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This is only one of many methods of self-torture practised in the hope of winning the favor of the gods. The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more than crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach from the mud walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls on the other, and so crooked that you are likely to meet yourself coming back before you get to the end.
He washed his hands and copied the notes he had made, for there was blood upon the page. He tore the original sheet into fine bits, and put the pieces into the waste basket. Then he put on his cuffs and his coat, and went out of the laboratory. He was dazed, and did not see that his own self-torture had filled him with primeval lust to torture in return.
This I must confess to be true, even though I may and do heartily esteem the saint's enthusiasm for righteousness. So far I have described chiefly the spiritual experiences of these men, but the details of their physical life are hardly less interesting. There was a holy rivalry among them to excel in self-torture.
Her work was done; her passion exhausted; her self-torture, and the mere weight of her fetters, which she had sustained during her passion, weighed her down; she dropped senseless on the turf, and lay in a trance for many hours. Then she arose, and casting off her fetters and her sackcloth, was herself again: but a sadder woman till her dying day.
There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self- denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature in her wonderful irony driving the anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
Seldom, except at the great Jaganath festivals at Puri, is a larger congregation seen of weird and almost inhuman figures; some clothed solely with their long unkempt hair, some with their bodies smeared all over with white ashes, and the symbol of their favourite deity painted conspicuously on their foreheads; some displaying ugly sores or withered limbs as evidence of lifelong mortification of the flesh; some moving as if in a dream and entirely lost to the world's realities; some with frenzied eyes shouting and brandishing their instruments of self-torture; some with a repulsive leer and heavy sensuous jowls affecting a certain coquetry in the ritualistic adornment of their well-fed bodies.
A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affections, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato."
Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre brows, at the opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit of self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be made with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story, what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities concerned?
It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored.
I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing you and your Fanny together, which union I have no doubt lie had foreordained. Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord' is my text now." The duality in self-torture of these spiritual brethren endured in all about a year and a half, and closed with Speed's marriage.
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