United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also.
The woman stood alone in the midst of the shadows; they were heavy, motionless. Glancing to right and left, behind her, to the wreckage of the door, to the furthermost corner, back to the Icon again, her eyes roved, darting from side to side like a creature hunted. Clasping the cloak to her quivering bosom she approached the candle slowly, stealthily. Her steps faltered. She hesitated.
He is kind, he is one of God's chosen, he's a benefactor, he once gave me ten rubles, I remember. Go to Kolyazin where a wonder-working icon of the Holy Mother of God has been revealed. On hearing those words I said good-by to the holy folk and went." All were silent, only the pilgrim woman went on in measured tones, drawing in her breath.
She clung to the foot of the Icon, sobbing, struggling with herself, glancing around fearfully into the shadows. A gleam from the candle fell on her hood; it had slipped slightly and a strand of her hair hung from under the cowl. It sparkled like gold. She staggered to her feet, still sobbing and trembling, catching her breath. Then she went to the nail on the wall and took down the cloak.
Among them, right over the table, figured a copy of Icon Basilike dressed up in a paper shirt, all drawn over with figures of flames and devils, and surmounted by a peaked paper cap, like a victim at an auto-da-fe.
Surely, there must have been an intelligible propriety in the terms, 'Logos', Word, 'Begotten before all creation', an adequate idea or 'icon', or the Evangelists and Apostolic penmen would not have adopted them. They did not invent the terms; but took them and used them as they were taken and applied by Philo and both the Greek and Oriental sages.
The old woman glanced over her shoulder. She was still crouching before the Icon, rocking herself backwards and forwards; the beads of the rosary slipping through her fingers one by one; mumbling to herself. Suddenly she stopped and listened. The rosary fell to the floor. Her eyes watched the wreckage of the doorway closely, suspiciously, like an animal before a trap.
The poor woman who kneels at a religious procession in order that the Icon may be carried over her head, and the rich merchant who invites the priests to bring some famous Icon to his house, illustrates this tendency in a more harmless form. According to a popular saying, "As is the priest, so is the parish," and the converse proposition is equally true as is the parish, so is the priest.
It was the Verum icon, or true impression of our Saviour's face, taken at the very moment of His most mortal agony for us. Received as it was without a grain of doubt, imagine how it moved every Christian heart. The people threw themselves on their faces when the priest raised it on high; and cries of pity were in every mouth, and tears in almost every eye.
She did not venture to ask any questions, and shut the door again, now sitting down in her easy chair, now taking her prayer book, now kneeling before the icon stand. To her surprise and distress she found that her prayers did not calm her excitement.
Word Of The Day