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Polity   Listen
noun
Polity  n.  (pl. polities)  
1.
The form or constitution of the civil government of a nation or state; the framework or organization by which the various departments of government are combined into a systematic whole.
2.
Hence: The form or constitution by which any institution is organized; the recognized principles which lie at the foundation of any human institution. "Nor is possible that any form of polity, much less polity ecclesiastical, should be good, unless God himself be author of it."
3.
Policy; art; management. (Obs.)
Synonyms: Policy. Polity, Policy. These two words were originally the same. Polity is now confined to the structure of a government; as, civil or ecclesiastical polity; while policy is applied to the scheme of management of public affairs with reference to some aim or result; as, foreign or domestic policy. Policy has the further sense of skillful or cunning management.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Polity" Quotes from Famous Books



... increasingly famous by his pleadings in court on behalf of women who with dauntless courage and at the cost of much bodily pain and even at the risk of death had forcibly called attention to this grave defect in the British polity, the withholding of the ordinary rights of tax-paying citizens ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... remember that our Lord's parables and teachings mainly concerned contemporary events and people. I mean, for instance, that in his great prophecy of judgment he simply was speaking of the destruction of the Jewish polity and nation. The principles involved apply through all time, but He did not apply them except to the Jewish nation. He was speaking then, not of 'the end of the world, (as is wrongly translated), but of 'the end of the age'. (Every age is wound up with a judgment. French Revolutions, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... so great that it may be held to counterbalance many defects. Mill decides in favour of democracy mainly on the ground that 'it promotes a better and higher form of national character than any other polity,' since government by authority stunts the intellect, narrows the sympathies, and destroys the power of initiative. 'The perfect commonwealth,' says Mr. Zimmern,' is a society of free men and women, each at once ruling and being ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... spiritual fervor, they never lost sight of the main chance, combining a shrewd practicality with a wealth of devotion. It has been happily said of them that they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on. In the polity of these men religion and education went hand in hand; and they habitually settled together in communities in order that they might have teachers and preachers of their ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... but also by experience, which had discovered and proved how difficult and even impossible was the conservation of those islands, unless the cost were very greatly in excess of the profit—although, in this matter, one should first decide whether [questions of] honor and polity counted for anything. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various

... citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore, an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in the polity—a grand word that!—of national councils. He wrote frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters were sometimes printed; occasionally—oh, joy!—they were answered by others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... the time were given by Mr. Gladstone, on every Thursday morning in the Session; when, while we ate broiled salmon and drank coffee, our host discoursed to an admiring circle about the colour-sense in Homer, or the polity of the ancient Hittites. Around the table were gathered Lions and Lionesses of various breeds and sizes, who, if I remember aright, did not get quite as much opportunity for roaring as they would have liked; for, when Mr. Gladstone had started on a congenial theme, it was difficult to get ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... College will be developing, as years bring experience and wider eye-range, till we become truly able to teach the English woman of the nineteenth century to bear her part in an era, which, as I believe, more and more bids fair to eclipse, in faith and in art, in science and in polity, any and every period of glory which Christendom has ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... hath in his heart a purpose, he carrieth in mind the whole form which his work should have; there wanteth not him skill and desire to bring his labour to the best effect, only the matter, which he hath to work on is unframeable." Hooker's Eccl. Polity, b. 5. 9. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... the cause and such the conduct of this two months' war; but a war, nevertheless, it was, waged by a political insurrection on behalf of a political object. It is very true that the Insurgents aimed at no form of polity known to the world, and that it would have been impossible to content them by any measure of civil freedom or political rights. Their chief and most peremptory demand was, not for any rights of their own, but for the suppression of the ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... preserve, under new conditions, the austere standard of morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. The creed which they professed endowed them with a capacity for self-government, and taught them the arts of administration and the polity of free States. The English colonies, as they throve and extended, were not without their faults. The faith which their founders professed was a gloomy faith, and left its mark in gloom upon the characters of the people and the tenor ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... moral stature of their illustrious ancestry; that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change,—as if the fair hair and skin of those ancestral non Angli sed angeli should crisp into wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can hold ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... controul, And shout for rights, with rapine in their soul! Who can, with patience, for a moment see The medley mass of pride and misery, Of whips and charters, manacles and rights, Of slaving blacks, and democratic whites, Of all the pyebald polity that reigns In free confusion o'er Columbia's plains? To think that man, thou just and gentle God! Should stand before thee with a tyrant's rod, O'er creatures like himself, with soul from thee, Yet dare ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... this latter consummation was at one time far from unlikely; but the older and more earnest he grew, the more definite became his creed, and the more intense his affinity for spiritual Christianity. In ecclesiastical polity he never was a partisan, and for piety his attraction was always more powerful than for mere theology. But in that essential element of vital Christianity, a profound and adoring attachment to the Saviour of men, the orthodoxy of Doddridge was never gainsaid. Had any one intercepted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... with the heartburn. But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenter's disadvantage was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and next, the fact of his not being a church-communicant, and the suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... metaphysical reasoning, was the sort of talk he most delighted in, so no kind of conversation pleased him less, I think, than when the subject was historical fact or general polity. "What shall we learn from that stuff?" said he. "Let us not fancy, like Swift, that we are exalting a woman's character ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... is mentioned with even more reverence than, by different peoples, is paid to that of Zoroaster, Solon, Lycurgus, or Alfred; but he has this peculiarity that he does not fade, like many other great legislators, into mythical indistinctness, but is himself the exponent of his own polity. ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... another, for which Deacon Pratt's house was always the place, not counting the sociables which Jack attended with unfailing regularity. They would not, any of them, have been quite regular without Jack. Indeed, many a question of grave church polity had been settled only after it had been submitted to and passed upon in meeting by Jack. "Is not that so, Jack?" was a favorite clincher to arguments which, it was felt, had won over his master. And Jack's groping paw ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... Missionary Association has planted Congregationalism in the South to stay. Fisk University and other such institutions, filled as they will be by young men of every class and color, will be strongholds of our New Testament faith and polity. Such a Commencement as was observed at Fisk this year does much to bring about that blessed day. This Commencement week, beginning Thursday, June sixth, and closing the evening of June twelfth, was crowded with literary and musical exercises of high ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various

... own bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at another's expense. Upon which consideration it comes into my head, that nature does not in this swerve from her general polity; for physicians hold, that the birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the dissolution and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great—a statesman aglow with the unselfish patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... of the primitive sect, with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that. "The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple. I suppose the young ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... to those conjunctures, brought on by misrule and oppression, when all forms are lost in the necessity of relief, and when the right of the people to change and choose their rulers is among the most sacred and inalienable that either nature or social polity has ordained. But, to apply the language of that last resource to the present emergency was to brandish the sword of Goliath [Footnote: A simile applied by Lord Somers to the power of Impeachment, which, he said, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... whole such peculiarities make no figure, nor does recent immigration play any important part. Almost the entire body of this tradition belongs to the English stock; it is the English population which, together with the language, has imposed on other elements of American life its polity, ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... made a study of the character, government and teaching of the different religious bodies. In this study I was especially impressed with the polity and teaching of the people designated as "Disciples of Christ," or "Christians." I procured their literature and made a thorough study of their position. I naturally found myself in harmony with their teaching. I had myself come to see the folly of ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... originated very little of the church polity, except the doctrine of polygamy, and what is published over his name is generally the production of some of his counsellors. Section 130 of the "Book of Doctrine and Covenants," headed "Important Items of Instruction, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... thus stated by Mr. Newman:[91] "That the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... learnt it, how is it that her victim, such a past mistress in architecture, such an adept in socialistic polity, has so far learnt no corresponding trick to serve in her own defence? She is as powerful as her executioner; like the other, she carries a rapier, an even more formidable one and more painful, at least to my fingers. For centuries and centuries the Philanthus has been storing her away in her ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... a protest against the political, rather than religious, character of much of the business transacted in the office to which he was attached. In the discharge of his ordinary duties he necessarily became acquainted with much of the inner administrative polity of the Vatican, and thus at times he learned of policies which stirred his alien soul to revolt. In his inferior position he could not hope to raise his voice in protest against these measures which excited his indignation; but in the loneliness of his room, or on his frequent long ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests. Some choice, reserved spots continued to flourish under it to the year 1756. Some remained till Mr. Hastings obtained the means of utterly defacing them. Such was the prospect ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... United States, and has therefore been able to compose his learned works in theology, history, &c. under advantages but seldom enjoyed by our authors. His chief productions are, Apostolical Succession, 1842; Presbytery and not Prelacy the Scriptural and Primitive Polity of the Church, 1843; Ecclesiastical Republicanism; Ecclesiastical Catechism; Claims of the Free Church of Scotland; Life and Character of Thomas Chalmers, with Personal Recollections; Nature and Functions of Ruling Elders; Nature and Functions of Deacons; The Rite ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various

... unanimity, sobriety, and justice, that domestic seditions are prevented. Cities fortified by the strongest bulwarks, have been often seen to yield to force from without, or to tumults from within. An exact military discipline, and a steady observance of civil polity, are the surest barriers against these evils. But there is still another point of great importance to be considered. The prosperity of some rising colonies, and the speedy ruin of others, have in a great measure been owing to the form ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... apoikoi ek Kadmou tou Agenoros.] Chron. p. 14. The antient Athenians worshipped Isis: and were in their looks, and in their manners particularly like the Egyptians. [Greek: Kai tais ideais, kai tois ethesin homoiotatous einai tois Aiguptiois.] The whole of their polity was plainly borrowed from that country. Diod. Sic. l. 1: p. 24, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... Cyprian, the great writer of Church polity, a pastor and teacher of rare gifts, was the first bishop to lay down his life for the truth's sake. The shadows of fifteen centuries rest upon his name; but it is as fadeless to-day as when a weeping multitude followed him to his martyrdom, and exclaimed, "Let us ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... into the shore and land a prisoner, to try the good will of the natives before any one else ventured." The poor wretch, instructed to enquire about the races living on the river and their manners, polity, King's name and capital, gold supply, and other matters of commerce, had no sooner swum ashore than he was seized and cut to pieces by some armed savages, while the ships sailed on with a south wind, making no attempt to avenge their victim, till after ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... its hard cushions and scrolled back. It was a room for winter, fashioned by the needs of winter. By the help of that great peat fire, built up year by year from the spoils of the moss a thousand feet below, generations of human beings had fought with snow and storm, had maintained their little polity there on the heights, self-centred, self-supplied. Across the yard, commanded by the window of the farm-kitchen, lay the rude byres where the cattle were prisoned from October to April. The cattle made the wealth of the farm, and there must be many weeks when ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... than persons of their own nation could hold out to them, these wealthy Strangers would naturally procure the poorer Israelites for servants. See Levit. xxv. 47. In a word, such was the political condition of the Strangers, the Jewish polity furnished a strong motive to them, to become servants, thus incorporating themselves with the nation, and procuring those social and religious privileges already enumerated, and for their children in the second generation, a permanent inheritance. (This last was ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... drunkenness, debauchery, indecency, and reckless, prodigal, and filthy habits, are but little regarded, while the slightest approach to the acquisition of a liberal education, or the expression of liberal opinions on any subject connected with public polity, is rigidly prohibited. Most of the English newspapers are excluded from the empire, although if admitted they would have but few general readers among the Russians—certainly not many among the middle or lower classes. No publication on political economy, no work of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... with vain excuses, he was occupied in pleading his own cause by flattering communications to the Queen, 'whose fame was spoken of throughout the world.' He wished to study the wisdom of her government, that he might know better how to order himself in civil polity. He was most urgent that her Majesty would give him 'some noble English lady for a wife, with augmentation of living suitable.' If she would give him his father's earldom, he would make her the undisputed sovereign of willing subjects in ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... each having powers and duties, distinct from the others, the Bishops being superior to the Priests and Deacons, and the immediate source of all their authority, is called EPISCOPACY, and those who adhere to this polity, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... to a creator; for now must I create an intolerable sort of lies, or my present profession loses the grace: and yet the lie, to a man of my coat, is as ominous a fruit as the fico. O, sir, it holds for good polity ever, to have that outwardly in vilest estimation, that inwardly is most dear to us: so much for my borrowed shape. Well, the troth is, my old master intends to follow my young master, dry-foot, over Moorfields ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson

... ponder well the logical consequences of his revolt against authority, ought to consider the inevitable results that would flow from the general adoption of the principles which he professes, ought to decide whether or not he really desires to overthrow the polity under which he lives, ought to ask if he and his fellows are able to face with any serious hope of success the colossal task of constructing a new society on the ruins of the old. Now the historic rebels to whom I have referred above by way of example—the ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... Milton's views would have had much countenance from them. There were individuals among them of Milton's way of thinking on the whole; but he had probably made a mistake in fancying that he had materially improved his influence, or the chances of his notions of Church-polity, by his public re-adhesion to the Rump. In fact, the continued existence of the Rump was more precarious than he had thought. In August 1659, while his pamphlet was in circulation, Lambert was away in the north, suppressing the Cheshire Insurrection of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... social solidarity than existed anywhere else in the Union. Descended from English stock, imbued with common religious and political traditions, and bound together by the ties of a common ecclesiastical polity, the people of this section had, as Jefferson expressed it, "a sort of family pride." Here all the forces of education, property, religion, and respectability were united in the maintenance of the established order against the assaults of democracy. New England Federalism was not so much a body ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... pastor, Rev. J. B. Fletcher. After long study of the New Testament, with the help of few other books than his tattered Greek lexicon, he resigned his ecclesiastical connection because he had found, as he thought, the free church polity on Bible principles. His discovery was substantially the Congregational system. He called his first church "Eureka." It now has nine other churches associated in the same work. A mission preacher, a devoted man residing near, a man who is highly respected by all the people, has immediate ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 05, May, 1896 • Various

... foresee or to secure the necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's polity in the De Monarchia, to take its place rather among the utopias than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they suffered ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... Hooker, author of "The Ecclesiastical Polity," was for six years Master of the Temple—"a place," says Izaak Walton, "which he accepted rather than desired." Travers, a disciple of Cartwright the Nonconformist, was the lecturer; so Hooker, it ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... sufficient as a rule of faith and practice. We may find in it all needful models and helps in the divine life, as well as all needful directions about the way to begin it. The church of Christ has always found in the Bible a safe guide for her polity and conduct, and civil government has prospered when the principles of Scripture were followed by the powers that ruled the State. Because the Christian believes the Bible to be the product of men inspired by Christ, he can ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong

... perpetual danger of the Hebrews, the temptation to turn back from the Gospel, with its spiritual order and its hopes of things not yet seen, to the outworn Dispensation, with its externally majestic circumstances of glorious ritual and imposing shows of polity and power. They would need again and again to open the soul's ears and eyes, and steadfastly to recollect, against all appearances, that we "are come unto the Mount Sion," if they were to resist the magnetic forces which drew them back towards Sinai—and towards death. So they were to hear ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule

... improvement of education, transport, and health services, at a cost in higher taxes. The war in March-April 2003 between a US-led coalition and Iraq, together with the subsequent problems of restoring the economy and the polity, involve a heavy commitment of British ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... great movement we know under the name of the Reformation touched the life of the Christian Church in every one of its three great departments—doctrine, discipline, and worship. In Henry's mind, however, the question appears to have been almost exclusively one of discipline or polity. His quarrel was not with the accepted theological errors of his day, for as Defender of the Faith he covered some of the worst of them with his shield. Neither was he ill-disposed toward the methods and usages of public worship so far as we ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... of the Old World ever deign to glance at our civil polity, they will learn that taxation is the only sure and certain cure for pauperism, and we may soon look for their political economists to render thanks to the "friends" of the former slave for this discovery of a specific for the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... whate'er is left to us Of ancient heritage— Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, The limited horizon of our stage— Old love, hope, fear, All this I fain would fix upon the page; That so the coming age, Lost in the empire's mass, Yet haply longing for their fathers, here May see, as in a glass, What they held dear— May say, ''Twas thus and thus They lived'; ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... This magnificent polity—his, ours—must, doubtless, one day, share the common fate, and where it goes down, the star of Washington must set with it, and his name pass, an unheeded word, into the dead annals of the obsolete ages. But O! not ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... the people of the United States should play no part in that great enterprise. To take part in such a service will be the opportunity for which they have sought to prepare themselves by the very principles and purposes of their polity and the approved practices of their Government ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it might in all that it was and did show mankind the way to liberty. They cannot in honor withhold the service to which they are now about to be challenged. They ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... under one empire, cleared the Mediterranean for safe and free communication, opened roads as arteries through the vast body politic, established post communications for travellers and the mails, carried law and order into every obscure hamlet, consolidated a polity which, by sheer massiveness, lasted for generations after the soul of Rome had fled, and left to posterity, in her institutes the basis for modern jurisprudence. Thus Greece evolved a genius for art, developed architecture and sculpture ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton

... who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for a shilling, seems no scene for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... those laws. I am not at all prepared at present to attempt anything like a digest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part of the task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon terms which would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. To take polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Government resembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk of Queens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and Titania, for example, are we using a rough ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... give promptitude, quickness, adaptability; men in whom their followers can confide. The Greeks understood that. Nay, as the colony makes progress, as its principal town rises into the dignity of a capital,—a polls that needs a polity,—I sometimes think it might be wise to go still further, and not only transplant to it a high standard of civilization, but draw it more closely into connection with the parent state, and render the passage of spare intellect, education, and civility, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations, here described, either void of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences; he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that, wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason; ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... brilliant passages in the history of Spanish adventure in the New World are undoubtedly afforded by the conquests of Mexico and Peru—the two states which combined with the largest extent of empire a refined social polity, and considerable progress in the arts of civilization. Indeed, so prominently do they stand out on the great canvas of history, that the name of the one, notwithstanding the contrast they exhibit in their respective institutions, most naturally suggests that of the other; and ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... Duties; Theology and Ethics; Biblical Introduction; Homiletics and Church Polity; Christian Theology; Sacred Rhetoric and ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland

... Oxford Press; Selections by Grosart, in Elizabethan Library; Raleigh's Last Fight of the Revenge, in Arber's Reprints; Life of Raleigh, by Edwards and by Gosse. Richard Hooker's works, edited by Keble, Oxford Press; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in Everyman's Library, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in Morley's Universal Library; Dowden's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... sovereignty of the people as the basis of the Roman constitution,[305] and the history of the long struggle of the Plebs for freedom made the protection of the commons the sole justification of the tribunate. From the lips of Polybius himself Tiberius may have heard the impression which the Roman polity made on the mind of the educated Greek: and the fact that this was a Greek picture did not lessen its validity; for the Greek was moulding the orthodox history of Rome, and the victims of his genius were the best Roman ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... an extensive area for exercise. It is governed chiefly by an old woman of superior skill and knowledge, to whose charge the girls of a village are intrusted as soon as they reach the age of ten or twelve. There are various opinions of the use and value of this institution in the primitive polity of Africa. By some writers it is treated as a religious cloister for the protection of female chastity, while by others it is regarded as a school of licentiousness. From my own examination of the establishment, I am quite satisfied that a line drawn between these extremes will, most ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... yielded himself up in the complete grand manner when nature absolutely compelled. The goose had not formally beaten him, but neither had he formally beaten the goose. The battle was drawn, and this meant that Darius had a slight headache, a feeling of heavy disgust with the entire polity of the universe, and a disinclination for food. The first and third symptoms he hid as far as possible, from pride: at breakfast he toyed with bacon, from pride, hating bacon. The children knew from his eyes and his guilty gestures that he was not well, but they dared not refer ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... that the ecclesiastical polity and discipline of a small city state, like a Greek [Greek word polis], feasible in such a community as Geneva at a moment of spiritual excitement, was brought by Knox and his brethren into a nation like Scotland. The results were a hundred and twenty-nine years of unrest, civil war, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... exaggerate. Yet the conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole townful—and I might rather say, by the whole polity—king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable number ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... some spectacles right among the legions, through the agency of Tiberius and Marcellus as aediles. To Juba he gave portions of Gaetulia in return for the prince's ancestral domain (for the majority of the inhabitants had been enrolled as members of the Roman polity), and also the possessions of Bocchus and Bogud. On the death of Amyntas he did not entrust the country to the children of the deceased but made it a part of the subject territory. Thus Gaul together with Lycaonia obtained ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... to blame, in yielding to their fear of the ambitious spirit of Rome so far as to deprive their councils of all religious element, what excuse are we to offer for the state, which, with Lords Spiritual of her own faith already in her senate, permits the polity of Rome to be represented by lay members? To have sacrificed religion to mistaken policy, or purchased security with ignominy, would have been no new thing in the world's history; but to be at once impious and impolitic, and seek for danger ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... coming hither." They were social beings, and loved stimulus like the rest of mankind, and had no public amusements. These causes are sufficient to account for the fondness for the weekly lecture; but if to them be superadded the peculiarity of their civil and religious polity, which inculcated an extraordinary affection for each other as God's chosen people destined to communion, not here only, but forever; and the isolation of their situation, cutting them off from participation in the stirring events to which they had been accustomed, we should wonder ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... of dinners, that if London were to be destroyed by an earthquake, the Londoners would meet at a public dinner to consider the subject. The Greeks, too, were great diners: their social and religious polity gave them many chances of being merry and making others merry on good eating and drinking. Any public or even domestic sacrifice to one of the gods, was sure to be followed by a dinner-party, the remains of the slaughtered "offering" being served up on the occasion as a pious piece ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... We all know that perfectly fortuitous circumstances, or what appear to us to be such, produced the Federal Government, and that its strongest and least exceptionable features are precisely those which could not be withstood, much less invented, as parts of the theory of a polity. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... proclamation, seventy of the principal men of the populace, for a show, as if they were real judges, while they had no proper authority. Before these was Zacharias accused of a design to betray their polity to the Romans, and having traitorously sent to Vespasian for that purpose. Now there appeared no proof or sign of what he was accused; but they affirmed themselves that they were well persuaded that so it was, and desired that such ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus

... purification. The first month, Januarius, is named after Janus. My opinion is, that Numa moved the month named after Mars from its precedence, wishing the art of good government to be honoured before that of war. For Janus in very ancient times was either a deity or a king, who established a social polity, and made men cease from a savage life like that of wild beasts. And for this reason his statues are made with a double face, because he turned men's way of life ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... divisions: there are no first-order administrative divisions as defined by the US Government, but there are 16 states: Aimeliik, Airai, Angaur, Kayangel, Koror, Melekeok, Ngaraard, Ngardmau, Ngaremlengui, Ngatpang, Ngchesar, Ngerchelong, Ngiwal, Peleliu, Sonsorol, Tobi Independence: the last polity remaining under the US-administered UN trusteeship following the departure of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas from ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... by Mr. Motley to "The North American Review" is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) "Geschichte der Colonisation von New England," but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,—an historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not narrowed by the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... eager to go as far as their brethren on the Continent. They unanimously condemned as Antichristian numerous dogmas and practices to which Henry had stubbornly adhered, and which Elizabeth reluctantly abandoned. Many felt a strong repugnance even to things indifferent which had formed part of the polity or ritual of the mystical Babylon. Thus Bishop Hooper, who died manfully at Gloucester for his religion, long refused to wear the episcopal vestments. Bishop Ridley, a martyr of still greater renown, pulled down the ancient altars of his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... we have in our Church discipline "a popular authority of elders," as Hooker calls [xxxvii] it, or whether we have Episcopal jurisdiction. Certainly, Hooker himself did not think it an essential; for in the dedication of his Ecclesiastical Polity, speaking of these questions of Church discipline which gave occasion to his great work, he says they are "in truth, for the greatest part, such silly things, that very easiness doth make them hard to be disputed of in serious manner." Hooker's ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... sphere of real things. Scientific discipline did nothing for him; he had never undergone it, and he never felt its value. He was an artist in social construction; and if right ideas, or the suggestion of right ideas, sometimes came into his head, about history, about human progress, about a stable polity, such ideas were not the products of trains of ordered reasoning; they were the intuitional glimpses of the poet, and consequently as they professed to be in real matter, even the right ideas were as often as not accompanied by ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... probably a change of life which leaves the ruder stage behind. The colony is led forth to a new land by its hero, who lays the foundation of a social order by building houses, temples to the Gods, and a wall round the city, and who divides the territory. Thus a civil polity begins by getting away from "the insolent Cyclops" or savages. On the other hand, civilized enemies who might bring war, seem not to dwell near the Phaeacians, beloved of the Gods. Beyond all conflict, inner and outer, lies the fortunate ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... of truth; abundance of talent, but no faith; gayety, gallantry, wit, devotion, dreams, and epigrams in perfection, without the solid foundation of principles and the efficient development in practice, either of polity, a social system, or religious belief,—the theory and the sentiment of each being at the same time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... effects of the alleged discovery of the means to direct the more terrible force of vril were chiefly remarkable in their influence upon social polity. As these effects became familiarly known and skillfully administered, war between the vril-discoverers ceased, for they brought the art of destruction to such perfection as to annul all superiority in numbers, discipline, or military skill. The ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... at least, have been But through untowardness of fate: For Polity was then too strong; He came an ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... [at Artemisium] were minded not to let a single soul" of the Greeks escape. The expression is, in general, a proverbial one, applied to utter destruction, especially in warfare. Its source is Greek, and lies in the custom of the Spartans (see Xenophon, Polity of the Lacedaemonians, chapter 13, section 2), which required the presence in their army of a priest carrying fire kindled at the shrine of Zeus the Leader, in Sparta, this sacred fire being absolutely essential to the proper conduct of important ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... of those specialists who are generally listened to, Virchow raises his voice as a leading authority, and brings forward the principles that he proclaimed in his speech at Munich as the surest guarantees for the freedom of science in the modern polity? Article XX. of the Prussian Charter, and Sec. 152 of the Code of the German Empire, say, "Science and its doctrines are free." And Virchow's first step, according to the principles he now declares, must be a motion to ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... Robespierre, cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... another of their aspects, give a most direct and potent stimulus to the desire of acquiring wealth. The earlier decline of feudalism [in England] having removed or much weakened invidious distinctions between the originally trading classes and those who had been accustomed to despise them, and a polity having grown up which made wealth the real source of political influence, its acquisition was invested with a factitious value independent of its intrinsic utility. And, inasmuch as to be rich without industry has always hitherto constituted a step in the social scale above those who are rich by ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... mentioned. And the moment we draw this line as an exponent of the mental and spiritual thought-life of the different peoples, we shall find it not only molding their language forms, both written and spoken, but manifest as well in their art, philosophy, and even their social polity. And of course we must be fair in our comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe our own type to ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not but is ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... those qualities which might be found to burn with more outward brightness in a younger man, those it is in my power to bestow for the term of my earthly life. Your steady adherence to church principles and your interest in ecclesiastical polity (as was shown by your bright questioning on those subjects during our morning walk round your grounds) have indicated strongly to me the grace and appropriateness with which you would fill the position of a bishop's wife, and how greatly ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... of his ungloved hand, and felt in a subtle way this combination of the physically fine with the morally hard, trenchant, tenacious. Close your eyes, and Arnold Jacks was a high-bred bulldog endowed with speech; not otherwise would a game animal of that species, advanced to a world-polity, utter ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... familiar to most of us in the flat sea-fish called Torpedo and in the fresh-water eel called Gymnotus. The only answer the anti-creationist can give to this dissimilarity of development is that there are many vacant places in the polity of nature, and that development takes place in that direction which fits the creature to occupy a vacant place, and is, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... clearly realised the fundamental error of Puritanism, which tended to make a man's eternal salvation depend upon the accuracy and extent of his beliefs; nor could they approve of the exaggerated import given by the High Church party to matters of Church polity. The term "Cambridge Platonists" is, perhaps, less appropriate than that of "Latitudinarians," which latter name emphasises their broad-mindedness (even if it carries with it something of disapproval). For although they owed much to PTATO, and, perhaps, more to PLOTINUS (c. A.D. 203-262), ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... religion with civil polity, gave permanence and stability to the Roman institutions; notwithstanding all the changes and revolutions in the government the old forms were preserved; and thus, though the city was taken by Porsenna, and burned by the Gauls, the Roman constitution survived the ruin, and was ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted, and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of love, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... Smyth's Church at Gainsborough. The Scrooby Church. Plymouth Colony. Settles Plymouth. Hardships. Growth. Cape Ann Settlement. Massachusetts Bay. Size. Polity. Roger Williams. His Views. His Exile. Anne Hutchinson. Rhode Island Founded. Settlement of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield. Saybrook. New Haven. New Hampshire. Maine. New England Confederation. Its ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... of Baghdad must have been enormous when the smallest number of her sons who fell victims to Hulaku Khan in 1258 was estimated at eight hundred thousand, while other authorities more than double the terrible "butcher's bill." Her policy and polity were unique. A well regulated routine of tribute and taxation, personally inspected by the Caliph; a network of waterways, canaux d'arrosage; a noble system of highways, provided with viaducts, bridges and caravanserais, and a postal service of mounted couriers enabled it to collect as in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... of his preface, page iv, he says, "The Church of England being established by acts of parliament, is a perfect creature of the civil power; I mean the polity and discipline of it, and it is that which maketh all the contention; for as to the doctrines expressed in the articles, I do not find high church to be in any manner of pain; but they who lay claim to most orthodoxy can ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... successive glorification of Humanity itself; of the various ties, political and domestic, among mankind; of the successive stages in the past evolution of our species; and of the several classes into which M. Comte's polity divides mankind. M. Comte's religion has, moreover, nine Sacraments; consisting in the solemn consecration, by the priests of Humanity, with appropriate exhortations, of all the great transitions in life; the entry into life itself, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... when the child should become informed concerning his own particular church or denomination. He should learn of its history, its achievements, its creeds, its plan of organization and polity. This is not with the purpose of cultivating a narrow sectarianism, but in the interests of a self-respecting intelligence concerning the particular branch of the church which is one's spiritual home. That the great ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... curious spectacle," as Sir George Staunton observes, "is here exhibited to the mind of so large a proportion of the whole human race, connected together in one great system of polity, submitting quietly and through so considerable an extent of country to one great sovereign; and uniform in their laws, their manners, and their language; but differing essentially in each of these respects from every other portion of mankind; and neither ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... in grounding the young idea in the geography of any particular country, the main points of its history should follow as a natural sequence. Its seas and rivers would lead to the consideration of commerce and the polity of nations:—the mention of its towns, suggest the names of its great men in literature and art. Its scenery would call to mind the poets who might have made it famous, the artists who may have portrayed its beauties with their pencil; while, to pursue the theme, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the first-born child of the Mother of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drove them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the Mayflower in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right to compel all to think, or at least ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... historian of the century will have to record the marvellous fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero that developed the race, but a deep ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed."[220] And, for all men who "drive ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... singular spectacle was exhibited amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and elevation,—not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism reigned in these communities, but confined and attached ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... little Anne her first suggestion of life outside of England, while Buchanan, the tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and poet of Scotland. Bacon had just ended life and labor; Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity was before the world, though not completed until 1632, and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a "mass of sermons, books of devotion, religious tracts and controversial pamphlets." Sermons abounded, those of Archbishop Usher, Andrews and Donne being specially valued, while "The Saint's ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... European importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had he done so it can hardly be doubted that the whole development of the English polity would have been changed. Already at the time of his death he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner circle of politicians he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of the mechanism of the State. Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his death as "a national ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... intellectual Italians were not ignorant that all reforms must be the fruit of time and of opinion, and that under the sway of enlightened and benevolent sovereigns, aided by the learning and wise counsel of able and conscientious statesmen, such changes, in matters of civil polity, as were adapted to the wants of the people would not have been delayed beyond the time when circumstances called for and ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... conquests from which he could not hope to derive any permanent advantages, he contrived to alienate from himself the affections of the people of the Netherlands. This people consisted of independent states, resembling each other in manner, character, and constitution of government; their polity being composed of three orders, clergy, nobles, and people, under the limited principality of one personage, denominated Count. The Netherlander had shown an heroic devotion to his mother, Maria Theresa, and were warmly attached to his own person. Animated, however, by a restless spirit of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... comfort, counsel, and assistance; asserting his conviction that the men who professed "the religion" demanded nothing else than the glory of God and the advancement of His Word, while in all matters of civil polity they were ready to render obedience to his Majesty. He averred, moreover, that if he should perceive any indications that the Huguenots were pursuing any other object than liberty of conscience and security for life and property, he would not only withdraw his ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... trade apply, For once, at Empire's seat, her heart, Then get what knowledge ear and eye Glean chancewise in the life-long mart. And certain others, few and fit, Attach them to the Court, and see The Country's best, its accent hit, And partly sound its polity. ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... they see that this is to be done by promoting thought fearlessly, yet urge temperance in action, while the time is yet so difficult, and many of its signs dubious. They aim at breaking down those barriers between the different states of Italy, relics of a barbarous state of polity, artificially kept up by the craft of her foes. While anxious not to break down what is really native to the Italian character,—defences and differences that give individual genius a chance to grow and the fruits of each region to ripen in their natural way,—they aim at ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... principles had been asserted with peculiar strength, or carried through with special consistency, or associated pre-eminently with the other graces of a Christian church, such as a ritual more impressive to the heart of man, or a polity more symmetrical with the structure of English society. Once having unfolded from philosophic grounds the primary conditions of a pure scriptural church, Phil. might then, without blame, have turned sharp round upon us, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... may be broken; but in most of the essential liberties and rights which government is the agent to establish and protect, the seceding State has no revolution, and the remaining States can have none. This arises from that refinement of our polity which makes the States the basis of our instituted labor. Greece was broken by the Persian power, but her municipal institutions remained. Hungary lost her national crown, but her home institutions remain. South Carolina may preserve her constituted ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... ancient loveliness of life. The beings whom the Christians can win over—a patch-work medley of loathsome Barbarians—let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are Greeks—the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world. The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the millions of Darius and Xerxes, shall live again, and we will keep the Barbarians at a distance as a Patrician ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... movement had its aesthetic side, and coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with the carving of lecterns and the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... effectiveness, and excelled them in practicability. "The Rights of Man" (Part I) may be termed an insular version of the "Contrat Social," with this difference, that the English writer pointed the way to changes which were far from visionary, while the Genevese seer outlined a polity fit only for a Swiss canton peopled by philosophers. Paine had had the advantage of close contact with men and affairs in both hemispheres. Not even Cobbett, his literary successor, passed through more varied experiences. Born in 1737 at Thetford in Norfolk, Paine divided his early life between ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... count up often, what a different world it would have been but for that island in the distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... unmapp'd—never, Columbus-like, sailing out for New Worlds, and to complete the orb's rondure. Emerson writes frequently in the atmosphere of this thought, and his books report one or two things from that very ocean and air, and more legibly address'd to our age and American polity than by any man yet. But I will begin by scarifying him—thus proving that I am not insensible to his deepest lessons. I will consider his books from a democratic and western point of view. I will specify the shadows on these sunny ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... romance: the merry laugh enlivened the newly opened fields, and rang through the bordering woods as loud, jocund, and unrestrained as in these older and more crowded settlements. It is true that their theology was austere, and their polity, in Church and State, stern; but, in their modes of life, there were some features which gave peculiar opportunity to exercise and gratify a love of social excitement of a pleasurable kind. Let me mention some of the customs having a tendency in this direction, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... complicated as ours is a matter full of difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to decide, a prudent man too ready to undertake, or an honest man too ready to promise." Neither now nor ever had Burke any other real conception of a polity for England than government by the territorial aristocracy in the interests of the nation at large, and especially in the interests of commerce, to the vital importance of which in our economy he was always keenly and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... of the Philippian Christians possessed these privileges. They knew what it was to live in a community to which they were less closely bound than to the great city beyond the sea. They were members of a mighty polity, though they had never seen its temples nor trod its streets. They lived in Philippi, but they belonged to Rome. Hence there is a peculiar significance in the first words of our text. The rendering, 'conversation,' was inadequate even when it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... European nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever onward in his aggressions and ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... the inheritors of all the foregoing ages. I do not believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world. The Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was valuable in the Jewish polity is ours now. We may say the same of the civilizations of Athens and of Rome; though the entire organization of the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... memorial to the government in 1873, said: "The people of European and American countries are for the most part rich in intelligence and knowledge, and they preserve the spirit of independence. And owing to the nature of their polity they share in the counsels of their government. Government and people thus mutually aid and support each other, as hand and foot protect the head and eye. The merits of each question that arises are distinctly comprehended by the nation at home, and the government is merely its ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga

... travel had taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... which, although in any one of them it may be alloyed by its adjuncts and by the faults of individuals, is in itself of inestimable value, and may be held alike by persons who differ widely from each other as to the forms of religious polity and as to details of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... estimate, by the changes from the old to the present system, but it is in a manner to render further violent changes necessary. I say violent, for political changes are everywhere unavoidable, since questions of polity are, after all, no other than questions of facts, and these are interests that will regulate themselves, directly or indirectly. The great desideratum of a government, after settling its principles in conformity with controlling facts, is to secure to itself ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... church polity there was no adequate provision for the needs of such an immense and ever expanding population. Now and then a broadminded pastor would encourage the planting of a church in some needy field, but ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner

... it," said Carlton; "but all systems have their defects; no polity, no theology, no ritual is perfect. One only came directly and simply from Heaven, the Jewish; and even that was removed because of its unprofitableness. This is no derogation from the perfection of Divine Revelation, for it arises from the subject-matter ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... peaceableness, but the economic or political systems in which these shall be embodied, we must discover for ourselves in each age. It is the norm of our life with God; but it is not a standard fixing our scientific views, our theological opinions, our ecclesiastical polity, our economic or political theories. It shows forth the spirit we should manifest towards God and towards one another as individuals, and families, and nations; "and where the Spirit of the Lord is, ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... inspired by the two ideas of love of God and love of humanity. In this conception, no doubt, the influence of Greek philosophy is to be seen; the Jewish interpreter keeps before him the "Republic" of Plato, and the "Polity" of Aristotle. With him, however, the ideal state is not a vision "laid up in heaven";[95] its foundation is already laid upon earth, its capital is Jerusalem, and it is the mission of his people to extend its borders till it embraces ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... this sally of mine, but the professor asked, with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, "What point in our polity can be obscure to the author of 'Glove and Gauntlet' and 'Airs ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... democratic and peaceable polity, and her present imperfections will diminish rapidly with the increase of her national maturity and stability. She will be a sane and healthy element in the future ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... from domineering and aggressive tendencies as during the Pontificates of Benedict XIV and his three successors.' This covers a period extending from 1740 to 1775; and we know that cycles of ecclesiastical polity never close abruptly. The Catholic was first to perceive that 'when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... Fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself Fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing Fear: begets a terrible astonishment and confusion Feared, lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure Few men have been admired by their own domestics Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it First informed who were to be the other guests First thing ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne

... that all this is contrary to the premises of the economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite premise—that the strength of a state depends on the economic development of its people, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... transaction is now taking place in the course of Indian polity. These speeches, with no rhetorical pretensions, contain some of the just, prudent, and necessary points and considerations, that have guided this transaction, and helped to secure for it the sanction ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)

... may be exposed, deprived, or cut off, by the fundamental laws of his country; and who, upon these principles, from his heart approves and glories in the virtues of his predecessors, who revived the true spirit of the British polity, in laying aside a priest-ridden, an hen-pecked, tyrannical tool, who had overturned the political constitution of his country, and in reinstituting the dissolved body politic, by a revolution supported by the laws of nature and the realm, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift

... what becomes of the 'lords over God's heritage,' if the one ground of pre-eminence is service? I know, of course, that there may be different forms embodying one principle, but it seems to me that that form of Church polity is nearest the mind of Christ in which the only dignity is dignity of service, and the only use of place is the privilege of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and out of these men were chosen ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question. I do not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of government, and how far all mankind, in all forms of polity, are entitled to an exercise of that right by the charter of Nature,—or whether, on the contrary, a right of taxation is necessarily involved in the general principle of legislation, and inseparable from the ordinary ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... uncertainty and danger, and craving order above all things,—as the French people submitted to the rule of Napoleon III., because they believed him to be the man best qualified to protect themselves and their property against the designs of the Socialists. Our constitutional polity would give way to a cannonarchy, as every quietly disposed person would prefer the arbitrary government of one man to the organization of anarchy. If we should escape from both despotism and anarchy, it would be at the price of national destruction. Every great State would "set up for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... must necessarily lead to a revision of the system of servile labour, unhappily bequeathed to them by England, in accordance with the spirit of the age, so as to combine the gradual extinction of slavery with the preservation of property, the maintenance of the civil polity, and the true ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... this terrible plague some ten thousand of the Vaudois perished, including twelve pastors. Only three pastors being now left, application was made to Geneva for assistance, and pastors being sent from thence introduced a polity which was Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian. Still the marked deference to authority, the succession of the ministers elected by their predecessors from time to time, the orderly administration of the sacraments, the use of the creeds and of a liturgy, the entire absence of any protest against ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold

... settlements by the banks of the Garonne and the Ebro. Their leader was that Ataulfus whose truly statesmanlike reflections on the unwisdom of destroying the Roman Empire and the necessity of incorporating the barbarians with its polity have been already quoted. There, in the south-western corner of Gaul and the northern regions of Spain, we must for the present leave the Western branch of the great Gothic nationality, while our narrative returns to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... most opulent and enlightened part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis, the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple Catholic, who was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution—there would be an eruption, and ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher



Words linked to "Polity" :   civil order, order, organisation, disposal



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