, as now, there were plenty of people who, for their own self-pleasing, were ready to argue in favour of the loose observance ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... this. He himself also felt a strange and painful sense of guilt. Was not he to a great extent the cause of this, though the unwilling cause? Ah! he thought, remorsefully, can wrong be right? and can any thing justify such a desecration as this both of marriage and of death? At that moment Chetwynde faded away, and to have saved it was as nothing. Willingly would he have given up every thing if he could now have said to this poor child—who thus crouched down, crushed ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of the Psalter. Many of the psalms, especially those in the latter half of the book, bear the unmistakable marks of the Maccabean struggle. In Psalms 74 and 89, for example, there are clear references to the desecration of the temple and the bitter persecutions of Antiochus. They voice the wails of despair which then rose from the lips of many Jews. Many other psalms, as, for example, the one hundred and eighteenth, express that intense love and devotion to the law which was from ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the Count, peremptorily, advancing to the side of the coffin and extending his arm across it, "I cannot permit that indignity—that desecration." ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon. "Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge for the desecration of her temples) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and lack of sanitation. It is the same with the sufferings of women. We used to think it was a dispensation of Providence if a woman were compelled to undergo an operation. Now we know it usually is due to someone's lack of care, to a desecration ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... wounded soul can find balm in sleep. Locked at night into a dark cell has made existence for nearly eighteen months a mere hideous vigil, broken by fitful nightmare. To see only pure faces, to listen to sweet feminine voices that never knew the desecration of blasphemy, to exchange the grim, fetid precincts of a penitentiary for a holy haven such as this, is indeed a glimpse of paradise to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see"—he explained as if ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... He has traced the one untraced ship to its grave beyond the ocean, and cleared the reputation of a harmless people from an undeserved reproach. He has given to the unburied bones of the crews probably the only safeguard against desecration by wandering wild beasts and heedless Esquimaux Which that frozen land allowed. He has brought home for reverent sepulture, in a kindlier soil, the one body which bore transport. Over the rest he has set up monuments to emphasize the undying ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... the altar had been promptly pulled down and its ornaments stowed away to be safe from possible desecration. The altar rail was left, however, and Weldon sat leaning against it, his eyes vaguely turned upwards to the organ in the farther end of the church. From the open floor between, the buzz of many voices and the smoke of many pipes rose to the roof; ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... tough debate regarding our adventure in the forest: the woodman insisting it was the Finn's spell that brought the wolves in such unheard-of numbers, and the peasant maintaining that it was a judgment on our desecration of Christmas-eve. For my own part, I think the long storm, and a great scarcity of food had something to do with it, for tales of the kind were never wanting in our province. The wolf-gathering, however, saved us a journey to Siberia: thanks to old Wenzel. And sometimes yet, when any strange ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... a letter a month, later, Mrs. Graham refers to the gay and fashionable circles to which they were introduced in Quebec, and mentions her visiting the beautiful falls of Montmorency; but mourns over the low state of religion, and the prevailing desecration ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove even ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... and may I not ask, gentlemen, that they shall so plead with you that you will report to the Senate unanimously in favor of the sixteenth amendment, which we ask in order that the women of these United States who shall come after us may be saved the desecration of their homes which we have suffered, and our country may be relieved from the disgrace of refusing representation to that half of its people that men call the better half, because it includes their wives ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... said Hypatia. 'But I will not see the altar polluted by blood. It is the desecration which it has undergone already which has provoked the god to withdraw the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... that his own act had placed him there; that he had friends to whom he might appeal. He would not, he dare not, accept outward help, even outward friendship, however hearty and sincere, at that crisis of his existence. It seemed a desecration of its awfulness to find comfort in anything but the highest and the deepest. And the glimpse of that which he had attained seemed to have passed away from him again,—seemed to be something which, as it had arisen with Argemone, was lost with her also,—one ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... priests, the territory to be occupied by them, also by the Levites, the city and the prince; the religious duties of the prince, and the rite of atonement for the temple. The whole description is a striking counterpart to the earlier vision of the desecration of the temple (viii.). The last section (xlvii., xlviii.) deals with the land which in these latter days is to share the redemption of the people. The barren ground near the Dead Sea is to be made fertile, ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... they had ever dreamed of, they could now do battle with the enemy that held their race in subjugation and with Russia, whose avowed object through generations had been the capture of Constantinople, the possession and perhaps desecration of the holy places of their religion and the dismembering of the last self-governing ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... always at her new conception of him. The tears which she had shed during his music filled her face with a sort of tender charm. It did not occur to her that any words of hers could be other than a desecration of those minutes. ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... greatly fear, all my respect for the foreign office and those who live thereby, would not have saved them from something most unlike a blessing, had not Monsieur Schnetz saved diplomacy from such desecration by saying, that if I could content myself with a plain suit, such as civilians wore, he would do his endeavour ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... and appropriated as a boundary fence for some adjoining fields. After the Restoration, and when his religious views had become sobered and settled, he is said, in an eager desire to atone for the desecration of which he had been guilty, to have purchased the crosses from the person who was then in possession of them, and to have been at the cost of re-erecting them on their present site, from which no sacrilegious hand will, I trust, ever again remove them. It is further said, that Webster's favourite ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... pang, totally unreasonable and totally irresistible, Edward Rider, only a moment before so fantastically extreme in Nettie's defence—in the defence of Nettie's very "image" from all vulgar contact and desecration—strode past Nettie now without word or sign of recognition. She did not see him, as he observed with a throbbing heart; she was talking to young Mr Wentworth with all the haste and eagerness which Dr Rider ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... my three children were uninjured. I found them, cowering and terrified, in an inner chamber. But the infidels had searched every room in their quarters, scattering the contents of chests on the floors. And at sight of this vile desecration the iron of revenge even then entered ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... a rough conical shape, weighing 30 tons, was dug up in the vicinity, and was placed on a base of cut stone masonry, twelve feet square by six feet high. The stone bears the following inscription: "To preserve from desecration the remains of 6000 emigrants who died from ship fever in 1847 and 1848 this monument is erected by workmen in the employment of Messrs. Peto, Brassey, & Betts, engaged in the construction of the Victoria Bridge, 1859." Several addresses ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... and the blaze of the meridian heat still inflamed the air; the kine for shelter, rather than for sustenance, had wandered through some broken arches, and were lying in the shadow of the nave. This desecration of a spot, once sacred, still beautiful and solemn, jarred on the feelings of Egremont. He sighed and turning away, followed a path that after a few paces led him into the cloister garden. This was a considerable quadrangle; once surrounding the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... spirit of the little bride flew to the side of her uncoffined body to protect it from desecration ere her lord had looked upon it. And there she saw the little brother playing ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... the upper stage-boxes Helen and Lady Gower watched the successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to the public—these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered to her liking—was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing him indeed—as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... misusage, misemployment^, misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to crack a nut; catch at a straw. Adj. misused &c v.. Phr. ludere cum ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... have no right to complain, but still I am not better satisfied than the child that has eaten its cake and wants to have it too. And I suppose there are many who would call me wretched, and say that my life, with my sorrowful marriage—which was no marriage, but a desecration of that holy state, and a sin—and my hopeless love, is a broken life. Certainly I feel it so. And yet I don't know. With his nature it seems to me that some wrong-doing was inevitable. Do you think my suffering might be taken ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... small nations," including, of course, Belgium. In further evidence of her humanity she has taken to spraying our soldiers in the West with flaming petrol and squirting boiling pitch over our Russian allies. It is positively a desecration of the word devil to apply it to the Germans whether on land, on or under water, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... him to give them at, least a share of his weapons; but he, as a good Catholic, replied that it was quite true that he had indeed a store of arms, but that they were destined to the triumph and not to the desecration of religion, and that he would only give them up with his life. With these words, he dismissed the envoys, barring his doors ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... might philander, kitchen wenches and such-like common flesh might philander, but never Ursula of the grey eyes, Ursula of the tender, firm mouth. Ursula philander? Never! never! The thought was desecration. What was it Louis had said? All women are the same under the skin. It was a cynic's lie, and Louis had never known Ursula ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... evidently encouraged by her father's humour, made a mouth, and droned in a sing-song voice: "'What doth every sin deserve? Every sin deserveth God's wrath and curse, both in this life and that which is to come.'" Such a desecration of the Westminster Assembly of Divines' "Shorter Catechism" would doubtless have produced further and severer reproof from Mrs. Meredith, but the censure was prevented by the clump of heavy boots, followed by the entrance ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... we visited another hospital; that known as the Hospital de Jess—hallowed ground; for here the mortal remains of Cortes were deposited. And, though rescued from desecration by a distinguished individual, during a popular tumult, so that they no longer repose in the sanctuary of the chapel, there still exists, enshrined here, that over which time and revolutions have no ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... himself obliged to lend money for the support of the poor. If he were not now to return to his home, people would say that he had run away in order to evade his creditors, and such talk concerning a man of piety would have been desecration of the Divine Name. So he said to Moses: "There are people who have a fatherland, but no property there; there are also property-holders who have no family; but I have a fatherland, and have property there as well as a family; hence I desire to return to my fatherland, my property, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed mouldings and figures—irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art—have been crushed; great wall spaces ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn. The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene. O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... were kept secret. The body was temporarily buried, and after some time exhumed; the bones were cleaned, and hidden in some cave or cleft in the rocks. As bones were used by enemies to make implements, it was a point to keep these depositories secret, to prevent such desecration.) Their Custom of mourning for a friend or relation is by cutting and Scarifying their bodys, particularly their Arms and breasts, in such a manner that the Scars remain indelible, and, I believe, have some signification ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... you suppose I'm thinking of that, and not of the desecration, the outrage, the horror? But who are they? Is ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... corridor he could see the interior of the room and all that went on there during the next few moments. A candle burned on the bureau, exposing the feminine neatness and delicacy of the furnishings. The presence of the three men was a desecration; what they were about to do, an unforgivable ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... most assiduously gleaned the pages of history, and massed the grains of truth; had studied maps of the city and descriptions of travellers, that she might thoroughly understand the topography of the scene of the great desecration. So fearful was she of committing some anachronism, or of soaring on the wings of fancy beyond the realm of well-authenticated facts, that she searched the ancient records to ascertain whether on that night in May, 415 ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of cheerfulness, for her husband's sake; rejoiced that the trees had been spared, that the family burial-place had escaped desecration, and talked gayly of the pleasure of repairing damages, and making improvements till Ion should not have a rival for beauty the ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... come into the fold than from the misinterpretation of any other text in the sacred scriptures. If any civilized power in the world to-day should send an expeditionary force into a heathen country, which should signalize its arrival therein by the desecration of its temples and the destruction of its idols, the commander would be recalled at once. We have learned other methods, methods of persuasion, of reason, of love. The age of Cortes knew nothing of these methods, and he was only following out the common practice when he smashed ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... size," said his sister, "and he left a good many clothes, which are most of them very good and carefully packed away, so that I am sure there is not a moth-hole in any one of them. I have several times thought, Asaph, that I might give you some of his clothes; but it did seem to me a desecration to have the clothes of such a man, who was so particular and nice, filled and saturated with horrible tobacco-smoke, which he detested. But now you are getting to be so awful shabby, I do not see how I can ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... men, with several others, drew up a remonstrance against "the desecration by officious restoration, and the tearing down of time-mellowed structures to make room for the unsightly brick piles of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... It would be unpardonable desecration to enter the chamber of Father Beret's soul and look upon his sacred and secret trouble; nor must we even speculate as to its particulars. The good old man writhed and wrestled before the cross for a long time, until at last he ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... fact Rome has never been so much Rome, never expressed its full meaning so completely, as nowadays. This change and desecration, this inroad of modernness, merely completes its eternity. Goethe has an epigram of a Chinese he met here; but a Chinese of the eighteenth century completed Rome less than an American of the nineteenth. Not only ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... mean condition, to the dishonor of God, the scandall of our profession, the coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie." Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed "by several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Lilian would hear that I had told a string of falsehoods to her uncle over the dead body of their idolised Bingo—an act, no doubt, of abominable desecration, of unspeakable profanity, in ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... Christ-like man. I have very strong convictions, you see, on the subject of the sanctity and responsibilities of marriage. There are certain conditions which I hold to be essential on both sides. I hold also that human beings are sacred and capable of deep desecration, and that marriage, their closest bond, is sacred too, the holiest relationship in life, and one which should only be entered upon with the greatest care, and in the most reverent spirit. I see no reason why marriage should be a lottery. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... which the spirit and measures of states and their regulators bear upon the most momentous interests, or it will have no right to be brought forward as the supreme law for the final award on those proceedings and those men. [Footnote: A censure on this alleged desecration of religious topics, which had been pronounced on the Essay (first edit.) by a Review making no small pretensions both religious and literary, was the immediate cause that prompted these observations. But they were made with a general reference to a hypocritical cant much in vogue ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... cad. I can't understand your inviting him. His very look is an insult, his touch a desecration. I don't like the way he ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... a mite surprised!" replied Cornelia, with a depth of meaning which her hearers failed to fathom. They imagined that she was humbly appreciative of her own good fortune in visiting a neighbourhood as yet preserved from the desecration of the American tourists, whereas she was mentally reviewing the sleepy shops where the assistants took a solid five minutes to procure twopence change, the broken-down flies which crawled to and from the station; the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... up, to bring away. Some of the crew were examining the graves to see whether they contained any of our missing countrymen. Seeing this, Kalli ran up to the officer, and, with tears and entreaties, as well as he could make himself understood, begged him and the men to desist from the work of desecration. ...
— Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian - A Memoir • Thomas Boyles Murray
... young, applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom,—even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone,—she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... performance sensibly lessened the satisfaction I felt at this my most successful work." This oratorio was not given in England till 1839, at the Norwich festival, Spohr being present to conduct it. The zealous and narrow-minded clergy of the day preached bitterly against it as a desecration, and one fierce bigot hurled his diatribes against the composer, when the latter was present in the cathedral. A journal of the day describes the scene: "We now see the fanatical zealot in the pulpit, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... these elements was represented, to my wonder and delight, by my dear Dante, who stood on the steps of the Portinari palace with a great sword in his hand. So standing, he looked like some guardian angel of the place, appointed to protect it from desecration. His face was very calm, and he kept his gaze ever fixed most steadily upon Simone of the Bardi, and he seemed eager for the conflict that must surely be. Below him were gathered many of his friends, many of the Reds, many of the fellowship of the Company of Death, that had fought and beaten ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... conscience of my Scotch forebears, and though my training in college and in my office has covered my conscience with a layer of office dust it is still there. Of course (and obviously) you are not touched by the words and deeds of the women you represent, but I somehow feel that it is a desecration of your face and voice to put them to such uses. That is the reason I dreaded to go back and see you to-night. If you were seeking praise of your own proper self, the sincerity of this compliment is unquestionable. I ought to say, 'I hope my words to-night did not disturb you,' but I will ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the custom, formerly, to hold all meetings for the transaction of public business in the sanctuary. None, not even the most piously fastidious parson or deacon, ever thought of being shocked at what in these degenerate times would seem like a gross desecration of the house of God. There were fewer Pharisees in Belfield a hundred years ago than now. To the Puritans, and to all their descendants, until of late, their places of worship were not churches, but meeting-houses merely; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... such desecration was impossible. The scene prolonged itself to midnight. On the morrow, with the exception of Mrs. Denyer's resolve to subdue Marsh, all was forgotten, and the Denyer family pursued their old course, putting off decided action until there should come ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... St. John, meantime, affected to be much scandalized at what they deemed a desecration of holy ground, and claimed the custody of the place. In 1340, in consideration of a hundred golden guineas contributed toward the armament against France, the king made over the Temple to the Hospitallers. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... startling to learn that here was the original Oro, who was still worshipped by the Orofenans, although of his actual existence they had known nothing for uncounted time. Also I was glad to learn that he was her father and not her old husband, for to me that would have been horrible, a desecration too deep for words. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Siddartha, the Bodhisattwa, in his second question, his probing had not been so deep, nor the effect so quick and great; but Mahomet, the camel-driver! Centuries of feud, hate, crimination, and wars—rapine, battles, sieges, massacres, humiliations, lopping of territory, treaties broken, desecration of churches, spoliation of altars, were evoked by ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... would, before considering such desecration of every sacred memory, have preferred to stuff with paper the crannies of that wind-rattled window and to turn on the gas. In comparison this ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... lady with the back, seeing that the desecration of the article had been completed, plucked up heart of courage and put in her little request; "I think I might have a needle-case out of it," said she, "just as a suvneer of the poor general"—and a long fragment ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... published December 18; but he had already exerted himself much in this cause, as convener of the Committee of Presbytery on Sabbath Observance, and had written his well-known letter to one of the chief defenders of the Sabbath desecration. He continued unceasingly to use every effort in this holy cause. And is it not worth the prayers and self-denying efforts of every believing man? Is not that day set apart as a season wherein the Lord desires the refreshing ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... stroke of irony) as an apostle of education. Projects are on foot for erecting his statue in positions of honour. Yet we see still in our own neighbourhood, as well as elsewhere, traces of the almost universal desecration of our holy places perpetrated by the fanaticism which he fostered and guided. Was Henry VIII. an Iconoclast, in shattering the monasteries? No less was the crime of Puritanism in dismantling our churches and stripping them ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... person's soul. Indeed, as she so often said to me, with a kind of plaintiveness which should have softened my declamatory ardour but did not, she did not like speaking of such matters at all; she regarded it as a kind of desecration. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... and, in fact, her sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming by the edge of a glacier. She felt that the human love she brought there and sought to gratify was pure and unselfish, and that in no sense could it be a desecration of the place and hour. To a nature like hers, her half-pitying love for one so unfortunate as Vinton Arnold was almost as sacred as her faith, and therefore she had no scruple ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... eyes upon the young man to see what effect this coarse and irreverent allusion to his father would have. A slight tinge of shame was in his face; but I saw that he had not sufficient moral courage to resent the shameful desecration of a parent's name. How should he, when he was himself the first to ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... meeting stands a crucifix. This large and dignified Calvaire, though bearing the nicks of bullets and faded by weather, still sheds a sorrowful beauty that is perhaps the more impressive because of these marks of desecration. It forms the center of the tiny village, whose houses cluster close to the mourning image and then straggle thinly along the three roads. Not even the war which swept over in all its ferocity has robbed Vauchelles of its winding charm. Many houses ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... his first chill of horror at the act itself, Henry Montagu realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair that the boy had left. But again he mastered his frightened mind and thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... lay dell after dell down into the cradle of the valley. It was a poetic corner of England, and I thought it almost unbelievable that London was only some twenty miles behind. A fit place this for elves and fairies to survive, a spot in which the presence of a modern automobile seemed a desecration. Higher we mounted and higher, the engine running strongly and smoothly; then, presently, we were out upon a narrow open road with the crescent of the hills sweeping away on the right and dense woods dipping valleyward to the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... of tea and flour, we pushed on. About midday on the fourth day we halted at the Mission of the White Dog, a spot which some more than heathen missionary had named Islington in a moment of virtuous cockneyism. What could have tempted him to commit this act of desecration ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... paintings, but on Christian gems, vases, and lamps. Speaking with peculiar distinctness to all who were acquainted with the Gospels, it was at the same time a figure that could be used without exciting suspicion among the heathen, and one which was not exposed to desecration or insult from them; and under emblems of this kind, whose inner meaning was hidden to all but themselves, the first Christians were often forced to conceal the expression of their faith. This figure recalled to them many of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... leaning on the arm of her future husband, accompanied her parents down into the comfortable kitchen, where, by a huge fire, stood the veritable wicker chair, familiar to her eyes from infancy, rickety as ever, but surviving its desecration by the boys at the auction; and looking round, she saw standing the whole solid old oaken furniture, coffers, dressers, &c., even to the same bright brazen skillets, pewter dishes, and sundries—the pride of Mistress Bevan's heart, the splendour of better ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... drawing-room had suffered conspicuous change. For, on Richard moving down-stairs to his old quarters in the southwestern wing of the house, Lady Calmady had judged it an act of love, rather than of desecration, to restore this long-disused apartment to its former employment. Adjoining the dining-room,—connecting this last with the billiard-room, summer-parlour, and garden-hall,—this room was convenient to assemble in before, and sit in for a while after, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... whether it has achieved its purpose to the full; I am content to leave you to judge so great a matter. It is your turn; trample under foot the ashes of the murderer! Disdain the dust of him who slew his brother, and defiled his brother's queen with infamous desecration, who outraged his sovereign and treasonably assailed his majesty, who brought the sharpest tyranny upon you, stole your freedom, and crowned fratricide with incest. I have been the agent of this just vengeance; I have burned for this righteous retribution; uphold me with a high-born spirit; pay me ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... misfortune could not be averted from Israel, but the destruction of the Temple, she continued consolingly, would not happen until after the death of Josiah. (117) In view of the imminent destruction of the Temple, Josiah hid the holy Ark and all its appurtenances, in order to guard them against desecration at the hands ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Veteran' (Miss G.) had wished to play the Part as it was acted: and furthermore comes Mr. Halliday, who somehow manages and adapts at D. L., to assert that the Veteran not only wished to enact the Desecration, but did enact it for many nights when Miss Wallis was indisposed. Then comes Isabel forward again—but I really forget what she said. I never saw her but once—in the Duchess of Malfi—very well: better, I dare say, than anybody now; ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... say of the endless evils that accompanied and followed the march of her armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities, the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death. Such were the calamities ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... continue their indictment, and, pointing out the crises of the hour, paint in dismal hues a picture of the problems never to be solved except by shot and shell. Her skeptics, blinded by thought of the errors of the past, may prophesy the desecration of her honor and the disappointing failure of her hopes. The press may pen a graphic story of the military spirit of the age, and frowning patriarchs relate the deeds of golden days gone by. But underneath this cloud that ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... actions as easily as he stamps value on the coin of his realm? He himself is not raised above the laws of honor, although he may stifle its whispers with gold—and shroud his infamy in robes of ermine! But enough of this, lady!—it is too late now to talk of blasted prospects—or of the desecration of ancestry—or of that nice sense of honor—girded on with my sword—or of the world's opinion. All these I am ready to trample under foot as soon as you have proved to me that the reward is not inferior ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mother's displeasure, but just then the girl's heart was hardened against her, in consequence of her persistency in dramatizing a record which the daughter deemed too mournfully solemn and sacred for the desecration of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... or oil nor any less libation [Ant. 3. Hallowed, nor made sweet with humbler perfume's breath; Not with only these redeemed from desecration, But with blood and spirit of life poured forth to death; Blood unspotted, spirit unsullied, life devoted, Sister too supreme to make the bride's hope good, Daughter too divine as woman to be noted, Spouse of only death in mateless maidenhood. ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... day was over, I went down into the dock shed. My father's old place was at peace for a time, the desecration done with. She was empty, dark and silent. In her long, inward-sloping walls the eight wide sliding doors were closed. Only through the dusty skylights here and there fell great masses of soft light. Big bunches of canvas hung from ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... Russia. Yet, even after the French had passed the frontier, Alexander still protested that his personal sentiments towards the emperor were unaltered; "but,'' he added, "God Himself cannot undo the past.'' It was the occupation of Moscow and the desecration of the Kremlin, the sacred centre of Holy Russia, that changed his sentiment for Napoleon into passionate hatred. In vain the French emperor, within eight days of his entry into Moscow, wrote to the tsar ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Gorgett's sleuth-hound, the man he sent to me this afternoon, for one; the policeman on the beat that he'd stopped for a chat in front of the house, for another; a maid in the hall behind us, the policeman's sweetheart she is, for another! Oh!" he cried, "the desecration! That one caress, one that I'd thought a sacred secret between us forever—and in plain sight of those three hideous vulgarians, all belonging to my enemy, Gorgett! Ah, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... to stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribald havoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see, stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wires that connect the trenches at the foot of the street with headquarters and with ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... I was in an agony over this desecration, which I was so powerless to prevent. But as I was thanking my stars that the matter had blown over with Bolingbroke's rejection, there ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of Italian patriots, the sublimest in our eyes is that of the defence of Rome. No writer of genius has yet been inspired to narrate the heroic deeds enacted, the pain, privation, anguish, borne joyfully to save "that city of the Italian soul" from desecration by the foreigner. Mazzini's beloved disciple, Mameli, the soldier-poet, died with the flower of the student youth; the survivors, exiled, dispersed, heartbroken, or intent only on preparing for the next ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... We are going to trust our customers, and keep our accounts without pen or ink. We have invented a most ingenious system, which gives us far more work than writing, but we have determined to spare ourselves no trouble to keep the Sabbath from unnecessary desecration.