"Pagan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sister made us some afternoon tea very nicely (we always carry tea and teapot on these excursions), and everybody made us welcome. We found a delightful old Frenchman of Strasburg to conduct us to the Pagan Wall, as, for want of a better name, people designate this famous relic of prehistoric times. Fragments of stone fortifications similarly constructed have been found on other points of the Vosges not far from the promontory on which the convent stands, but none to be compared to this one in colossal ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... people or the governments surrounding their own, they were compelled, for self-protection, to resort to every means of concealing the earnings of their enterprise and superior knowledge and skill from Christian and pagan alike. They gave value to the diamond, that in a small stone, easy of concealment, immense wealth might be hidden. They invented the bill of exchange, by which they could at pleasure transfer from one country to another their wealth, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the history of Christianity the thought became manifest that it was at least questionable for one to hold a fellow-Christian in slavery. This went so far that at length it became "fireside law" that the baptism of a pagan slave ipso facto effected his emancipation. There was no foundation for this view in positive law, but it appears from time to time in non-legal and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Florence, but experienced some difficulty in doing so, by reason of the statue of Mars, which had been thrown into the Arno. The temple, converted to Christian purposes, had been the only building to escape the wrath of Totila; but owing to the pagan incantations practised when the town was originally consecrated to the god of war, the statue of that divinity would not consent to lie quietly and ignominiously in the bed of the Arno, while his temple and town were appropriated to other purposes. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize, the latter to vilify than to discriminate. The appellations of "savage" and "pagan" were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pagan with the heart of Christ, I go bewildered from thine altar place, These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings, Nor know if thou deniest My destiny and race, Man's goalward falterings, To sing the perfect joy that lay Along the path we missed somewhere, That led thee to thy home ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank and family might have savoured of snobbishness ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... this connection, the account of the faith of the philosopher Sallustius, the Emperor Julian's friend, by Professor Gilbert Murray, "A Pagan Creed," in the English Review for December, 1909. The term 'pagan' now has a connotation that is singularly out of accord with the character of a man ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... great a dissention among the philosophers, upon this subject, that it was almost impossible to enumerate their different sentiments. So it came to pass that exertions for benevolent ends were seldom, if ever, put forth by pagans in pagan lands—they knew nothing of the happiness springing from such ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... that hard Pagan World disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... superstitious terror some of them came round Gerard. "Here is the cause of all," they cried. "He has never invoked a single saint. He is a heathen; here is a pagan aboard." ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... opposite tendencies of the mores, with their attendant philosophies and ethical principles, on the conjuncture of the conditions and interests. At Rome children were exposed either on account of poverty, which was the ancient cause, or on account of luxury, egoism, and vice. "Pagan and Christian authorities are united in speaking of infanticide as a crying vice of the empire."[972] These protests show that the custom was not fully protected by the mores. Pliny thought it necessary.[973] ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she had decided to marry ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... seductive daughter Ruth (sweetly and gently represented by Miss OLGA BRANDON) this gay LOTHARIO of a Prefect has contrived, not, apparently, with any great difficulty, to lead astray, or, to put it "classically," to seduce from the narrow path of such virtue as is common alike to Pagan, Jew, and Christian. As for handsome Hypatia herself, magnificent though Miss JULIA NEILSON be as a classic model for a painter, she is nowhere, dramatically, in the piece, when contrasted with the unhappy Jewish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... could not keep one. And Dan, knowing well his own weakness and his mother's shrewdness (she would soon be guessing what was passing in his mind), began to animadvert on Azariah for his residence in Tiberias, a pagan city—his plan for leading her on a false trail. Others, he said, spoke more unfavourably than he did; and he continued in this strain until Rachel, losing patience, interrupted him suddenly saying that Azariah did not ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... powers. No difference could be greater than that between the stirring age of Elizabeth and that of Alexandria in the fifth century, when the world was occupied with barren ecclesiastical strife. Hypatia, the last defender of the pagan faith, is a wonderful study, and the whole book is a brilliant picture of the passing of the old faiths ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, that is to say voluptuous and cruel: he abuses himself and victimizes others; a brutal, calculating egoism resumes its ascendancy, depravity and sensuality spread, and society ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... after her miserable experience she became as utter a sceptic in regard to human love, and happiness flowing from it, as her father had taught her to be respecting God and the joy of believing. Though seemingly a fair young girl, her father had made her worse than a pagan. She believed in nothing save art and her father's wisdom. He seemed to embody the culture and worldly philosophy that now became, in her judgment, the only things worth living for. To gain his confidence became her great desire. But ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... an act of "faith" (auto da fe), or burning of heretics, was offered as a public spectacle. The grandest of all the bull-fights of Mexico was nothing in comparison with this vice-regal exhibition. As among the Aztecs and the pagan Romans, the sacrificial victims were kept in reserve for important occasions, and for occasions when a bull-fight would have been a most inadequate exhibition. The consecration of a new archbishop, or the arrival of a new Vice-king from Spain, or ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Liberia, canopied by unclean skies and based on dirty-looking seas. The natives, who, as usual, are new upon the coast, and who preserve curious traditions about their predecessors, are the Vai (not Vei), a Mandengan race still pagan. They call, however, the world 'duniya,' and the wife 'namusi,' words which show whence their ideas are derived. Their colour is lighter than the Kruman's; there are pretty faces, especially amongst the girlish boys, and the fine ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... blackness of marsh and forest. Opechancanough came from the forest with a score of warriors behind him, and stopped beside me. I rose to greet him, as was decent; for he was an Emperor, albeit a savage and a pagan. "Tell the English that Opechancanough grows old," he said. "The years that once were as light upon him as the dew upon the maize are now hailstones to beat him back to the earth whence he came. His arm is not swift to strike and strong as it once was. He is old; the warpath and ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... quite true, ma tante, but I am afraid that father would not altogether see eye to eye with you in this. After all," she added naively, "a pagan may become converted to Christianity without being called a traitor to his false gods, and the Duc de Raguse may have learnt to hate the idol whom he once worshipped, and for this profession of faith we ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... century, my ancestor Arthur was among them, Baron Halsa Ungern Sternberg. Here these border knights formed the order of Monk Knights or Teutons, which with fire and sword spread Christianity among the pagan Lithuanians, Esthonians, Latvians and Slavs. Since then the Teuton Order of Knights has always had among its members representatives of our family. When the Teuton Order perished in the Grunwald under ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... inflammable Cheek of Innocence, be good-natured for once, and I will rack my brains to try if I can put it to you without offense! May I picture good Papa as an elder in the Temple of Venus, burning incense inexhaustibly on the altar of love? No: Temple of Venus is Pagan; altar of love is not proper—take them out. Let me only say of my evergreen parent that his life from youth to age had been one unintermitting recognition of the charms of the sex, and that my sisters and I ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... the sentence: [Greek: Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter]("Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour"). Based upon this discovery arose that extraordinary enthusiasm, during the second, third, and fourth centuries, for hunting up further prophecies in Pagan sources, resulting in a great number of Sibylline verses being invented, giving the minutest details in the Life of our Lord. These fabrications seem to have been at that time generally accepted ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Ninfale or of classical myth, it appears to me utterly erroneous. The 'nymphs' who love the shepherds in the renaissance pastorals are nothing but shepherdesses. The confusion no doubt began with Boccaccio. The nymph of Diana in the Ninfale is, as we have already seen, nothing but a nun in pagan disguise. The nymphs of the Ameto are represented as of the classical type, but their amorous confessions reveal them as in nowise differing from mortal woman. The gradual change in the connotation of the word is one of the results of the blending of Christian and classical ideas. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... in his veins as he walked slowly back into pagan London. Here the great restaurants, brilliantly lighted, reminded him that all day he had eaten nothing. He jumped into a hansom and was driven to his rooms, kept the man while he changed his clothes, and drove to Piccadilly. Here he entered a famous restaurant, known to him only ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... over a still sea, we two rejoiced and sang as did the knights of old when they followed our great Duke to England. Yet was our leader an heathen pirate; all our proud fleet but one galley perilously overloaded; for guidance we leaned on a pagan sorcerer; and our port was beyond the world's end. Witta told us that his father Guthrum had once in his life rowed along the shores of Africa to a land where naked men sold gold for iron and beads. There had he bought much gold, and no few elephants' teeth, and thither ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... such there had been, those impartial witnesses who must have known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was silent: storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man's Peace, be still; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all nature was ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... you were abroad in Norfolk. I pitied you undergoing those dreadful Oratorios: I never heard one that was not tiresome, and in part ludicrous. Such subjects are scarce fitted for Catgut. Even Magnus Handel—even Messiah. He (Handel) was a good old Pagan at heart, and (till he had to yield to the fashionable Piety of England) stuck to Opera, and Cantatas, such as Acis and Galatea, Milton's Penseroso, Alexander's Feast, etc., where he could revel and plunge and frolic without being tied down to Orthodoxy. And these are (to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... to see many of the London lions, or literati, George Dyer is to take me to Mary Hayes, Miss Christal, and Taylor, the Pagan, my near neighbour. You shall have my physiognomical remarks upon them. I hate this city more and more, although I see little of it. You do not know with what delight I anticipate a summer in Wales, and I ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... who was a godless man, A pagan, heart and soul, Played nurse until the wound began To heal, and Giles ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... even the versification, in which this master excelled, is wanting in fluency and sweetness. I can only account for it from the weight of the subject. Two verses, which are fairly worth two hundred such poems, are from another pagan; he was forced to sigh for the church without knowing her. ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... the conduct of a pagan government with that of Great Britain. When the Emperor of China became fully convinced of his inability to resist the prowess of the British arms, in the famous "Opium War," efforts were made to induce ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Borgoo, as well as in the neighbourhood of Algi, and in all the countries between them and the sea, that Lander passed through, he met with tribes of Fellatas, nearly white, who are not moslem, but pagan. "They are certainly," he says, "the same people, as they speak the same language, and have the same features and colour, except those who have crossed with the negro. They are as fair as the lower class of Portuguese ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages; so that 'pagans' or villagers, came to be applied to all the remaining votaries of the old and decayed superstitions, although not all, but only most of them, were such. In an edict of the Emperor Valentinian, of date A.D. 368, 'pagan' first assumes this secondary meaning. 'Heathen' has run a course curiously similar. When the Christian faith first found its way into Germany, it was the wild dwellers on the heaths who were the slowest to accept it, the last probably ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... interest in the West Roxbury Association for the Old Manse at Concord (truly a poetic bargain), he wrote the most keenly humorous of his shorter sketches, his "The Celestial Railroad," and in it represented the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant, the Transcendentalist, who "makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... more zealous to recast French society in its old mould, and so to restore their church to its former place there, than to reform and purify the moral condition of souls. Here was a profound mistake. The Christian Church is not like the pagan Antaeus, who renews his strength by touching the earth; it is on the contrary, by detaching itself from the world, and re-ascending towards heaven, that the Church in its hours of peril regains its vigour. When we saw it depart from its appropriate and sublime mission, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... statement of a melancholy fact. The average state school, high or low, is absolutely colorless as to religion. Even the morality that is taught is not the morality of the Christian religion, but of philosophical ethics that differ but little from the ethics of the pagan. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... imperfect analogies. A voice, like that which is said to have startled the mariner of old on the coasts of Ionia, and to have announced to him the cessation of oracles, comes to us from all the remains of pagan antiquity, warning us that the spirit of that ancient civilization has departed with its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the human race, it teaches us that the maxims and the oracles by which ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... into the lap of a friend, incur debts which he would not pay, quarrel wildly with a man about a rouble, remember things that you would expect him to forget, forget everything that he should remember—a pagan, a saint, a blackguard, a hero—anything you please so long as you ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... professors, in the way of mere religious observances; yet was he as far from being in that state which St. Paul has described succinctly as "for me to live in Christ, and to die is gain," as if he had been a pagan. It was not the love of God that was active in his soul, but the love of self; and he happened to exhibit his passion under these restrained and deceptive forms, simply because he had been born and educated in a state of society ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... ceremony of that kind would soothe the last hours of Tim Hurley," said the pagan Endicott, "but I am curious, if you will pardon me, to know if the holy oils would have a similar effect on ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... elsewhere there is, in rather narrow and usual limits, a good deal else. Charlemagne's daughter, and the daughters of peers and paladins, figure: and their characteristics are not very different from those of the pagan damsels. It is, indeed, unnecessary to convert them,—a process to which their miscreant sisters usually submit with great goodwill,—and they are also relieved from the necessity of showing the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... faith. Once liberated, however, Christianity appropriated bodily for its public rites the basilica-type and the general substance of Roman architecture. Shafts and capitals, architraves and rich linings of veined marble, even the pagan Bacchic symbolism of the vine, it adapted to new uses in its own service. Constantine led the way in architecture, endowing Bethlehem and Jerusalem with splendid churches, and his new capital on the Bosphorus with the first of the three ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Pagan Northern Mariana Islands Palau Pacific Islands, Trust Territory of the Palawan Philippines Palermo [US Consulate General] Italy Palk Strait Indian Ocean Palma de Mallorca Spain [US Consular Agency] Pamirs China; Soviet ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... universal, this clasps us, as Abraham's bosom did Lazarus, within its infinite embraces, causing every fibre of our being to quicken under its heavenly truths. Ithuriel's golden spear was not more antagonistic to Satan's loathly transformation—than is Christian opposed to pagan art. The wide, the awful gulf, separating one from the other, will be felt instantly in its true force by first thinking ZEUS, and then thinking CHRIST. How pale, shadowy, and shapeless the vision of lust, revenge, and impotence, that rises at the thought of Zeus; but ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... to join in the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God. It is the only occasion of the kind, and the clergy, either ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... whom good Angels Had preserv'd from Murderers' hands, And from Pagan chains had rescued, Liv'd with honour on his lands. Sons he had, saw Sons of theirs: And through ages, Heirs of Heirs, 110 A long posterity renown'd, Sounded the Horn ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... thus command obedience to the State, even to a pagan Government, such as the Roman was at the time they wrote, it will scarcely be denied by any Christian that obedience is due to the Church, and to the ecclesiastical government, altogether apart from any question of infallibility. In fact, though ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... folk. But his humorous triumphs are bucolic. And for another source of keenest pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work. Whether for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master. His mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is inscrutably dark and mysterious. He knows, none better, of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... such an idea of marriage should be gaining foothold in America. It has its root in an ignoble view of life,—an utter and pagan darkness as to all that man and woman are called to do in that highest relation where they act as one. It is a mean and low contrivance on both sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and heroic toils of home ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... best that I can wish for its adherents is, that they should speedily reach a point at which they could perceive their doctrines to be debasing. I hope, indeed, that they do not realise their own meaning: but I could almost as soon join in some old pagan ceremonies, gash my body with knives, or swing myself from a hook, as indulge in this ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal music. Perhaps we should add here that Prometheus is, and probably always will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it suggests, by contrast, Milton's Christian ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... James Stuart and of Clementine Sobieski. The birth took place in Rome, and cardinals accredited from all the great Powers of Europe were present on the occasion to bear witness to it. The city was alive with such excitement as it had seldom witnessed since the days when pagan Rome became papal Rome. The streets in the vicinity of the house where Clementine Sobieski lay in her pain were choked with the gilt carriages of the proudest Italian nobility; princes of the Church ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... what wonder? Close to where I sat was the altar of Our Lady of La Salette, offering to the adoration of the people the most coarse and revolting of impostures. And in the course of the service, an image of the Virgin, from which the taste of a Greek Pagan would have recoiled, was borne round the aisles in procession, manifestly the favorite object of worship in a church nominally devoted to the worship of God. An educated man in France, even one of the best character and naturally religious, would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... hygienic sandals, a white toga and a brown felt Jaeger pileus. Mr. HAROLD BEGBIE as MARCELLUS, the best boy of ancient Rome, formed an agreeable contrast to the numerous Messalinas, Poppaeas and Cleopatras who lent a regrettably Pagan element to the assembly. But Lady ASTOR as CORNELIA, mother of the GRACCHI, was an austere and dignified figure in her panniered Botticelli stola, with pearl-embroidered red wings, and a flabellum (or fan) of albatross feathers with gold bells attached. The grandeur ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... blamed them. Every sect, in its origin, and especially in its time of persecution, has had its fanatics. The early Christians, if we may credit the admissions of their own writers or attach the slightest credence to the statements of pagan authors, were by no means exempt from reproach and scandal in this respect. Were the Puritans themselves the men to cast stones at the Quakers and Baptists? Had they not, in the view at least of the Established Church, turned all England upside down with their fanaticisms and extravagances ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... no doubt that, as your correspondent suggests, the judicial oath was originally taken without kissing the book, but with the form of laying the right hand upon it; and, moreover that this custom is of Pagan origin. Amongst the Greeks, oaths were frequently accompanied by sacrifice; and it was the custom to lay the hands upon the victim, or upon the altar, thereby calling to witness the deity by whom the oath was sworn. So Juvenal, Sat. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... of Fable," Mr. Bulfinch endeavored to impart the pleasure of classical learning to the English reader by presenting the stories of Pagan mythology in a form adapted to modern taste. In this volume the attempt has been made to treat in the same way the stories of the second "age of fable"—the age which witnessed the dawn of the several ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... spirits of the sons of Adam mount upwards, and if those of the beasts go downwards?" And that it is false according to the Gentiles, let the testimony of Ovid in the first chapter of his Metamorphoses prove, where he treats of the constitution of the World according to the Pagan belief, or rather belief of the Gentiles, saying: "Man is born "—he did not say "Men;" he said, "Man is born," or rather, "that the Artificer of all things made him from Divine seed, or that the new earth, but lately parted from the noble ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... a mother's book, it is a book for fathers, for all teachers of children, and also for pastors, who will be especially interested in the author's efforts to separate what Christ actually taught from the ideas which we have inherited from our pagan ancestors, and who will find in the volume abundant fresh material on the most pressing problem of ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... you like to see hanging in your room the picture of the Good Shepherd with the little lamb, so they began to long for pictures from their Bible. Every heathen Roman had his house decorated with pictures and carvings from his pagan religion, but it was in the dim underground galleries that ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... Sunday; and two club-houses for balls and concerts. A printing office and a newspaper, published weekly or oftener, are, in such towns, establishments of course. Wyborg, the most ancient town in Jutland, the capital in the time of the pagan kings, and once a great city, with twelve parish churches and six monasteries, but now containing no remains of its former grandeur, and only about 3000 inhabitants, has its newspaper three times a week, its classical school, its burger school, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... basin on the ground, with which Don Quixote contented himself, saying that the pagan had shown his discretion and imitated the beaver, which finding himself pressed by the hunters bites and cuts off with its teeth that for which by its natural instinct, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... soften its natural ugliness, or elevate its insignificance. Except a few lichens, there was not a mark of vegetation about it. Not a single ivy leaf grew on its spotted and wasted walls. It gave a hopeless, pagan expression to the whole landscape—for it stood on a rising ground, from which we had an extensive prospect of height and hollow, cornfield and pasture and wood, away to the dim ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... was somewhat of a religious man, far from decorating the ship with pagan idols, such as Jupiter, Neptune or Hercules, which heathenish abominations, I have no doubt, occasion the misfortunes and shipwreck of many a noble vessel, he I say, on the contrary, did laudably erect for a head, a goodly image of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Pagan religion still prevailed, the new goddess, in whose honour temples would be raised and to whom statues would be erected in all the capitals of the world, would he the goddess Worry. London would be the chief seat and centre of her sway. A gorgeous statue, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... arrived at a better knowledge of her capabilities to-day and began to realize that she was as changeable as a chameleon. One moment she could be like the sirocco in warmth and languor, the next as sparkling as the sunlit ocean. Again she could be steeped in a dreamy abstraction or alive with a pagan joy of life. She might have been sixteen or thirty, as her mood chanced to affect her. Of all the crossed strains that go to make up the Sicilian race she had inherited more of the Oriental than the Greek or Roman. Somewhere ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... manners. He who presumes to censure me for my religious belief, or want of belief; who makes it a matter of criticism or reproach that I am a Theist or Atheist, Trinitarian or Unitarian, Catholic or Protestant, Pagan or Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, or Mormon, is guilty of rudeness and insult. If any of these modes of belief make me intolerant or intrusive, he may resent such intolerance or repel such intrusion; ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... may hang in the corners of the world like fine-spun cobwebs, with greedy, puffed-up, spider-like lusts in the middle. And this, which in Christian times is the abuse and corruption of the sense of beauty, was in that Pagan life of which St. Paul speaks, little less than the essence of it, and the best they had; for I know not that of the expressions of affection towards external nature to be found among Heathen writers, there are any of which the balance and leading thought cleaves not towards ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... very remote times from Norway to the shores of the Mediterranean the glow of St. John's fires might have been seen. The Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century forbade the custom as a heathen rite, but the Church endeavoured to win over the custom from its Pagan associations and to attach to it a Christian signification. In the island of Jersey the older inhabitants used to light fires under large iron pots full of water, in which they placed silver articles—as spoons, mugs, &c., and ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of faith which carried them ever farther ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... dashing soldier and courtier of the Renaissance should be represented in the guise of a Roman warrior, is an anomaly, irreconcilable as that of pagan gods and the personification of Christian attributes here placed vis-a-vis. Perhaps the grief-stricken wife, who was, as it appears, of a highly romantic and adventuresome turn, wished thus to commemorate the heroic qualities of ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... his friends had forborne to mention the fact to him. His manner was urbane, although quite serious. He spoke French and English fluently. In brief, I doubt if you could have found the equal of this Pagan shopkeeper among the Christian traders of ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... express their thoughts, after which they began to desist from war, to fortify cities and enact laws." They who in later times have embraced a similar theory, have been led to it by no deference to the opinions of their pagan predecessors, but rather in spite of very strong prepossessions in favour of an opposite hypothesis, namely, that of the superiority of their original progenitors, of whom they believe themselves to be ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... New England, was false, disloyal. She had but half kept the faith. When the cry of pagan England had gone forth for light, it had been heard; the light had been given. But now in her day of illumination, when the Macedonian cry came to her, she closed her ears and listened not. On her skirts was the blood of the souls ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... at that tyme when it became of Pagan Christian seimes to me much viser then our reformers under Knox when we past from Papisme to Protestantisme. They did not demolish the Heathen Idol temples, as we furiously did Christian, but converted them to Christian temples, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... who never lost a moment, that we find the men who have moved and advanced the world,—by their learning, their science, or their inventions. Labour of some sort is one of the conditions of existence. The thought has come down to us from pagan times, that "Labour is the price which the gods have set upon all that is excellent." The thought is also worthy of ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... manhood's early bloom The Christian hero found a Pagan tomb: Religion, sorrowing o'er her favorite son, Points to the glorious trophies which he won. Eternal trophies, not with slaughter red, Not stained with tears by hopeless captives shed; But trophies of the Cross. For that dear Name Through every form of ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... making a commotion that brought Mrs. Munn from her pie-baking in hurried alarm. He washed his hands, resumed his coat, and, leaning out of the window, wished with all his might that he had something to do. He was seized with an honest, pagan desire that some one would get sick, or that there might be an accident in the mill—-just a mild accident, of course; or, better still, that that queer specimen of humanity sitting under his cherry-tree, down there, should be smitten ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an unkempt and broken ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... "—up," enpaki. pad : sxvelajxo, pufo; remburi. pagan : idol'isto, -ano. page : pagxo; (boy) lakeeto; (noble) pagxio. pail : sitelo. pain : dolor'o, -i; igi. "take—s," peni. paint : pentri, kolori; "-brush," peniko. pair : paro. pale : pala; malhela. paling : palisaro. palm : palmo, manplato. palpitation : korbatado. pan : tervazo. "sauce-", ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... a century ago the learned Mr. Faber, in his Origin of Pagan Idolatry, expressed his astonishment at "the singular, minute and regular accordance" between the classical myths. That accordance has now been discovered to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... than anything I have yet seen, and Elsie, if not an angel, is at least part witch and part fairy. But you need not fear ghostly entertainment from mother's larder. As you are a Christian, and not a Pagan, no more of this reluctance. Indeed, nolens volens, I shall not permit you to go out into this November storm to-night;" and Elsie, to her dismay, saw the new-comer led up to the "spare room" with ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... contentions for the prize, divided with him the applause of the populace. At that time the theatre was held to be an object of the highest magnitude and importance, and made an essential and magnificent part of their pagan worship. The Athenians, therefore, were delighted by the contentions of these two prodigious men: but, as it generally happens in cases of rivalship between public favourites, the people divided into two ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... me," said he; "the Zapoteques are still more pagan than Christian, and given to superstitious practices to a greater degree than any other Indians in Mexico. Our Catholic curas in their villages are there only for the name of the thing, and as a matter of formality. The business ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... came round again to the artificial lake in front of the house. For some reason it looked a very artificial lake; indeed, the whole scene was like a classical landscape with a touch of Watteau; the Palladian facade of the house pale in the moon, and the same silver touching the very pagan and naked marble nymph in the middle of the pond. Rather to his surprise, he found another figure there beside the statue, sitting almost equally motionless; and the same silver pencil traced the wrinkled brow and patient face of Horne Fisher, still dressed ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... danger from, limited, 250 suppression of, due to danger from doctrine in pagan and mediaeval times, 251; only necessary when practice of, dangerous ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... hast said more than enough already. Think'st thou the son of a duke royal would look at a brown-skinned savage, an unbelieving pagan, no matter how comely, as thou call'st it, she ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... a small Onondaga Indian boy, a good-looking, black-eyed little chap with as pagan a heart as ever beat under a copper-colored skin. His father and grandfathers were pagans. His ancestors for a thousand years back, and yet a thousand years back of that, had been pagans, and We-hro, with the pride of his religion and his race, would ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson |
