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They're like animals in that respect. What is a curse but a noise? Yet most men are secretly afraid of curses. They're uneasy under them. Yet they know it's only noise. Then look at thunderings from the pulpit. Look at excommunications. Look at denunciations. All noises to be sure. But there's the threat of force behind some of them. The blow may come and again it may not.

The clergy renewed their excommunications against him and his adherents, and added the terrors of superstition to those which arose from a victorious enemy. Cromwell, having received a reënforcement from England, again took the field early in the spring. He made himself master of Kilkenny and Clonmel, the only places where he met with any vigorous resistance.

"I would rather incur all the excommunications in the world than run the risk of appearing unjust to you. Take me." So saying, she took off her cap, and let down her beautiful hair. I unlaced her corset, and in the twinkling of an eye I had before me such a siren as one sees on the canvas of Correggio.

Hence perhaps even the excess of the controversial activity of the two sects against each other, and the frequency of their mutual excommunications, are not without a favourable significance. Here, however, it was the Baptists, rather than the Independents collectively, that had pushed their theory of the all-sufficiency of congregational censure to its finest issue.

The "Patriarch of Antioch and all the East," who resided at Cannobeen, hearing of this, proceeded at once to excommunicate the sheikh and his family, who had dared to associate "with that deceived man, and deceiver of men, Bird, the Bible-man." An infernal spirit appears in the excommunications of the Romish Church.

He says that many pious ministers of the word of God, some thousands of them, do now beg their bread: and told me how highly the present clergy carry themselves every where, so as that they are hated and laughed at by everybody; among other things, for their excommunications, which they send upon the least occasions almost that can be.

Then, seeing that neither excommunications nor assaults could help him, Caesar converted the siege into a blockade: all the roads leading to Faenza were cut off, all communications stopped; and further, as various signs of revolt had been remarked at Cesena, a governor was installed there whose powerful will was well known to Caesar, Ramiro d'Orco, with powers of life and death over the inhabitants; he then waited quietly before Faenza, till hunger should drive out the citizens from those walls they defended with such vehement enthusiasm.

The practical religion of the Abyssinian Christian is of the very lowest degree of formality. Fasts, penances, and excommunications, form the chief discipline; but the penitent can always provide a substitute for the two former, and the latter is always to be averted by money.

One says, Here, and another says, There: the philosophers upset each other's schemes in turn, the theologians hurl reciprocal excommunications, the scientists of to-day laugh at those of last year. If Pilate meant it this way, we owe him some sympathy and respect. "Speak the truth and shame the devil," they say. And in most cases you don't know, and if you suppose you do, you are mistaken.

Meantime the man, whose talk is not of doves and owls, the fierce physician, who deals not with ointments and cooling draughts, strides past the crowd of gentle quacks to smite the foul disease. Devils, thicker than tiles on house-tops, scare him not from his work. Bans and bulls, excommunications and decrees, are rained upon his head.