"Idolatrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a communion occasion) it was rigged over the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew why. And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope below, and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the turfy soil of the Ring itself. In truth the situation was well qualified to give a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any wanted. But these congregations assembled under conditions at once so formidable and romantic ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which accounts for the pure monotheism of the Hebrews from their peculiar national character, is sufficiently refuted by their history. Notwithstanding the severe penalties with which the Mosaic code of laws visited idolatrous practices in every form, the people were perpetually relapsing into the idolatry of the surrounding nations, and could be cured of this propensity only by the oft-repeated ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the Bechwanas as they were when the Moffats first settled among them, for up to that time the efforts of the missionaries had been unattended with success, we find a people who had neither an idea of a God, nor who performed any idolatrous rites; who failed to see that there was anything more agreeable to flesh and blood in our customs than in their own; but who allowed that the missionaries were a wiser and superior race of beings to themselves; who practised ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... town,... he proceeded to tell me that the city was the metropolis of a kingdom now governed by his father; that the former king and all his subjects were Magi, worshipers of fire and of Nardoun. the ancient king of the giants who rebelled against God. 'Though I was born,' continued he, 'of idolatrous parents, it was my good fortune to have a woman governess who was a strict observer of the Mohammedan religion. She taught me Arabic from Al Koran; by her I was instructed in the true religion, which I would never afterward renounce. About three years ago a thundering ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... had an idolatrous husband; for even in Arcadia she could not, or would not, keep her coquetry within decent bounds. She flirted outrageously with the neighbouring squires and with such men of rank as drifted her way; but the baronet saw no cause for alarm or resentment. He was frankly delighted that his wife had ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... blessing and fruit, and the purpose for which we are commanded to cherish it, is that thereby we may become like Him in whom we trust. 'They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.' That is the key to the degradations that inhere in idolatrous worship, and that principle is true about all worship—as the god so is every one that trusteth in it. 'As the mountains are round about Mount Zion,' God is round about the people that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Grecians the foolishness of worldly wisdom, and the impossibility of salvation but through Christ, whom they despised on account of the ignominious death he died. Because at Rome, the proud mistress of the world, they thundered out the terrors of the law upon that idolatrous, war-making, and slave-holding community. Why were the martyrs stretched upon the rack, gibbetted and burnt, the scorn and diversion of a Nero, whilst their tarred and burning bodies sent up a light which illuminated the Roman capital? ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... examined Jeanne concerning her childhood in her village. He essayed to show that she had been cruel, had displayed a homicidal tendency from her earliest years, and had been addicted to those idolatrous practices which had given the folk ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Jezebel." This is most significant. There is no worse character named in the whole Old Testament. She not only represented the worst adulterous uncleanness in herself, but she was the national leader energetically fostering unclean idolatrous practices among the people. Jezebel pulled God's light-holder nation down to the lowest moral level it ever reached. She brazenly dominated king and people, and remained stubbornly obstinate ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... effort was made to impede and defeat the Pharaoh. His position grew daily more insecure, and at last he turned his back on the capital of his fathers, and built himself a new city far away to the north. The priests of Amon had thus far triumphed; the old idolatrous worship was carried on once more in the great temple of Karnak, though its official head was absent, and Khu-n-Aten with his archives and his court had fled to a safer home. Upper Egypt was left to its worship ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... (lay) 997. pagan; heathen, heathenish; ethnic, ethnical; gentile, paynim^; pantheistic, polytheistic. Judaical, Mohammedan, Brahminical^, Buddhist &c n.; Romish, Protestant &c n.. bigoted &c (prejudiced) 481, (obstinate) 606; superstitious &c (credulous) 486; fanatical; idolatrous &c 991; visionary &c (imaginative) 515. Phr. slave to no sect [Pope]; superstitione tollenda religio non tollitur ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the Israelites; there are very few Bedouin tribes who have not one or more tombs of protecting saints (Makam), in whose honour they offer sacrifices; the custom probably originated in their ancient idolatrous worship, and was in some measure retained by the sacrifices enjoined by Mohammed in the great festivals of ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... not obliged to adore and invoke you, and celebrate festivals, fast, make oblations, hold masses for your honor [and worship], and put my faith in you for my salvation. I can in other ways indeed honor, love, and thank you in Christ. If now such idolatrous honor were withdrawn from angels and departed saints, the remaining honor would be without harm and would quickly be forgotten. For when advantage and assistance, both bodily and spiritual, are no more to be expected, the saints will not be troubled [the worship of the saints will ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... made many pictures in Italy the objects of attentions which our Puritan fathers condemned as idolatrous. The miraculous 'Annunziata' became, accordingly, the divinity of a splendid shrine. The fame of her interposition spread far and wide, and her tabernacle was filled with the costly offerings of the devout, the showy tributes of the zealous. The prince ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was no less than a vigorous attempt to convert me to Popery. I had not yet bestowed any great attention on the details of that abominable device, but was most fully persuaded of its being a system of idolatrous delusion, the working of which was strikingly manifested in the wretchedness, the immorality, the turbulence and degrading superstitions of the poor creatures around me. It never had been my practice ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... justly conclude, by arguments preceding the proof of facts, that one idolatrous people must have borrowed their deities, rites, and tenets from another, since gods of all shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance, too strong to have ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... they will be as an ensign in the land. "The Lord their God shall save them in that day as the flock of his people: for they shall be as the stones of a crown, lifted up as an ensign upon his land;" Zech. ix. 16. But who are these? Even idolatrous Ephraim, and backsliding ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan
... man should be raised to His elevation,—which placed the holiness of God in the centre, and founded upon it the requirement that its possessors should be holy;—but it would be the soft, sensual, idolatrous doctrine which flattered human corruption, because from that it had its origin. Thus the Jehovah of the Israelites became in reality what they sometimes called Him by way of alternation—a Baal. And the matter was now much more dangerous than ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... as connected with the Catholic worship. The Calvinists were masters of Caen, and, incited by the information of what had taken place at Rouen, they resolved to repeat the same outrages. Under the specious pretext of abolishing idolatrous worship, they pillaged and ransacked every church and monastery: they broke the windows and organs, destroyed the images, stole the ecclesiastical ornaments, sold the shrines, committed pulpits, chests, books, and whatever was combustible, to the fire; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... with Paul's practice: the Gentiles were not to be required to be circumcised; only they were enjoined to abstain from meat offered in sacrifice to idols, from fornication, and from blood. To these conditions Paul consented. He did not, indeed, see any harm in eating meat which had been used in idolatrous sacrifices, when it was exposed for sale in the market; but the feasts upon such meat in the idol temples, which were often followed by wild outbreaks of sensuality, alluded to in the prohibition of fornication, were temptations ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... They were, at times, angry, afraid, unsatisfied, ambitious, jealous. Aristotle gave to the world the conception of a transcendent God, a being who is real and yet is "without body, parts and passions," who cannot receive idolatrous worship, and is not an object of sense. Impassibility was one of the highest attributes of this being. The attribute does not involve or imply absence of feeling. Originally it had no reference to feeling, in the psychological sense of that word. It certainly excludes ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... at that time had borne by no means all its fruits. There was a perceptible improvement of the public morals, and a partial release from oppression; but, other than that, the SEEDS SOWN BY THE SON OF MAN, having fallen into idolatrous hearts, had produced nothing save innumerable discords and a quasi-poetical mythology. Instead of developing into their practical consequences the principles of morality and government taught by The Word of God, his followers busied themselves in speculations as to his birth, his origin, his ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... come across the sea, with an unknown code of instructions, with a few companions, whom multitudes would obey, and who would obtain dignity and reverence from the men of Erinn; and that he would expel kings and princes from their governments, and would destroy all the idolatrous images; and that the faith which would arrive would live for ever in Erin. Two years, or three, before the arrival of Patrick, what they used to prophesy was ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... unknown God," he said to the assembled multitude, "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you," and then began to preach Jesus Christ and His great salvation. But so far from imitating this example, they, in many instances, took part in their idolatrous and superstitious ceremonies. It is vain to attempt an excuse of these Englishmen by saying either that it was the fashion of the times to pass by the heathen without a thought for their wretched lost condition, or that the party of philosophers and scientific men and discoverers ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Christians seem to have grasped the true spirit of Christianity. All that appeals to the eye in the rites and ceremonies impresses them—the glamour and pomp of the procession attract them; they are very fervent in outward observances, but ever prone to stray towards the idolatrous. A pretended apparition of the Blessed Virgin is an old profitable trick of the natives, practised as recently as December, 1904, in the village of Namacpacan (Ilocos), where a woman, who declared the Virgin ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... refuses to comply with it, and loves the departed friend more than Christ, or truth and duty; and then, dying, finds that the departed friend is saved, through that very faith, which the other refused from idolatrous attachment to the departed; and now they are separated; whereas, had the survivor forsaken all for Christ and the truth, he would have had a hundred fold in this world, and, in the world to come, would have found that friend ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... rummaging of cellars, your demolishing of Christian temples, and bearing off, in triumph, the superstitious plate and pictures, the ornaments of their wicked altars, when all rich moveables were sentenced for idolatrous, and all that was idolatrous was seized? Answer first, for your remembrance of all these sweetnesses of mutiny; for upon those grounds I ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... two sons. Their crime consisted in not going to mass, and in practising private worship at home. They confessed the offence, for they protested that they could not endure to see the profanation of their Saviour's name in the idolatrous sacraments. They were asked what rites they practised in their own house. One of the sons, a mere boy, answered, "We fall on our knees, and pray to God that he may enlighten our hearts, and forgive our sins. We pray for our sovereign, that his reign may be prosperous, and his life peaceful. We also ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Caboi, "land of the dead," for the people killed their prisoners), little is known, for they were exterminated as a distinct race, and their few relics were disregarded as worthless or destroyed as idolatrous. It is believed, however, that they had some knowledge of the arts; they worked gold into ornaments, and copper and stone into tools and weapons, and they wore helmets of feathers, like those of the Hawaiian ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... since the first commencement of Christianity. He explained that there were nations still existing in a distant portion of the globe in a state of the wildest barbarism. Ignorant savages were they, with many cruel and idolatrous customs, who were cannibals and murderers, and given up to the worst vices of the heathen. Their abject and pitiable state, he told us, the Lord God had witnessed with Divine commiseration, and had determined that the light ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... propagation of the notions of monotheism; of the divine origin of man, and of the duties incumbent upon him to practice justice, charity, rectitude, and piety; they had to protest incessantly against polytheism, and against all and every idolatrous and superstitious creed, as adverse and injurious to the development of the principles of revealed religion; they had to confirm these theories by making themselves the exemplars of a religious life, ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... the sky; hence the Rhodians, who worshipped the sun as their chief deity, annually dedicated a chariot and four horses to him, and flung them into the sea for his use. Doubtless they thought that after a year's work his old horses and chariot would be worn out. From a like motive, probably, the idolatrous kings of Judah dedicated chariots and horses to the sun, and the Spartans, Persians, and Massagetae sacrificed horses to him. The Spartans performed the sacrifice on the top of Mount Taygetus, the beautiful range behind which ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... heretics has not been without effect as regards the children of St. Francis, for of a thousand martyrs which they reckon in his Order, a very great number of them were put to death with greater cruelty in this and latter times by the sectarians than by idolatrous tyrants. Heresy will be ever so, the daughter of a parent, who, according to the words of Jesus Christ, was a murderer from ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... replied that Jerusalem was as sacred a place in the eyes of Mussulmans, and as dear to them, as it was to the Christians, and that they could on no account give it up. In respect to the true cross, the Christians, he said, if they could obtain it, would worship it in an idolatrous manner, as they did their other relics; and as the law of the Prophet in the Koran forbade idolatry, they could not conscientiously give it up. "By so doing," said he, "we should be accessories ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols?" The reason why the sacred writer here dissuades from associations with the heathen, is evidently, that their worship was idolatrous, and calculated to lead from obedience to God. And treaties, of whatever kind with the enemies of God, that are condemned, are to be shunned as a snare to the soul. Wherever they are forbidden, there is implied an exhibition of the duty of adhering to His service; and ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... stopped, Tom awoke from his idolatrous dream. He brought Nellie to a seat and sat awkwardly beside her. His old self-complacency had left him. Nellie was talking to him, but he did not hear what she said. He was not looking at her, but at himself. Before he knew it she had left him and was dancing with Jim ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... of olden times. The commotion soon spread to Mosul, where the terrified workman, "entering breathless into the bazars, announced to every one he met that Nimrod had appeared." The authorities of the town were alarmed, put their heads together and decided that such idolatrous proceedings were an outrage to religion. The consequence was that Layard was requested by his friend Ismail-Pasha to suspend operations for awhile, until the excitement should have subsided, a request ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... between a resolute conception, recognized for such, and an involuntary apprehension of spiritual existence, already insisted on at some length. And you will see more and more clearly as we proceed, that the deliberate and intellectually commanded conception is not idolatrous in any evil sense whatever, but is one of the grandest and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of any kind, in a thing in which there ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... could found a charge of heresy against her. Her visions were distorted by them into a proof of infernal agency; even the harmless superstitions of her village home did not escape being turned into idolatrous ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... recognize no one present, though he regarded all that was passing with a peculiar air of still and earnest attention; and wherever he moved, his calm, penetrating gaze seemed to diffuse a singular uneasiness about him. Now his eye was fixed with a quiet scrutiny on the idolatrous statues, with their votive adornments—now it followed earnestly the young forms that were wreathing in the graceful waves of the dance; and then he turned towards the tables, loaded with every luxury and sparkling with wines, where the devotion to Bacchus became more than poetic fiction; and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Delany mentions it not with doubt, but only with regret. Swift never mentioned her without a sigh. The rest of his life was spent in Ireland, in a country to which not even power almost despotic, nor flattery almost idolatrous, could reconcile him. He sometimes wished to visit England, but always found some reason of delay. He tells Pope, in the decline of life, that he hopes once more to see him; "but if not," says he, "we must part as ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... of age, the Rabouilleuse felt for the first time a true love, an idolatrous love, the love which includes all ways of loving,—that of Gulnare and that of Medora. As soon as the penniless officer found out the respective situations of Flore and Jean-Jacques Rouget, he saw something more desirable than an "amourette" in an intimacy with the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... confess that some notion of the sort flashed across my mind for a moment. The dark grove, the great idolatrous looking marae, with its heathen altar, and monstrous images; the pile of skulls; the hideous old man and his strange words; all tended to suggest vague but startling suspicions. But another glance at the open and friendly countenances of our guides reassured me. In answer to a question in regard ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... speakers gave an account of the conversion, sickness, death and Christian burial of a member of the school, a youth of eighteen. The heathen relatives and friends had attributed the illness to the boy's desertion of the religion of his fathers, and had begged him to allow the burning of idolatrous incense. But he had calmly resisted their appeals, and, in an alien land, far from his father and mother, had pillowed his dying head on the breast of the Saviour ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 5, May, 1889 • Various
... been committed, or in some cases died with them. But to this day it is believed that vast stores of the precious metal still lie waiting the hand of the discoverer, the barbaric relics of a fierce and bloody religion, the creed of an idolatrous people; and many an explorer unrewarded has wasted his days amidst the traces of the ruined temples and tokens of a grand civilisation, scattered here and there amidst the forests and mountain ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... salvation Much as there was to discourage them in this city of pagoda, "the missionary looked out on the strange magnificence of shrines and temples that lay around him,—upon the monuments that had perpetuated for many ages this idolatrous worship,—upon the priests who taught it, and the countless devotees who practised it; and as he prepared to strike the first blow at the hoary superstition which they all enshrined, he felt to the full the sublimity and greatness of the undertaking. He stood alone, the herald ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... in a way which did not promise much hope of reconciliation. He had grounded his attack upon the letters A.M.D.G., which he had seen outside a Roman Catholic chapel, and which of course stood for Ad Mariam Dei Genetricem. Could anything be more idolatrous? ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I shewed them her Majesty's picture, which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof. The like and a more large discourse I made to the rest of the nations, both in my passing to Guiana and to those of the borders, so as in that part of the world her Majesty is very famous and admirable; whom they now call EZRABETA CASSIPUNA AQUEREWANA, which is as much as 'Elizabeth, ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... in full testimony the nevertheless fact that such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity and personal spirituality ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... end which cut all compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he look on with a secret smile at the turmoil they made, as if it mattered which was uppermost, with a natural horror ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... in Germany, where a Jew, on a Rhine boat, inspired or increased his aversion to works of sacred art, as being "idolatrous." About 1542-43 he was reading with pupils at Cambridge, and was remarked for the severity of his ascetic virtue, and for his great charity. At some uncertain date he translated the Helvetic Confession of Faith, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... love. 'Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart's table,—heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour: But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his relics. Who comes here? One that goes with him: I love him for his sake; And yet I know him a notorious liar, Think him a great way fool, solely a coward; Yet these fix'd evils ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Persia to and fro like a tennis-ball, upset the throne of Artaxerxes, countersigned haughtily the elevation of a new Basileus more friendly to herself, and then recrossed the Tigris homewards, after having torn forcibly out of the heart and palpitating entrails of Persia, whatever trophies that idolatrous empire had formerly wrested from herself. These were not the acts of an effeminate kingdom. In the language of Wordsworth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... and I remember distinctly, in consequence, that the temple of Castor had three columns standing and the temple of Saturn had eight, while of the Basilica Julia there was nothing at all but the places where they used to be. Mrs. Malt said it made her feel quite idolatrous to look at them, and for her part she couldn't be sorry they had fallen so much into decay—it was only right and proper. This launched Mr. and Mrs. Malt and my parents upon a discussion which threatened to ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... been ransacked and the work of clearing out the idols in the village was finished, the procession moved on to the next hamlet. The villages were very near each other, so the journey was not wearisome; and at last when every vestige of the old idolatrous life had been taken from the homes of five villages, the happy crowd marched back to the first village. There was a large courtyard near the temple and here the procession halted. The boys dropped their well-filled ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... and the door swung open—but the black-cassocked gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary of idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend Ozias Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings, and very much on the alert for the Scarlet Woman. He was supported, to his evident relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah B., and the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... our stock of light, this detachment from the idolatrous conception of religion. It is no loss of the religious sense, as the persisters in idolatry maintain. It is quite the contrary, it is a restitution of allegiance to the true Divinity. It is a step made in the direction of this Divinity, it is an abjuration of the dogmas ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... epicurean indifference, and abandoned himself to inglorious pleasures; and as Nero is said to have fiddled while his capital was in ashes, so he, in this great emergency, consumed his time in gardening and the arts of cookery, and was commended by his idolatrous courtiers as a philosopher and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... face, the fairest in the world (a thing beyond hope), would be of more avail for my healing than all the Pharaoh powders of the apothecaries. These, in truth, I had never taken, but put them away secretly, as doubting whether such medicaments, the very dust of the persecuting Egyptian and idolatrous race, were fit for a Christian to swallow, with any hope of a blessing. Thus my kind nurse ended, calling herself my lady's sister in the love of France and of the Maid, and bidding my lady be mindful of so true a lover, who lay sick for a token at ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... provided they, conducted themselves like good citizens. For this toleration—a lesson which statesmen like Buys and Barneveld had learned in the school of William the Silent—the opposition-party were denounced as bolsterers of Papists, and Papists themselves at heart, and "worshippers of idolatrous idols." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... at Eton together. Geoffrey, four years the senior, a member of "Pop," and an athlete of many colours, found himself one day the object of an almost idolatrous worship on the part of a skinny little being, discreditably clever at Latin verses, and given over to the degrading habit of solitary piano practicing on half-holidays. He was embarrassed but touched by ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... crew. Nearly all of them had the handiness then required for life in a new country. And, what with conviction and what with prejudice, they were also quite disposed to look upon the expedition as a sort of Crusade against idolatrous papists, and therefore as a very proper climax to the Great Awakening which had recently roused New England to the heights of religious zealotry under the leadership of the famous George ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... from Paradise of Adam and Eve, Satan and his followers did not return to Hell, but remained on earth, the fallen angels becoming the evil gods of various idolatrous nations and Satan engaging in every kind of evildoing which he knew would vex the Powers of Heaven. All the time he was troubled by the thought of the heavenly foe who he had been told would one day appear on earth to crush ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... time had come at which the Roman Empire of the West was to collapse and Gaul was to become France, God did not allow such a noble part of Christendom to remain long under idolatrous princes; and wishing to hand over to the kings of the French the keeping of his Church, which he had formerly intrusted to the emperors, he gave not to France only, but to the whole Western world, a new Constantine in the person of Clovis. The miraculous ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted. He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it, sailed on it, and she was never quite happy ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... began to leave Luther's own monastery, and the students and citizens to tear down the images of the saints in the churches. The Lord's Supper was no longer celebrated in the form of the Mass, since that was declared to be an idolatrous worshiping of the bread and wine. Then Carlstadt reached the conclusion that all learning was superfluous, for the Scriptures said plainly that God had concealed himself from the wise and revealed the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Philistines—were unsubdued. The land was desolated by constant war. It was one sure sign of the prevailing disorder and anarchy, that "the highways were unoccupied, and the travelers walked through byways" (Judg. v. 6). Not unfrequently the people forgot Jehovah, and fell into idolatrous practices. In this period of degeneracy and confusion, men full of sacred enthusiasm and of heroic courage arose to smite the enemies of Israel, and to restore the observance of the law. Of these heroic leaders, Deborah, Gideon, Jepththa, and Samson were ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... amiable dispositions, was absolute. In considering Mrs. Henry Siddons's character, when years had modified its first impression upon my own, my estimate of it underwent, of course, some inevitable alteration; but when I stayed with her in Edinburgh I was at the idolatrous period of life, and never, certainly, had an enthusiastic young girl worshiper a worthier or ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the idolatrous system of faith and worship of the pagans, and by simple machinery the scene is made to pass from the view of the audience, and we have represented the faith and glorious emblems of Christianity. The machinery ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... The idolatrous worship of her brother for the painter caused her to suffer still more as she comprehended, with the infallible perspicacity of antipathy, the immense dupery. She read the very depths of the souls of the two old comrades of Beaumont. She knew that in that friendship, as ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I showed them her Majesty's picture' (doubtless in ruff, farthingale, and stomacher laden with jewels), 'which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to make them idolatrous thereof.' ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... that education would fit the slaves for the exalted position of citizens. The retrogressives made much of the assertion that adult slaves lately imported, were, on account of their attachment to heathen practices and idolatrous rites, loath to take over the Teutonic civilization, and would at best learn to speak the English language imperfectly only.[1] The reformers, who at times admitted this, maintained that the alleged difficulties encountered in teaching the crudest element of the slaves ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... Church against the tornado of superstition which had been let loose. But what was the use of struggling any longer? He felt the wretchedness of the suffering people committed to his care to be so great that he resigned himself to granting them the idolatrous religion for which he realised them to be eager. Some prudence remaining to him, however, he contented himself in the first instance with drawing up an ordonnance, appointing a commission of inquiry, which was to investigate the question; this implied the acceptance of the miracles after a period ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... can compete with deified Benares in the matter of divine merit that may be conferred on the pilgrim entering its gates and threading its narrow and filth-smeared streets. There two hundred thousand people live and fatten upon the half million devotees coming annually to the idolatrous fountainhead. The sacred city attracts this tide of pious humanity from all the tribes and nations of many-peopled India: they journey to Benares brimming with love and trustfulness, and after a season spent in her temples, at her shrines, and by her sacred stream, she sends them forth ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... Charles the First a Papist because he permitted his queen, who was born and bred a Catholic, to attend Holy Mass. Now we have our newly-formed government not alone countenancing Popery, but actually participating in a supposedly pagan and idolatrous ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... mountain is a little hill which the idolatrous Agaus have in great veneration; their priest calls them together at this place once a year, and having sacrificed a cow, throws the head into one of the springs of the Nile; after which ceremony, every one sacrifices a cow or more, according to their ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... is capable of going at all, except swiftly to perdition? These Austrians have taken a great deal of ruining, first and last! Their relation to the then Sea-Powers, especially to England embarked on the Cause of Liberty, fills one with amazement, by no means of an idolatrous nature; and is difficult to understand at all, or to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to visit the habitations of Christendom once more, my feet would rather follow the tender spirits intrusted to my keeping, even into the idolatrous province of the Jesuits, than take one step backward, while they pined ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... had, during many years, enjoyed, passed to a third judge, Lord Thurlow. Everybody knows what a dominion that eminent judge, Lord Eldon, exercised over the peers, what a share he took in making and unmaking ministries, with what idolatrous veneration he was regarded by one great party in the State, with what dread and aversion he was regarded by the other. When the long reign of Lord Eldon had terminated, other judges, Whig and Tory, appeared at the head of contending factions. Some of us can well remember ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of sentiment. Mr. Plumptre especially expressed in strong terms his repugnance to the proposal on religious grounds; avowing, as the basis of his objections, the belief that the Roman Catholic religion was idolatrous. On the side of the liberal, all were in favour of the motion, except Mr. T. Duncombe, who expressed himself averse to all religious establishments supported out of the public revenue. Some on the conservative side, as Lords Francis ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and lang-nebbit things frae the neist warld. But Father Vaughan thinks himself a privileged person—set him up and lay him down!—I'se be caution the warst stibbler that ever stickit a sermon out ower the Tweed yonder, wad lay a ghaist twice as fast as him, wi' his holy water and his idolatrous trinkets. I dinna believe he speaks gude Latin neither; at least he disna take me up when I tell him the learned names o' ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seldom read greater rubbish than Le Solitaire. It is a historical-romantic story (the idolatrous preface refers both to Scott and to Byron), and bears also strong, if sometimes distinctly unfortunate, resemblances to Mrs. Radcliffe, the Germans, and Chateaubriand. The scene is that of Charles the Bold's defeat at Morat: and the "Solitary" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... fondled the murderous machines of war, responding to the appeal "call me pet names, dearest." The unrelenting gun was the stern cannoneer's lady love. He kissed it with unwashed, mustached lip. In rude and rough devotion he was ready to die rather than abandon the only object of his idolatrous homage. Consistently he baptized the life-devouring monster with blood. Affectionately he named it Mary, Emma, Lizzie. In crossing he Alps, dark night came on as some cannoneers were floundering through drifts of snow, toiling at their gun. They would not leave ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... no notice taken of Christianity in the Mishna, a collection of Jewish traditions compiled about the year 180; although it contains a Tract "De cultu peregrino," of strange or idolatrous worship; yet it cannot be disputed but that Christianity was perfectly well known in the world at this time. There is extremely little notice of the subject in the Jerusalem Talmud, compiled about the year 300, and not much more in the Babylonish Talmud, of the year 500; although both these ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... mere names of the holy days that the objects worshipped by our countrymen were not the same as those whom the most ancient of the Romans called Jove and Mercury, nor those to whom Greece and Latium paid idolatrous homage. For the days, called among our countrymen Thors-day or Odins-day, the ancients termed severally the holy day of Jove or of Mercury. If, therefore, according to the distinction implied in the interpretation ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Christmas, which was considered by the Puritans to be idolatrous, has for many centuries been so universal that it may prove of interest to contrast the rites, ceremonies and quaint beliefs of foreign lands with those of ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... thee. Tell me, Stead, I mind now that thou wast out with father that last day ere the Parson was taken to receive his deserts. I don't believe that even thy churlishness would have stood such blows if thou hadst known naught of the idolatrous vessels, and couldst have saved thy skin by saying so! No answer. Why, what have these malignants done for thee that thou shouldst hold by them? Slain thy father! Burnt thine house! No fault of theirs that thou art alive this day! Canst ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... For a somewhat similar reason the veneration of relics is prevalent among Moslims. Islam indeed provides an object of worship but its ceremonies are so austere and monotonous that any devotional practices which are not forbidden as idolatrous ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... who, like Margaret, was a part of it, says, "the summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of this strange enthusiasm." As he briefly defines it "Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the living God in the soul." Its disciples, says Mr. Channing, "were pleasantly nick-named the 'Like-minded,' on the ground that no two were of the same ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... a French Protestant minister of the 17th century, in his treatise entitled La Religion Catholique Romaine Institute par Nama Pompile, demonstrates that "the Papists took their idolatrous worship of images, as well as all their ceremonies, from the old heathen religion." Bishop Stillingfleet of the English church and a writer of considerable eminence in the 17th century, said, in reference to the complaisant spirit of the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... swayed slowly past. He knew enough to be conscious of what this meant; but he felt at the same time disinclined to humiliate himself by a too facile compliance. A proud American, in the midst of a people he had learned to despise—their idolatrous observances along with them—no wonder he should feel a little defiant and a good deal exasperated. Enough yielding, he thought, to withdraw farther back from behind the pillar, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... upon his divine right, by very force of reiteration, whether his own or that of the clergy who favored royalty, won a growing recognition from a conservative people. For his king as the political head of the nation, the Puritan had all the Englishman's half-idolatrous reverence, until James's own acts outraged ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... nations claimed distinction, as the worshipers of Jehovah, and to be wholly recreant and reprobate. Convicted on such a charge those sign-seeking Pharisees and scribes understood that Jesus classed them as worse than the idolatrous heathen. The words "adultery" and "idolatry" are of related origin, each connoting the act of unfaithfulness and the turning away after false objects of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to torment even the idolatrous Von Buelow. Riemann says: "Domestic misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Buelow left the city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... to them whole nations, to be hated, pillaged, and exterminated; at other times he permits these same nations to exercise over his favorite people the greatest of cruelties. He delivers them into the hands of their enemies, who are likewise the enemies of God himself. Idolatrous nations become masters of the Jews, who are left to feel the insults, the contempt, and the most unheard-of severities, and are sometimes compelled to sacrifice to idols, and to violate the law of their God. The race ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... sees around, without God and without hope, may take place that greatest of miracles called conversion. Nevertheless, every missionary has ever to guard against a most subtle and deadening influence which may be likened to poisonous gas in the enemy's country, lulling him to a condition wherein the idolatrous practices of the people around, instead of stirring him to greater activity, come to be regarded as customs of the nations amongst whom he lives, deplorable ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... orange. No man makes "two bites of a cherry." So let us pass on to the other stages of the day. Only in taking leave of this morning stage, throw your eyes back with us, Christian reader, upon this truly heathen meal, fit for idolatrous dogs like your Greeks and your Romans; survey, through the vista of ages, that thrice-cursed biscuit, with half a fig, perhaps, by way of garnish, and a huge hammer by its side, to secure the certainty of mastication, by previous ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... with the Mongol general unless he would perform the ko-tou, or three genuflections, an act which he and his followers refused as an idolatrous ceremony which would scandalize all Christendom. Finally, as nothing less would be accepted, they, in their wise heads, thought they might consent to perform the ko-tou, provided the general and all his army would become Christians. This folly ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris |
