"Theocracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... herself to at least a partial solution of it. That the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider the subject will, we think, deny. The establishment of a Jewish polity, in the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness is supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and love;—the establishment of such a polity locally between the materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological subtleties ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... we are indebted for the Messianic idea, the hope of a better time in which their high ideal of the theocracy should be realized. With such belief in the future, with pious aspirations enlivening their patriotism, did they comfort and encourage their countrymen. The hope, general or indefinite at first, was afterwards attached to the house of David, out of which a ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... of the people carried into exile. The effect of failure, however, was not to discredit the Law and the Covenant, now once for all adopted by the unshakable Jews. On the contrary, when they returned from exile they re-established the theocracy with greater rigour than ever, adding all the minute observances, ritualistic and social, enshrined in Leviticus. Israel became an ecclesiastical community. The Temple, half fortress, half sanctuary, resounded with perpetual psalms. Piety was fed on a sense at once of consecration ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was to them the ultimate standard of authority—civil and religious. The only restriction on suffrage was its being conditioned on church-membership. They aspired, probably from Calvinistic influence, but aspired in vain, to establish a theocracy, borrowed somewhat from that of the Jews. I do not agree with Mr. John Fiske, in his able and interesting history of the "Beginnings of New England," that "the Puritan appealed to reason;" I think that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... convenient, the agreeable and attractive, until the luxury sprung from the sense for the beautiful degenerates into a foolish misuse of things. Vico divides antiquity into three periods: the divine (theocracy), the heroic (aristocracy), and the human (democracy and monarchy). The same course of things repeats itself in the nations of later times: to the patriarchal dominion of the fanciful, myth-making Orient correspond the spiritual states of the migrations; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... doctrine of miraculous interposition and special providence by the light of its gradually increasing conviction of the uniformity of nature. In its moral and metaphysical forms, science examines such subjects as the moral history of the Hebrew theocracy; or ponders reverently over the mystery of the divine scheme of redemption, and the teaching which scripture supplies on the deepest problems of speculation, the relations of Deity to the universe, the act of creation, the nature of evil, and ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Middle Ages, looked with disgust upon the past, and longed to try experiments, not only in religion, but in politics and social life. The only antiquity which had authority to them was the Jewish Commonwealth, because it was a theocracy, and recognized God Almighty as the supreme ruler of the world. Hence they adhered to the strictness of the Jewish Sabbath, and baptized their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... urged both for the Crown and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man can understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacious theocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and with them he was more active dead than alive—yes, even more busy. In the next chapter ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... dogmas do. Not that I share the Christian sneer at Jewish legalism. Add the Statute Book to the New Testament, and think of the network of laws hampering the feet of the Christian. No; much of our so-called ceremonialism is merely the primitive mix-up of everything with religion in a theocracy. The Mosaic code has been largely embodied in civil law, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... my text. Rightly understood they lead us to this: 'The death of Christ was the destruction of the Jewish Temple and polity, and the raising again of Christ from the dead on the third day was the raising again of that destroyed Theocracy and Temple in a new and nobler fashion.' Let us then look for a moment, and it shall only be for a moment, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... [329] The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... promote public interest, and establish peace and security among mankind: His most obvious thought would be, to assign the largest possessions to the most extensive virtue, and give every one the power of doing good, proportioned to his inclination. In a perfect theocracy, where a being, infinitely intelligent, governs by particular volitions, this rule would certainly have place, and might serve to the wisest purposes: But were mankind to execute such a law; so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... intrude it on others. But backwoods Calvinism differed widely from the creed as first taught. It was professed by thorough-going Americans, essentially free and liberty-loving, who would not for a moment have tolerated a theocracy in their midst. Their social, religious, and political systems were such as naturally flourished in a country remarkable for its temper of rough and self-asserting equality. Nevertheless the old Calvinistic ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... theocracy promised to us, and which we must wait for, when all the diseased and false systems of this world shall be swept away, and Christ's feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, and the twelve apostles shall sit on twelve ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... that the word Elohim is the name for Deity, as worshipped by the Hebrew patriarchs; Jehovah, the conception of Deity which is at the root of the Mosaic theocracy.(789) El, or the plural Elohim, means literally "the powers," (the plural form being either, as some unreasonably think, a trace of early polytheism, or more probably merely emphatic,(790)) and is connected with the name for God commonly used in the Semitic ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... to the supreme court of the nation, and how much soever the authority of a military judge among the Israelites resembled that of a Roman dictator, the privilege of making laws was at no period intrusted to any order of the Jewish state. As long as the Hebrews were governed by a theocracy, this essential prerogative was retained by the Divine Head of the nation. "Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes, and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers giveth ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the hammer-bearing Daikoku, with Ebisu the fisherman, with fat naked Hotei, and with Benten, the fair but frail. In fact, with the American Billiken, Santa Claus may be considered as the latest addition to the tolerant theocracy of Japan. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Spain, too, had her Isabella, and France her Maid of Orleans, her Madame Roland, yes, and her Charlotte Corday. Austria and Hungary their Maria Theresa. Russia her Catharine; and even the jealous Jewish Theocracy was judged forty years by a woman. It is too late, by thirty centuries, to put in the plea of her incompetency ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... individual, personal, domestic, social, or civil, still less anything that concerned religion, free from the direct or indirect interposition of public authority." [29] Such inquisitorial supervision was due to the close alliance of Church and State within the narrow limits of a theocracy. In more liberal Plymouth and Connecticut, the "watch and ward" over one's fellows, which the early colonial church insisted upon, was extended only over church members, and even over them was less rigorous, less intrusive. Something of the development of the great authority ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... spirituals, by a council or kind of presbytery, in which the count, as their ordinary, presided. In cases of doubt, or great consequence, these pretended to consult the Saviour, and to decide from immediate inspiration; so that they boasted of being under the immediate direction of a theocracy, though in fact they were slaves to the most dangerous kind of despotism; for as often as any individual of the community pretended to think for himself, or differ in opinion from the ordinary and his band of associates, the oracle decreed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... The Christian world presents itself as Christendom—one mass of which, the spiritual and the secular, form only different aspects. This epoch extends to Charlemagne. In the second period the Church develops for itself a theocracy and the state a feudal monarchy. Charlemagne had formed an alliance with the Holy See against the Lombards and the factions of the nobles in Rome. A union thus arose between the spiritual and the secular power, and a kingdom of heaven on earth promised to follow in the wake of this conciliation. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... inspiration in the measure of their outward success. Judged by their own ideals, the Puritans failed. They would neither recognize nor approve the civilization that has sprung from the seeds of their planting. They tried to establish a theocracy; they stand in history as the heroes of democracy. Alike in their social and religious aims they ignored ineradicable elements in human nature. They attempted the impossible. How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all the honor that we pay ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... contained an urgent plea for a professorship of the "History and Polity of the Hebrew Theocracy," and although the funds for such a professorship are still wanting, the college stands faithfully by the old traditions of reverence and ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... become a preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter resentment stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home was seen in their abolition of Episcopacy and their prohibition of the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The intensity of its religious sentiments turned the colony into a theocracy. "To the end that the body of the Commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered and agreed that for the time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the bounds of the same." But ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Isaiah's lovely apologue (Isaiah v. 1), which was, no doubt, familiar to the learned officials. But there is a slight difference in the application of the metaphor which in Isaiah means the nation, and in the parable is rather the theocracy as an institution, or, as we may put it roughly, the aggregate of divine revelations and appointments which constituted the religious ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... particularly to them when you have finished a chapter or come to a proper pause. After an experiment of this mode, you will never abandon it. Lempriere's Dictionary is that of which I spoke to you. Purchase also Macbeau's; this last is appropriated to ancient theocracy, fiction, and geography; both of them will be useful in reading Gibbon, and still more so in reading ancient authors, or of any period ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... seem to you and to all of us, that if one became poor in Israel, his children could be attached. Thus the idea of involuntary servitude, where no crime was, prevailed in the Theocracy. ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have built? It then recapitulated the principles of the Hebrew theocracy, the dependence of the national prosperity and happiness on the national conformity to the civil and religious law. As the king concluded in these emphatic terms:—Now, therefore, arise, O Lord God, into thy resting-place, thou and the ark of thy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... government in New England was a theocracy; it was the realization of Arnold's idea of the identity of Church and State. Under it the clergy had peculiar powers and privileges, which, it is but fair to say, they turned to the advantage of the Commonwealth more than has generally been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... which have entered, more or less, into all Christian civilizations. I can not enter upon a minute detail of these primary laws. Each of the tribes formed a separate state, and had a local administration of justice, but all alike recognized the theocracy as the supreme and organic law. To the tribe of Levi were assigned the duties of the priesthood, and the general oversight of education and the laws. The members of this favored tribe were thus priests, lawyers, teachers, and popular orators—a literary aristocracy ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... every one knew that his judgments would be informed by shrewd sense and good-humour, and would be followed by a story, and woe betide the disputant whose perversity deferred that pleasure. So Garotte became a sort of theocracy, with Judge Rablay as ruler. And yet he was, perhaps, the only man in the community whose courage had never been ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... semi-paralyzed, (d) that constitutional government and the Eastern conception of kingship, which is purely theocratic, are so antithetical that they cannot possibly co-exist, any re- establishment of the throne being ipso facto the re-establishment of a theocracy, (e) that although he so constantly speaks of the low political knowledge of the people, the Chinese have had a most complete form of local self-government from the earliest times, the political problem of the day being simply ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... them, as the chosen people of God, from all the rest of the world. AJew must be of the seed of Abraham: and when in later times, owing chiefly to political circumstances, the Jews had to admit strangers to some of the privileges of their theocracy, they looked upon them, not as souls that had been gained, saved, born again into a new brotherhood, but as strangers gerim, as Proselytes (proslutoi); which means men who have come to them as aliens, not to be trusted, as their saying was, until ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... homage of prayer and sacrifice. Sometimes these human gods are restricted to purely supernatural or spiritual functions. Sometimes they exercise supreme political power in addition. In the latter case they are kings as well as gods, and the government is a theocracy. Thus in the Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a supernatural power over the elements: they could give abundant ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the common school system of New England, which in the beginning was the device of a theocracy bent on usurping the authority of parents over their children, taken up after more than two hundred years, and readjusted to the purposes of a set of men whom the Puritans would have unhesitatingly whipped to death at the cart's ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... prejudices were not very strong. In these respects, as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrast to Milton. Milton's works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. He had his thoughts constantly fixed on the contemplation of the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth; and he seized the pen with a hand just warm from the touch of the ark of faith. His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; so that he devotes himself with the same sense of duty ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... into contact with almost every nation which commands our interest in the ancient world; the migratory pastoral population of Asia; Egypt, the mysterious parent of arts, science, and legislation; the Arabian Desert; the Hebrew theocracy under the form of a federative agricultural republic, their kingdom powerful in war and splendid in peace; Babylon, in its magnificence and downfall; Grecian arts and luxury endeavouring to force an unnatural refinement within the pale of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... welfare of any of his children. He was as deeply interested in the Athenian as in the Hebrew. He is the God of the Gentile as well as the Jew. His tender mercies are over all his works. If the Hebrew race was selected to be the agent of his providence in one special field, and if the Jewish theocracy was one grand instrument of preparatory discipline, it was simply because, through these, God designed to bless all the nations of the earth. And surely no one will presume to say that a civilization and an intellectual ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... on the first floor of the Palace, ending in a loggia approached by two steps. Through the arches of the loggia the Mediterranean can be seen, bright in the morning sun. The clean lofty walls, painted with a procession of the Egyptian theocracy, presented in profile as flat ornament, and the absence of mirrors, sham perspectives, stuffy upholstery and textiles, make the place handsome, wholesome, simple and cool, or, as a rich English manufacturer would ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw |
