United States or France ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nor did he need Paul Bert to tell him, after the terrible struggle of 1877, that Clericalism was the enemy. Still less, if that were possible, did he require Paul Bert or any other man to tell him that France imperatively needed education free from priestcraft. Madame Adam is so anxious to deal Paul Bert a stab in the dark that she confuses the most obvious facts.
These facts show that any race, white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have priests as well as prophets.
Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence; civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason.
So with a Church. It lives if it is at home with the poor. In the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their political truncheons to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it!
It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the hands of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one of them.
Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did believe it, merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to believe it!
Now a boundary is established before which liberty must halt; a venerable, hallowed line, towards which all the various conflicting inclinations of the will must finally converge. The common aim of despotism and of priestcraft is uniformity, and uniformity is a necessary expedient of human poverty and imperfection.
But it is a fact nevertheless, and will remain apparent to all so long as priestcraft takes the place of New Testament Christianity and superstition supplants religion."
But let them turn their eyes from Him to aught in earth or heaven beside, and there will be no lack of priestcraft, of veils to hide Him from them, tyrants to keep them from Him, idols to ape His likeness.
"But," said Aubrey, pointing to a passage in the book before him, "see what a preacher of the word has said!" and Aubrey recited one of the most dangerous maxims in priestcraft, as reverently as if he were quoting from the Scripture itself. "'The nakedness of truth should never be too openly exposed to the eyes of the vulgar.
Word Of The Day