United States or Togo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


There was, however, in another part of the city, a great temple called the Serapion. This temple was a very magnificent edifice, or, rather, group of edifices, dedicated to the god Serapis. The origin and history of this temple were very remarkable. The legend was this: It seems that one of the ancient and long-venerated gods of the Egyptians was a deity named Serapis.

Ha! he looks like the tutelary deity of the city come to defy me, bringing the god of love to his aid in the form of his own marvellous and incomparable beauty. Aye! and I feel that I am defeated already, before the battle has so much as begun. And then, all at once, a spasm of rage shot through her heart, and she turned pale.

"I succeeded a brigand, and I had brigands to govern: I taught them virtue and the worship of God; after me they forgot both more than once; I forbade that in the temples there should be any image, because the Deity which animates nature cannot be represented. During my reign the Romans had neither wars nor seditions, and my religion did nothing but good.

'Heaven, he writes piteously, 'hears the groans of the lowest creatures, and therefore I trust that you, being a terrestrial deity, will not disdain my supplication. He had come from Cologne to Bruges to teach the royal household, and wanted his wages, for he and his family were starving.

And altho in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble a woman standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription above her "Mother of God" she is not here the presiding deity.

Marija has apparently concluded about two hours ago that if the altar in the corner, with the deity in soiled white, be not the true home of the muses, it is, at any rate, the nearest substitute on earth attainable. And Marija is just fighting drunk when there come to her ears the facts about the villains who have not paid that night.

It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity, "trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year of sunsets.

That "cardinal explication of the reason," the wondrous idea of the Deity, had found a voice in his soul, and the child went forth from the church, while the golden-winged angel followed him to the dark alley, and the darker home; and that night, before he laid himself on his miserable pallet in the corner, he bowed his head, and clasped his hands, and whispered so that none might hear him, "My Father, will you take care of me, and come and take me to yourself? for I love you."

They say, in the change from one period to another there are great alterations, and that the art of the seer at one time is held in high repute, and is successful in its predictions, when the deity gives clear and manifest signs, but that in the course of another period the art falls into a low condition, being for the most part conjectural, and attempting to know the future by equivocal and misty signs.

Since, again, he is the master of the vast universe, he is called Maheswara. The whole universe is pervaded by him in diverse forms. It is that deity whose mouth roars and burns the waters of the sea in the form of the huge mare's head!""