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the Grand Seignior. Patrick Dooley, Secretary, was in his place on the right of the Grand Seignior. The meeting was large, and a more desperate looking collection of men have rarely assembled in a convention in our city. Such desecration of the evening of the Sabbath has never before been witnessed here. After the opening of the meeting, one of the members took early occasion to remark substantially, that it must have been noticed by all ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... malediction.[63] The indignation also that was felt by the people at large against the immorality of the age was proved by their ascribing this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavored to hasten their reconciliation with the irritated and at that time very degenerate people by exorcisms, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... yet suspecting much with haunting vagueness, it seemed a horrible desecration to me that the beautiful, gentle girl should be given up to Wildred. I had little enough hope for myself with her, whatever might betide, for even had it been possible, under happier circumstances, that she could have learned to care for me, she and her friends would be ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown past that. Surely her body was sacred from ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... stripped the armour from his dead foe, and would have dragged the body into the city had not Menelaus and Ajax the Greater rushed forward, and after a long and fierce struggle succeeded in rescuing it from desecration. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... which has given vogue to the common story is wholly untrue." He further adds: "Some fanatic soldier may, indeed, according to the story, have broken off the head of Queen Elizabeth, mistaking her for our Lady. But no general mutilation or desecration took place at this time. And at Exeter, one form of mutilation, which specially affected the west front, was not the work of enemies but of devotees. For ages the country folk who came into the city loved to carry home a Peter ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... contemplate calmly. Some day Sara would marry—a man who was her equal, who sat at her father's table as a guest. In spite of himself, Jeffrey's heart filled with hot rebellion at the thought; it was like a desecration ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... forecastle lounged about smoking and drinking 'mate' whilst they played at cards. Someone reminded him it was not fitting that God's Body should thus be seen so near to sailors, and therefore the Bishop, according to the custom of the Church in cases of accident or desecration, consumed the offended wafer, and peace descended ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... in the Wadi Maghara, which had been lately very much damaged by the operations of the turquoise-miners. It seems almost incredible that ignorance and vandalism should still be so rampant in the twentieth century that the most important historical monuments are not safe from desecration in order to obtain a few turquoises, but it is so. Prof. Petrie's expedition did not start a day too soon, and at the suggestion of Sir William Garstin, the adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, the majority of the inscriptions have been removed to the Cairo Museum for safety and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... manuscripts known to have belonged to this library were found—so the catalogue states—as remote as in a grocer's shop in Nova Scotia. It would be difficult to conjecture which would have caused the greater grief to Mr. Prince,—the desecration of the church, whose construction had been a daily delight, and where he had earnestly labored for so many years, or the sacrifice of a portion of the results of the patient toil of a lifetime. This material, however, which was consigned ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... uncanny creatures, point to the former nature and ancestral worship of a people cut off from the advancing civilisation of their time. Luckily for the archaeologist, superstitious beliefs and folk-lore tales have preserved the graves of the Stone Age inhabitants of the country from desecration. As in Norway so in the Isle of Man, and in the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... not move. To have done so meant the desecration of a picture so delicate that a breath upon its surface would have swept it forever from the vision. How long he revelled in the glory of the picture he knew not, for it was as if he looked from a dream. At last he saw her look down upon the roses, lift them slowly and drop ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... already loves it, any comments on the poem may at first thought seem like desecration, but, on the other hand, there is so much more in the Elegy than appears at first glance that it is worth while to read it in the light of another's eyes. Not a few persons find some enjoyment in reading, but fall far short of the highest pleasure because of their failure ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... compelled to render compensation, should be withdrawn from his grave. I cannot tell you how I have blushed for the living, and kindled with resentment on behalf of the dead, when contemplating the merciless desecration of what may truly be called the sacredness of ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... fought. We are disgusted and shocked at reading Croly's account of the scandalous conduct of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, with regard to the emoluments they extort from their miserable flocks, and at the systematic desecration of holy things which they countenance and practise; but when the difference is considered between their spiritual condition and their moral composition as a class, the conduct of the clergy here appears just as revolting. The Irish clergy are generally sprung from the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... should be read that day six months; but the third reading was carried by one hundred and four against fifty-four. In the lords the second reading encountered no opposition, objections to it being reserved for the committee. In the committee the Bishop of Exeter moved, in order to avoid the desecration of the marriage contract when the ceremony was not performed in church, that the parties should make the following declaration:—"In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, I, M., do take thee, N., to be my wedded wife, according ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... what told me. I understood you through her, and through your dealings with her. There she was—the woman you adored and longed to save; and you would not lift a finger to make her yours by means which would have seemed—I see it now—a desecration of your feeling for each other." She paused, as if to find the exact words for meanings she had never before had occasion to formulate. "It came to me first—a light on your attitude—when I found you had never breathed to her a word of our talk together. ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... experts to scour the Italian cities; and soon untold treasures of art, letters, and science began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; while Monge and Berthollet ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... stillness of the bleak foothills came the faint echoes of a coyote's shrill "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... experience? Suppose that, after all, he had not really passed through the door of death, like these others, but was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offence? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Four Western Powers had secretly met in London and agreed to deprive the sovereign of the Nile of his conquests, and fling him again at the foot of the throne, which he had treated as a plaything. Mehemet Ali haughtily protested against the desecration of his rights, and France, his faithful ally, with hand on sword-hilt, threatened to draw it against whosoever should touch Egypt. England and Austria covered the Syrian sea-coast with their sails and guns. Beyrut, Latakia, Tortosa, Tripoli, Saida, Tyre, St. Jean d'Acre were bombarded and fell. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... not talk about him, but she thought the more. And—though had he known it, the pelf-despising Mr. Vanbrugh would never have forgiven such a desecration of Art—it was not her lightest spur in the attainment of excellence, to feel that as soon as her pictures were good enough to sell, she might earn money enough to discharge the claim of this harsh creditor, whose very name sent a pang ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... to credit the Reformation or the Civil War with most church desecration and destruction, but this window was ruthlessly destroyed by an order of the Chapter in 1679, nearly thirty years after the Civil War was ended, and nearly 140 years after the dissolution of the monastery. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... religious character the insurrection assumed the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and numbered among its adherents all who had not embraced the new doctrines in Yorkshire and Lancashire. That such an outbreak should occur on the suppression of the monasteries, was not marvellous. The desecration and spoliation of so many sacred structures—the destruction of shrines and images long regarded with veneration—the ejection of so many ecclesiastics, renowned for hospitality and revered for piety and learning—the violence and rapacity of the commissioners ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... like a gold-digger's washing-pan, unless the lame leg is propped up with an old shoe, or a stray newspaper fifty times folded, or a magazine of due thickness (I am using 'Harper's Magazine' at this moment, which is somewhat a desecration, as it is too good to be trampled under foot, even the foot of a table), or a coal cinder, or a towel. Well, it is but for a moment and so ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... Roads, gives much interesting information upon the subject of compensation for land and buying off opposition to railway schemes. He says:—"One noble lord had an estate near a proposed line of railway, and on this estate was a beautiful mansion. Naturally averse to the desecration of his home and its neighbourhood, he gave his most uncompromising opposition to the Bill, and found, in the Committee of both Houses, sympathizing listeners. Little did it aid the projectors that they urged that the line did not pass within six ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Ordnance Survey, and successively Commanding R.E. in Malta and Scotland. He was Engineer to Sir C. Fellows' Expedition, which gave the nation the Lycian Marbles, and while Commanding R.E. in Edinburgh, was largely instrumental in rescuing St. Margaret's Chapel in the Castle from desecration and oblivion. He was a thorough Scot, and never willingly tolerated the designation N.B. on even a letter. He had cultivated tastes, and under a somewhat austere exterior he had a most tender heart. When already past sixty, he made a singularly happy marriage ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... big fingers trembled as he pulled them away, as though to avoid further desecration of ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen—all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live in such an unfinished land—Hilda, whom I imagined as moving by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and immemorial oaks—Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls—all ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... eternal life." [489:2] This misconception of the ordinance was the fruitful source of superstition. The mere elements began to be regarded with awful reverence; the loss of a particle of the bread, or of a drop of the wine, was considered a tremendous desecration; and it was probably the growth of such feelings which initiated the custom of standing at the time of participation. But still there were fathers who were not carried away with the delusion, and who knew that the disposition of the worshipper was of far more consequence than the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... as he held her hand, and at that moment the kiss which Luce had taken burned like fire upon his lips. He shrank from touching the pure lips of the girl he loved while the other woman's kiss still lingered on his consciousness. It would be desecration. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... "Thou knowest, Lord," that unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing which Dr. Crotch, one of the "English school," living in an age less sensitive even than this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great that it would be a desecration to set the words again. Later composers set the words again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks down upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's Ninth upon every other symphony, or the finale ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... historical groups in the costume of the period instead of in the vestments of the early Romans, as had been the custom. This innovation was made by him in his picture of the death of General Wolfe, and created no little disturbance. His friends, including Reynolds, protested against such a desecration of tradition; even the King questioned him, and West replied that the painter should be bound by truth as well as the historian, and to represent a group of English soldiers in the year 1758 as dressed ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... tread its corridors and offer up the midnight mass in its small chapel. It is now occupied by ladies—les Dames du Calvaire, as they are called. If the monks were to arise from their little graveyard, would they rush back horrified and affrighted at such desecration? and if the walls had voices, would they, too, be ungallant enough to cry "To such base uses do we come?" The ancient convent of the Ursulines has been turned into a Penitentiary, thus in a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... that he was leaving on the next day for Tippecanoe. Philip Alston barely glanced at the white face lying against the pillow. He was disturbed and even shocked to see it there. He felt this stranger's presence in her chamber to be a desecration. And then the sight of suffering always made him uncomfortable. He wondered how she could endure it. The repulsion which the average man feels for any affliction of mind, body, or estate was so intensified ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Rene Caillard, who, with the others, had been standing silently, said abruptly. "This is too painful; I feel suffocated to think that such a humiliation should fall on Paris. Surely all civilized Europe will rise and cry out against this desecration." He turned and with his comrades walked back towards the gate. Cuthbert followed ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... respect has been shown to the tombs of worthies of bygone times, with the recent recollection also of what has been so well carried out by MR. MARKLAND in regard to the grave of Bishop Ken, shall we not make an effort to preserve from desecration and oblivion the resting-place of one so eminent as Leighton for his learning and piety, so worthy to be held in honoured remembrance for his high principles and his consistent ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. "How ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... went into the war as a robber, the poilu as a crusader determined to save the sacred and holy things of the world from desecration and destruction, the Tommy as a player in a great game, and the Yank as a policeman whose job it was ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... in high ecclesiastical places. Let those wince who feel a sense of their own backslidings. When the Bishop had ended, I determined to walk once through the bazaar just to make sure that there were no lotteries nor games of chance—a desecration of our MITES now too, too frequent. As I was returning through the throng, alas! of PLEASURE-SEEKERS, and wishing that I might scourge them out of the schoolroom, Mr. Crawley met me, in company with a lady who desired, he said, to be presented ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... the steps of the saints, the goal of the earthly pilgrim, the seat of the throne of the Vicar of God. No Jew saw the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not with keener anguish than the devout sons of the Church heard of the desecration of Rome. If a Roman Catholic and an imperialist could term it the just judgment of God, heretics and schismatics, preparing to burst the bonds of Rome and "deny obedience to the said See," saw in it the fulfilment of the woes pronounced by St. John the Divine on the Rome of Nero, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... not blind to this change; he did not see who had cast the first veil of darkness over the pure light that had shone so freely for him; and while he silently regretted what he deemed the desecration of the spotless image he had loved, nothing whispered that it was his own Shadow brooding above the true heart that had toiled so faithfully and long ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... sacred hearth: she will defend Her gods from desecration of the vile. Fierce, like a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... attention among virtuosos.——The English, undeterred by the indignation which has been poured out upon Lord Elgin by BYRON and others for rifling Athens of its antiquities for display at home, are practicing the same desecration in regard to the treasures discovered in Nineveh by Mr. Layard. It is announced that the Great Bull and upwards of 100 tons of sculpture excavated by him, may be expected in England in September for the British Museum. The French ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... respect for the dead, and as a place of resort for those pilgrims who may come to pay him tribute. It is this sentiment which dots our graveyards with memorial tablets and more ambitious sculptures, and which still preserves so many of our closed churchyards from desecration, and our {1a} ancient tombs from the molestation of careless, ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, "Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don't let it ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... be hoped, few people who read such letters (unless they are of such a date that Time has exercised his strange power of resanctifying desecration and making private property public) without an unpleasant consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is another class which is not exposed to any such disagreeable liability: and that is the very large proportion of love-letters ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... the sight, and prevents it from taking in the whole fall at once. This unsightly object has stood where it now stands since the day of creation, and will probably remain there to the day of judgment. It would be a desecration of nature to remove it by art, but no one could regret if nature in one of her floods were ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... in Germany, where the newspapers and the composers, conductors, and others who were strongly affiliated with Bayreuth manifested a disposition to hold the American people as a whole responsible, not only for a desecration of something more than sacrosanct, but of robbery also. The mildest term applied to Mr. Conried's act, which I am far from defending, was that it was "legalized theft." It was not that, because in civilized lands thievery cannot be made ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... it could be and thought it was possibly a Y.M.C.A. hut. Imagine my surprise on closer inspection to see painted over the door in large black letters "Ypriana Hotel"! It had been put up by an enterprising Belge. Somehow it seemed a desecration to see this cheap little building on that ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... desecrated and destroyed the tombs of warriors and prelates, obliterated ancient paintings; flung stained glass by cart loads into the city ditch; and razed to the ground the beautiful old campanile which stood opposite the north porch." That such desecration should be permitted in a civilized country only a century ago indeed ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... twist of feeling, hardly remembered Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in sharing it, and ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... faith shamelessly broken, the freedom of a small people trodden in the dust, the wanton invasion of Belgium and then of France by hordes who leave behind them at every stage of their progress a dismal trail of savagery, of devastation, and of desecration worthy of the blackest annals in the history of barbarism. [Cheers.] That was four weeks ago. The war has now lasted for sixty days, and every one of those days has added to the picture its share of sombre and repulsive traits. We now see clearly written down in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... receive all fines imposed in cases within ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the provosts may hereafter hold court just as the bishops have done hitherto, and shall render an account of their doings to the king. (10) For desecration of holy days no penalty is to be imposed on those who have been tilling the ground, or fishing, or catching birds, but persons discovered hunting or quarrelling shall be fined. (11) Priests shall be subject ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson |
