United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the first place, to take away all superstition, he ordered the dead to be buried in the city, and even permitted their monuments to be erected near the temples; accustoming the youth to such sights from their infancy, that they might have no uneasiness from them, nor any horror for death, as if people were polluted with the touch of a dead body, or with treading upon a grave.
I am quite sure that nothing is to be done in a hurry; a good and zealous man in ignorance and haste might do more harm in one year than could be remedied in ten. I would not root out a single superstition until I had something better to put in its place, lest if all the weeds were rooted up, what had before been fertile should become desert, barren, disbelieving in anything.
This made an impression upon me, because it was an instance, rare to me then, but common enough now, of how minds, otherwise exceptionally able, may have a spot so encankered with creed, bigotry, and superstition as to render their judgments respecting certain classes of phenomena erroneous and illogical, puerile and ridiculous.
Warrior as he was, he had the superstition of the pagan, and to avoid the predicted fate he sent his horse far away, and for years avoided even speaking of it. Then, moved by curiosity, he asked what had become of the banished animal. "It died years ago," was the reply; "only its bones remain." "So much for your soothsayers," he cried, with a contempt that was not unmixed with relief.
We can infer, if we want to, like those slaves.... No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is not courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call US the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as to follow them.
And the reason it was a success was because it fitted the needs of the people. Beecher expressed what the people were thinking. Mankind clings to the creed; we will not burn our bridges we want the religion of our mothers, yet we crave the simple common-sense we can comprehend as well as the superstition we can't.
Now to suspend and drown this sense, and these apprehensions, be it by the hurry of business or of pleasure, or by superstition, or moral equivocations, this is in a manner one and the same, and makes no alteration at all in the nature of our case. Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?
Although the ancients resorted hither for the loveliness of the spot, they did not bathe in the springs, a gentle superstition holding it sacrilege for the human body to lave itself in a stream near its source. They came by the Via Flaminia, the old high-road from Rome to Florence, which crosses the modern railroad hard by.
They were but children, and full of superstition; and we had to win them by kindly patience, never losing faith in them and hope for them, any more than the Lord did with us! Our learning the language on Aniwa was marked by similar incidents to those of Tanna related in a preceding chapter; though a few of them could understand my Tannese, and that greatly helped me.
In so far as it involves the distribution of wealth, it does so as a necessary condition or means of progress, and not as an end in itself. Democracy would raise government to the rank and dignity of a science by making it appeal to the reason instead of the fear and superstition of the people.
Word Of The Day