Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
Ku Hsi, whose own standard work on the Shih appeared in A.D. 1178, declined to express himself positively on the expurgation of the odes, but summed up his view of what Confucius did for them in the following words: 'Royal methods had ceased, and poems were no more collected. Those which were extant were full of errors, and wanting in arrangement.
We have already spoken of the expurgation of the constitution, which prohibited the observance of Pagan rites to the kings, and imposed on them instead, certain social obligations. This was a first change suggested by Saint Patrick, and executed mainly by his disciple, Saint Benignus.
It is still used as an ordeal of expurgation, in cases of stolen property; and we are not wrong in asserting, that many of those misguided creatures, who too frequently hesitate not to swear falsely on the Word of God, would suffer death itself sooner than commit a perjury on the Donagh.
Nor was this the end of the difficulty; the license of any one of these officials could be revoked at pleasure, and, when republished, the work had to be re-"viséd." Even as late as the year 1825, a Spanish standard author could not be republished without expurgation.
It is nevertheless true that the Olympian Religion is only to the full intelligible and admirable if we realize it as a superb and baffled endeavour, not a telos or completion but a movement and effort of life. We may analyse the movement into three main elements: a moral expurgation of the old rites, an attempt to bring order into the old chaos, and lastly an adaptation to new social needs.
They decide in favor of the expurgation; and their decision has been both made and manifested, and communicated to us in a great variety of ways. A great number of States have expressly instructed their senators to vote for this expurgation. A very great majority of the States have elected senators and representatives to Congress, upon the express ground of favoring this expurgation.
Thus a failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning.
Thus Shakespeare used to be considered an obscene writer, in need of expurgation, and may be so considered still, though his obscene passages even to our prudish modern ears are so few that they could surely be collected on a single page. Thus also it is that even the Bible, the God-inspired book of Christendom, has been judicially declared to be obscene.
Not to mention Byron's caustic remarks on the peculiar expurgation of Martial in Don Juan's edition, it is obvious that the Bible and Shakespeare could both be proved obscene by this process; and setting aside ancient literature altogether, half our own classics, before the age of Wordsworth and Scott, would come under the same condemnation.
Immediately he was on his feet, and without preface or apology, reproduced as far as he was able the M. O.'s speech of the previous night, and that without expurgation. There was but little discussion. There was but one opinion. It was resolved to call a joint meeting of the chaplains and medical officers to decide upon a course of action.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking