Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Baring-Gould has given an excellent account of the rabbinical legends concerning the wonderful schamir, by the aid of which Solomon was said to have built his temple. From Asmodeus, prince of the Jann, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, wrested the secret of a worm no bigger than a barley-corn, which could split the hardest substance. This worm was called schamir.
Baring-Gould derives its name, as that of the Fal, from the Celtic falbh, which means the "running or flowing," but the point is hardly clear. It is pleasant to turn from such disputations to the place itself, which has become famous in present-day romance as "Troy Town," the fanciful title bestowed by a gifted literary resident.
S. Baring-Gould confesses that "at Corinth, and certainly elsewhere, among excitable people, the wine, the heat, the exaltation of emotion, led to orgiastic ravings, the jabbering of disconnected, unintelligible words, to fits, convulsions, pious exclamations, and incoherent ravings." And unless St. Paul was deliberately slandering his fellow-believers worse things than these occurred.
It has there been pointed out that the deliberate torture of mind and body arose from the belief that the induced states brought man into direct communion with supernatural powers, and that this element has continued in almost every religion in the world. Says Baring-Gould: "The ascetic instinct is intimately united with the religious instinct.
It was not there as something hidden, something of which men ought to be ashamed; it was an avowed teaching, claiming full religious sanction. "The Church," says Baring-Gould, "trembled on the verge of becoming an immoral sect." The same writer also says:
Then his health broke down; yet he still struggled on with enfeebled constitution, but with an unbroken will, to discharge, if possible, his obligations, and leave to the world a respected name. Conscientiousness is the underlying granite of life. Sir Walter Raleigh When love of praise takes the place of praiseworthiness, the defect is fatal. S. Baring-Gould
S. Baring-Gould himself, in his book on the Vicar of Morwenstow, has located Coppinger in the Kilkhampton district; but his novel, In the Roar of the Sea, places its hero, somewhat humanised, at St. Enodoc. The truth is, there are similar traditions in several parts of the Cornish coast, and elsewhere.
Anecdotes of the kind are very numerous, for there are few subjects in folk-lore concerning which more has been written than on the divining-rod, one of the most exhaustive being that of Mr. Baring-Gould in his "Curious Myths of the Middle Ages."
But the reappearance of this particular story in such remote times and places, and with such marked similarities and variations, would entitle it to a place among the indestructible popular legends collated by Mr. Baring-Gould in his Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. "Metildy, you are the most good-for-nothin', triflin', owdacious, contrary piece that ever lived."
Cox, indeed, would have us believe that the whole notion arose from an unintentional play upon words; but the careful survey of the field, which has been taken by Hertz and Baring-Gould, leads to the conclusion that many other circumstances have been at work.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking