United States or Nauru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Frequent watchings, fasts, bleedings, and scourgings, for the purpose of mortifying the body; abstinence from conversation or laughter; habits of perpetual devotion, laborious exertion, and humble obedience to the abbot, were the main features of the system.
"Yes, yes," said De Guiche, "a strange face; but these monks are subject to such degrading practices; their fasts make them pale, the blows of the discipline make them hypocrites, and their eyes become inflamed through weeping for the good things of this life we common folk enjoy, but they have lost."
"I have kept every detail of the religious rules," continued the young man. "I even keep two fasts instead of one! I never break the Sabbath. Don't you think I have earned eternal life?" Jesus answered simply; he did not argue. "Any man who wishes to enter the Kingdom must seek the will of God above every other goal. Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also.
An army of various nations was gratified with the pillage of the city; but the public disorders were expiated by the tears and fasts of the Comneni, who submitted to every penance compatible with the possession of the empire. The life of the emperor Alexius has been delineated by a favorite daughter, who was inspired by a tender regard for his person and a laudable zeal to perpetuate his virtues.
Picking their way through the crowd of dealers in cigars, shells, and obscene books, who had just been ejected from the boat, they were soon on board. A few moments' delay in getting up the baggage of the new comers, and the welcome "cast off the fasts and haul in the plank" was again heard.
A Greek who was not too inquisitive was thus enabled to move through the calendar of splendid festivals and fasts, charmed by the beauty of the ritual, inspired by the chorus and the dance, and drawing from the familiar legends the moral and aesthetic significance with which he had been accustomed from his boyhood to connect them, but without ever raising the question, Is all this true?
However, there wasn't much time left for us to speculate on that, for a rush of firemen and crew and the like into the boats was the next thing, and then the fasts were cast off or cut, and the wind and sea did the rest. They shot away into the darkness. A couple of firemen, two of the priests, and a soldier were left on board.
The continued fasts, severe flagellations, labours and meditations of those anchorites make the regulations governing this order exceedingly strict, and recall the times when kings and emperors, in the same monkish garb, walked barefoot to knock humbly in penance at monastery gates.
His religion was of a more ambiguous cast; and his hair-cloth, his fasts, his pious idiom, and his wish to retire from the business of the world, were a convenient mask for his dark and dangerous ambition.
Now, it curiously happened that whilst waiting for the tea-pan rather than tea-kettle to boil, I accidentally alighted upon a people's calendar, published at Brixen for the current year, protruding its somewhat greasy pages from behind a churn; and after turning over long black-and red-lettered lists of fasts and feasts, came upon some pertinent advice to the Tyrolese farmers by Adolph Trientl, concerning Milzbrand.
Word Of The Day