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More "Celibacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the vow of celibacy, had become more and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... to celibacy or any of the other restrictions imposed upon the nuns, they desired only, in association with others of the same mind, to lead a life pleasing in the sight of God and devoted to Christian charity. Schweinau afforded abundant opportunity for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 'not to admit honesty in discourse with beauty,' and why his resolution is that 'we will have no more marriage.' Those words of Hamlet, too, 'this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof,' are easy of explanation. It was not yet so long ago that celibacy had been abolished in England. The 'time' now confirms celibacy once more in ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... looked upon with veneration or contempt, according to the opinion formed of them by their observers, but who, at any rate, lived a simple and wholesome life, and were to some extent witnesses to the existence of a supernatural Power at whose bidding (so they believed) they were summoned to celibacy, seclusion, labour, and prayer. ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... give, and to receive, what he thought the common right of mankind. So perfect a harmony naturally prevented all those connections of gallantry which are so often fatal to the peace of families. This evil was prevented by early marriages, for no one passed his youth in a state of celibacy. As soon as a young man arrived to the proper age, the community built him a house, broke up the lands about it, and supplied him with all the necessaries of life for a twelvemonth. There he received the partner whom he had chosen, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... ancient teaching in relation to the Seven Sacraments, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Real Presence, Purgatory, and Prayers for the Dead, were scrupulously retained. Subsequently, the necessity of auricular confession, the invocation of Saints, and the celibacy of the clergy came to be questioned, but they were not dogmatically assailed during this reign. The common people, where English was understood, were slow in taking alarm at these masked innovations; ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... respect to the opposite duties of leading celibate lives, and of continuing families, have been contradictory. In many nations it is and has been considered a disgrace to bear no children, and in other nations celibacy has been raised to the rank of a virtue of the highest order. During the fifty or so generations that have elapsed since the establishment of Christianity, the nunneries and monasteries, and the celibate lives ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... most strenuously renounces this world and all its works, when St. Anthony flees into the desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell, when the pale nun prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it is Celibacy, that great denial of life, that sings through all their struggle, it is this business of births as the central fact of life they ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... opportunities of living and new fulnesses of life in every direction. During that time, four hundred years of it roughly, there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear a quite considerable family became the chief business of everybody, celibacy grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became Protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families. The natural checks upon increase, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... conduct of life, as far as moral prudence is concerned, must depend ultimately upon facts. Now, of the numbers of people in this world, how many do you think have married their first loves? Probably not one out of ten. Then, would you have nine out of ten pine all their lives in celibacy, or fret in matrimony, because they cannot have the persons ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... rite, so far Christianity disavowed the old associations. But to this day the representative Christian churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and maliciousness that so often ensue. Nearly every Christian church inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the illegitimate child. They do ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... rate, things change. There are manners and customs evolved that would seem strange to you. There come laws and religions, all made to match current requirements. Celibacy and sterility become a crime. Virginity becomes a disgrace, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... before Harry Warrington found it; but I like to fancy that he was going to keep it; that, bewailing mischance and times out of joint, she would yet have preserved her love, and fondled it in decorous celibacy. If, in some paroxysm of senile folly, I should fall in love to-morrow, I shall still try and think I have acquired the fee-simple of my charmer's heart;—not that I am only a tenant, on a short lease, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with Elizabeth Throckmorton were not in themselves without excuse. To be the favourite of Elizabeth, who had now herself attained the sixtieth summer of her immortal charms, was tantamount to a condemnation to celibacy. The vanity of Belphoebe would admit no rival among high or low, and the least divergence from the devotion justly due to her own imperial loveliness was a mortal sin. What is less easy to forgive in Raleigh than that at the age of forty he should have rebelled at ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... seldom finds a man whose person and qualifications are every way suited to one's liking:—Natura is certainly such as I should wish a husband to be, if I were inclined to marry again;—I have not taken a vow of celibacy, and have nobody to controul my actions':—'then,' said she again, 'what foolish imaginations comes into my head; perhaps he has not the least thought of me in the way I am dreaming of;—no, no, he has suffered too much ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Hawarden, there would then be at once increased ease and increased attraction in the performance of your duties; nor can I overlook the fact that the life of the unmarried man, in this age particularly, is under peculiar and insidious temptations to selfishness, unless his celibacy arise from a very strong and definite course of self-devotion to the service of God ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the turn which matters had taken, but saying that, after repeated conversations with Vane, he had been forced to the conclusion that his resolve to enter the Church and devote himself to a life of celibacy and mission work at home ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... years, Mary was not of a temper to live upon terms of so much intimacy with a man of merit and genius, without loving him. The delight she enjoyed in his society, she transferred by association to his person. What she experienced in this respect, was no doubt heightened, by the state of celibacy and restraint in which she had hitherto lived, and to which the rules of polished society condemn an unmarried woman. She conceived a personal and ardent affection for him. Mr. Fuseli was a married man, and his ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... novel describes the book as "a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as possible from being a chivalry ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... "monks" was transferred from those who dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular communities, under a fixed government. But the three names at first were interchangeable; the three modes of life alternated, often in the same man. The life of all three was the same,—celibacy, poverty, good deeds towards their fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of every kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after baptism: and the mental food of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... bestow them in 'marriage' on other parties, whether they chose it or not, by which summary process the slightest 'incompatibility of temper' received the relief of a divorce more rapid and easy than even Germany could afford, and the estate lost nothing by any prolongation of celibacy on either side. Of course, the misery consequent upon such arbitrary destruction of voluntary and imposition of involuntary ties was ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... northern tribes, impinging on the empire, and settling on its various provinces like vultures, became the matter into which the Holy See, guiding and unifying the episcopate, maintaining the original principle of celibacy, and planting it in the institute of the religious life through various countries depopulated or barbarous, infused into the whole mass one spirit, so that Arians became Catholics, Teuton raiders issued into Christian ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... picture. Then follow "sorceries," plainly pointing out pretended revelations, false miracles, etc. To these are to be added "fornications," corporeal and spiritual, in a mass of superstitions added to, or supplanting divine ordinances; together with vows of celibacy, monkeries and nunneries,—followed by public license of brothels. And finally,—"thefts." By these are to be understood the illegal exactions and oppressive impositions, by which the nations of Christendom have been plundered of their revenues to enrich the lordly hierarchy of apostate ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... does not marry, he will suffer no serious loss of vital power; there will be no tendency to spermatorrhoea or congestion, nor will he be afflicted with any one of those ills which certain vicious writers and quacks would lead many people to believe. Celibacy is perfectly consistent with mental vigor and physical strength. Regularity in the habits of life will always have its good ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... lasting importance on another account. This Philip of Burgundy was deeply affected by the doctrines of the Reformation, which had burst forth in Germany. He held in abhorrence the superstitious observances of the Romish Church, and set his face against the celibacy of the clergy. His example soon influenced his whole diocese, and the new notions on points of religion became rapidly popular. It was chiefly, however, in Friesland that the people embraced the opinions of Luther, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... youth, glowing with deep, ripe feeling, and needy of human love. He had little joy in the acquisition of what, in other circumstances, might have been considered his enviable fortune. He thought only of the miserable destiny that sentenced him to celibacy or death. His immediate predecessor, riding across a heath to take a last farewell of his bride, had been struck dead by lightning, and the maiden herself had been hurled from life at the edge of a precipice. Bolko, attired in mourning, sat at the window of his lofty castle, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Dick? I'm not proud, and I'll scrap the plan if you can show me another ... Night after night I've hammered the thing out, and I can't hit on a better ... Heigh-ho, Dick, this isn't like you,' and he grinned ruefully. 'You're making yourself a fine argument in favour of celibacy—in time of war, anyhow. What is ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... wives of the clergy or not, I will not presume to answer that question myself; but I may, perhaps, be allowed to record the opinion, emphatically expressed to me, of one who has lived in the East for a great many years, and is by no means in sympathy with the compulsory celibacy of the Roman priesthood. "It is," he remarked, "far too hastily assumed that the fact of the married missionary usually bringing another valuable ally to the work sufficiently determines the question. But I am convinced that, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... him, Francois Lambert performed services far more important than any he was permitted to render his native land. As the first French monk to throw aside his habit—above all, as the first to renounce celibacy and defend in a published treatise the step he had taken (1523), no French reformer, even among those of far greater abilities and wider influence, was regarded by the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church with so intense ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... and for the enjoyment of that recreation he kept a number of excellent horses, and several packs of hounds, particularly galgos (greyhounds), for some of which he paid 150 or 200 dollars. In the most shameless way he violated the ecclesiastical vow of celibacy, and he was usually surrounded by several of his own children, who called him uncle, addressing him by the appellation of tio, the term usually employed in Peru to express that sort of relationship. The Padre used to boast of ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... confined to words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them. The lonely wayfarer shrank within himself at the horrid clamor and clapper-clawing; eyed the den of discord askance; and hurried on his way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... with an atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it is the interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of all these things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples is universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice) should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of two childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit an ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economic disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... most of them were sturdy, thrifty mechanics and peasants, who, under the skillful direction of Father Rapp, soon transformed the forest into a thriving community. After a soul stirring revival in 1807, they adopted celibacy. Those who were married did not separate but lived together in solemn self-restraint, "treating each other as brother and sister in Christ."[17] Their belief that the second coming of the Lord was imminent no doubt strengthened their ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... better to marry than burn," said the Pringle misdemeanant, "and here was I, my lord, married and still burning!" and, "I think you would find, my lord, considering all Charlotte's peculiarities, that the situation was really much more trying than the absolute celibacy ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... "the girl is the image of what her mother was at her years, and before she had become acquainted with grief. When death deprived me of my wife I returned to Scotland, enriched by the marriage; and, would you think it, Duncan! the suffering angel had remained in the heartless state of celibacy twenty long years, and that for the sake of a man who could forget her! She did more, sir; she overlooked my want of faith, and, all difficulties being now removed, she took ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... rooms are perhaps more dreary than of old, in many a college, for lack of the presence of men now translated to another place. As to the "society" of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... the bad were by degrees so multiplied, that men truly holy and devoted to God appeared more rarely; and the pious few were almost oppressed by the vicious multitude." Of their doctrines he says: "Fictions, of early origin" (about saint veneration and relics, a purifying fire, celibacy, &c., &c.), "now so prevailed as in course of time almost to thrust true religion aside, or at least to exceedingly obscure ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... her wishes had not a good soul informed him that in later hours of the night, others were accustomed to come in turns to hear her romantic solos.... Ah, these women! and then, on recalling the finale of his trans-oceanic idyl, Ferragut would become reconciled to his celibacy. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... this rule—it is China.] But this population must be the natural result of the government and the national character, for if it is caused by colonisation or any other temporary and accidental cause, then the remedy itself is evidence of the disease. When Augustus passed laws against celibacy, those laws showed that the Roman empire was already beginning to decline. Citizens must be induced to marry by the goodness of the government, not compelled to marry by law; you must not examine the effects of force, for the law which strives against the constitution has little or no effect; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... inquiry as to a priest's wife, p. 77 Number 5, I would suggest that married persons may have separated, and retired each into the celibacy of a convent, yet might join, when necessary, in a legal conveyance; but I should examine closely the word ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... said Don Ruy with feigned complaint, "Think you not that your rigid rules for the journey might have stopped short of hopeless celibacy for all of us?—Why a moon like that and Venus ascendent ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy."—("Works", vol. ii, p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to her literary abilities. She wrote "Mrs. Leicester's School", which Mr. C. used warmly to praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... for you—blessed if I don't! I intended to run over and see her in the morning, anyway. Did it ever strike you that matchmaking is the proper business of old maids? They atone for celibacy through vicarious marriage!" ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... substance between the two—a healthy, happy-hearted woman, full of beauty and vigour, made to bloom in the sunshine, not to languish in the shadow of some old grief. Women of her stamp do not die of broken hearts or condemn themselves to life-long celibacy as a sacrifice to the shade of the departed. If unfortunately No. 1 is removed, as a general rule they shed many a tear and suffer many a pang, and after a decent interval very sensibly turn their ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... reason why the Primitive Church has not lasted up to the present day. And you do not seem to realise, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... Zwingli drew his knowledge and faith from the Bible, holding that for authority one ought to return to it or to the primitive church. He advocated the abolition of image-worship, and, in addition, the abolition of enforced celibacy, nunneries, and the celebration of the mass. He held, too, that there ought to be a return to local church government, and {386} that all of the cloisters should be converted into schools. He objected to so many ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... him conjugal continence was equally meritorious with the virginal continence of John, as regards the essential reward, but not as regards the accidental reward. Hence Augustine says (De Bono Conjug. xxi) that both "the celibacy of John and the marriage of Abraham fought Christ's battle in keeping with the difference of the times: but John was continent even in deed, whereas Abraham was continent ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... building of temples and cathedrals, by the blood of men and beasts, by forms and ceremonies, by chants, by kneelings and prostrations, by flagellations and maimings, by renouncing the joys of home, by living alone in the wide desert, by the practice of celibacy, by inventing instruments of torture, by destroying men, women and children, by covering the earth with dungeons, by burning unbelievers, by putting chains upon the thoughts and manacles upon the limbs of men, by believing things without evidence ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... dedicated to that particular side of inquiry and learning. In the booksellers' catalogues we sometimes meet with examples, which are recommended to the curious buyer by their illustrations of conventual life, and their exposure of those vices which a state of celibacy is calculated to promote in both sexes. The chained book is not an uncommon feature in the ancient ecclesiastical repositories, and even in certain churches; and apart from the Scriptures, it almost invariably enters into the department ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... her evil star, from the grandparents who adore her, and transferred to the care of an aunt and uncle. Monsieur Rogron and his sister Sylvia. A hard, gloomy couple, these two; retired shopkeepers, who live in a dreary house in the back streets of a dreary country town. Their celibacy weighs heavily upon them; they are miserly, and absurdly vain; morose, and instinctively full ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... every sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many children, to say the least. I have sometimes questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was enforced for so long ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... introductory. La Curee discussed society under the second Empire. Le Ventre de Paris described the great market of Paris. La Conquete de Plassans spoke of life in the south of France. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret treated of the results of celibacy. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon dealt with official life. L'Assommoir was a tract against the vice of drunkenness. Some think this the strongest of the naturalist series. Its success was prodigious. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... recluse life of a French girl prevents her from expecting much from marriage but an increase of consequence. With us it is a step from tutelage to liberty—from nonentity to importance. It cannot be quite so much so in England; but, from the greater prevalence of celibacy, it has even more ECLAT and prestige than here, where marriage is the rule. The TROUSSEAU, the presents, the congratulations, the going into society under the interesting circumstances of an engagement, must ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... devotion to the public idea, a devotion of which the mind of Aristotle, as his criticisms of Plato show, was incapable, as a substitute for the warm and tender but illiberal emotions of the home. But while the Church made the alternative to family ties celibacy [Footnote: The warm imagination of Campanella, that quaint Calabrian monastic, fired by Plato, reversed this aspect of the Church.] and participation in an organisation, Plato was far more in accordance with modern ideas in perceiving the disadvantage that would result from ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Some praise celibacy, or reason about husbands' rights; the merry gossip will answer them. She discusses the matter thoroughly; sets forth the pros and cons; allows her husband to speak, then speaks herself; she has the best arguments ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... is personal effort and self-sacrifice. It has also been reserved for this time to show that what was only possible in former times for those who were under vows, so that in old days they man or woman who was moved by the enthusiasm of humanity put on robe or veil and swore celibacy and obedience, can really be practised quite as well without religious vows, peculiar dress, articles of religion, papal allegiance, or anything of the kind. The doubter, the agnostic, the atheist, may as truly sacrifice himself and give up his life for humanity ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... is not on such mere sentimental grounds that the Chinese nation has condemned in this wholesale manner the clergy of China. Did the latter carry out even to a limited extent their vows of celibacy and Pythagorean principles of diet, they would probably obtain a fair share of that questionable respect which is meted out to enthusiasts in most countries on the globe. The Chinese hate them as double-dyed hypocrites ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... very young men who give promise of presenting in a creditable manner our intellectual heritage for the benefit of the majority otherwise occupied, have no means of their own, and yet are not ready (as it should not be expected of them that they should be) to take the vow of poverty and celibacy and form a Jewish monastic order of St. Haninah. Accordingly not a few of these choose the Rabbinic career as the most likely profession to enable them to keep in touch with Jewish learning—more or less a disappointed hope ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Labor. Usury. Economics. Punishment for Debts. Healing. Peace. Marriage. Celibacy. Adultery. Divorce. Faulty Judgment. ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... come to pledge yourself to Temple Service? Is it your desire to become a Vestal of Isis? Do you take the pledge of celibacy to the virgin Rites of the Temple; your time, energy and purpose to be devoted to the duties that devolve upon ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... conditions. The practice not only quickened their own sense of the reality of religion, it served the same purpose for thousands of others pursuing the course of ordinary social existence. "Religious teachers," says Francis Galton, "by enforcing celibacy, fasting, and solitude, have done their best towards making men mad, and they have always largely succeeded in inducing morbid ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... lord and master of the herd retained, Mr Atkinson supposes, his full sovereignty over the females born in the herd as well as over those whom his prowess had perhaps added to it from time to time. The young male on the other hand was not condemned to a life of celibacy as a condition of his non-enforcement of the traditional decree of banishment. He was permitted to find a mate, but she must be a mate not born in the herd, nor one of the harem of his sire; he had, ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... have the sacred ministries of the family state been undervalued and warred upon in other directions; for example, the Romish Church has made celibacy a prime virtue, and given its highest honors to those who forsake the family state as ordained by God. Thus came great communities of monks and nuns, shut out from the love and labors of a Christian home; thus, also, came the monkish systems of education, collecting the young in ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... these ladies, impelled by a desire to lead a secluded life of celibacy, forsook the gay and fashionable circles in which they had moved; and in their search for a fitting spot, on which to pass their days together in devoted friendship to each other, and in acts of benevolence and charity to their neighbours, they visited Llangollen. Rambling along ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... in a measure to my conscience for the awful deed I had committed, I knelt upon the earth, and swore, by all I held sacred in time and eternity, that if the wound inflicted upon my cousin should prove mortal, I would live a life of celibacy, and become a wandering pilgrim in the western wilds of America till God should see ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... come together, he would smile at it, knowing that it was an accidental effect with no malice in it. If any of you really believe in a working Utopia, why not join the Shakers, and convert the world to this mode of life? Celibacy alone would cure a great many of the evils you ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to Pryer, and was surprised to find that this gentleman, though attentive to such members of his flock as were young and good-looking, was strongly in favour of the celibacy of the clergy, as indeed were the other demure young clerics to whom ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day—are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the better to establish a running system, I shall have recourse to the Classics, to prove, that the pursuit will confer honour upon its practitioners; for instance, has not Ovid recorded the gallopings of the lovely Atalanta, who, being determined to live in a state of celibacy, positively ran away from the male sex? This establishes the vast antiquity of running, and nothing can possibly stand the test of inquiry, which has not such a voucher as antiquity to bear it out against the growlings ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... of crime? Am I not compelled to wash in secrecy and darkness the dirty linen of the most corrupt members of society? Ah! some professions are fatal. Ought not the magistrate, like the priest, to condemn himself to solitude and celibacy? Both know all, they hear all, their costumes are nearly the same; but, while the priest carries consolation in the folds of his black robe, the magistrate conveys terror. One is mercy, the other chastisement. Such are the images a thought of ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... reprehensible, it would be the last glimpse he would take of her, she reflected with a sigh, She wondered that passion and the spiritual part of love should be so hopelessly entangled. She was ready to live a life of celibacy for his sake; she delighted in his mind, and knew that had it been commonplace she could not have loved him did he have every other gift in the workshop of the gods; she worshipped his strength of character, his independence, his lofty yet practical devotion to an ideal; she loved ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the more deeply, perhaps; anyhow, Barty had no doubt as to which of the two voices was the voice for him. His passion was as that of Brian de Bois-Guilbert for mere strength, except that he was bound by no vows of celibacy. There were no moonlit platonics about Barty's robust love, but all the chivalry and tenderness and romance of a knight-errant underlay its vigorous complexity. He was a good ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... several doctrines of the Romish church peculiarly obnoxious to the reformers, was probably drawn up by this minister. It was enacted in the parliament of 1539: a vast number of persons were soon after imprisoned for transgressing it; and Cranmer himself was compelled, by the clause which ordained the celibacy of the clergy, to send ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... who select professions or avocations and follow them for a livelihood. This is true, but this class, compared with the number who unite in matrimony with the husbands of their choice, is comparatively very small, and it is the duty of society to encourage the increase of marriages rather than of celibacy. If the larger number of females select pursuits or professions which require them to decline marriage, society to that extent is deprived of the advantage resulting from the increase ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... keep our young women pure and to protect them from infection, in the endeavor to make them demand one moral standard for both sexes, our exaggerating reformers are condemning them to lifelong celibacy, which in the case of women often means lifelong ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... unless he had renounced all marital relations. In this case, the woman "gave her husband to God, and to the good men." It often happened, too, that women, moved by the preaching of "the Perfected," condemned their unconverted husbands to an enforced celibacy. This was one of the results ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... to be meant here, that Paul says: That there are several Ways of Life, that lead to Holiness. Some affect the Ministry, some Celibacy, others a married State; some a retired Life, others publick Administrations of the Government, according to the various Dispositions of their Bodies and Minds: Again, to one Man all Meats are indifferent, another puts a Difference betwixt this Meat and ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... I find you fat and rosy: if I am a walking satire on celibacy,—you, at least, are a ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... needed repair.[1150] An unextinguished fire had burnt upon its altar for thirteen hundred years; and the worship had remained unchanged—no image profaned the Holy of Holies, where the god dwelt, waited on by bare-footed priests with heads shaved, clothed in white linen robes, and vowed to celibacy.[1151] The name of the god occurs as an element in a certain small number of Phoenician names of men—e.g. Bomilcar, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Marriage was instituted by God in Eden [Gen. 2:13] and was sanctioned by Christ, who performed His first miracle at a wedding. [John 2:1-11] It is a holy estate. Celibacy is not a holier estate than marriage, as the Roman Catholic Church maintains. ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... threshold! And the priest felt all this, as, melancholy and envious, he turned from the door in that November day, to find himself thoroughly alone. He now began seriously to muse upon those fancied blessings which men wearied with celibacy see springing, heavenward, behind the altar. A few weeks afterwards a notable change was visible in the good man's exterior. He became more careful of his dress, he shaved every morning, he purchased a crop-eared Welsh cob; and it was soon known in the neighbourhood that ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... (which I have contracted with thee) in view, I shall speak to thee something. Do thou listen to it. They that have not their souls under control, acquire not merit by leading the four successive modes of life, viz.,—celibacy with study, domesticity, retirement into the woods, and renunciation of the world. That which is called religious merit is said to consist of true knowledge. The wise, therefore, have declared religious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... we are told that willy-nilly every sound, healthy person of either sex must get married or at least betake him or herself to the business of propagating the race. That at least is the essence of his singularly offensive dictum that since the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and of members of Religious Orders deprives the State of a number of presumably excellent parents, "if monastic orders and institutions are to continue, they should be open only to the eugenically unfit."[32] If the ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... matrimony, like a silly girl, who dreams of nothing else from morn till night; but I am a nun here, without the vow of celibacy. Where shall I find a ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... matrimony by the charms of an outward Venus, will find after marriage that he has tied himself up for life to a human hat-rack, specially designed by a clever dressmaker, to yank him from the joys of a contented celibacy into the thorny ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... them, though the imagination still dallies with their possibility. Equally insane when once aroused and under headway, whether they shall be aroused or not depends on accidental circumstances. How are old maids and old bachelors made? Not by deliberate vows of celibacy, but by sliding on from year to year with no sufficient matrimonial provocation. So of the nations with their wars. Let the general possibility of war be left open, in Heaven's name, for the imagination ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... presented to the Chapter, built a Deanery House, and established a "fratery," or guild for the ministration to the spiritual and bodily wants of the sick and poor. He died in 1202. He wrote against the strict views concerning the celibacy of the clergy promulgated by Pope Gregory VII., and declared that the doctrine and the actual practice made a great scandal to the laity. Dean Milman suspects that he was much moved herein by the condition of his ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... love and feelings are imaginary. Their thoughts and sentiments pass without trace like futile words. My companions, therefore, soon began to violate the regulations of the Order. Then I introduced the condition of celibacy, the entire negation of woman, of the comforts of life, of superfluities, according to the teachings of the Yellow Faith; and, in order that the Russian might be able to live down his physical nature, I introduced the limitless use of alcohol, hasheesh and opium. Now for alcohol ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... And yet celibacy is as old as civilisation, and the Will to Live has denied itself since first It was conscious. It cannot be pished and pshawed away, by you or ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... with the girl, after all was discovered? Her presence in Canada would for ever compromise the holy (?) Church of Rome. She knew too well how the priests, through the confessional, select their victims, and help themselves, in their company, in keeping their solemn vows of celibacy! What would have become of the respect paid to the priest, if she had been taken by the hand and invited to speak, bravely, boldly, before ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... period of the Christian era the affection of one sex for the other was considered to be under the special control of the devil. Marriage was to be tolerated; but celibacy was the state most conducive to the near intercourse with heaven that was so dearly sought after. This opinion was doubtless generated by the tendency of the early Christian leaders to hold up the events ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... in the law, a D.D. Mohammed did his best to abolish the priest and his craft by making each Moslem paterfamilias a pontifex in his own household and he severely condemned monkery and celibacy. But human nature was too much for him: even before his death ascetic associations began to crop up. Presently the Olema in Al-Islam formed themselves into a kind of clergy; with the single but highly important difference that they must (or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... the Abbot of Clugny was a pope of monasticism. The movement acquired enormous influence on the Church as a whole, getting control of the papacy, insisting that the Church should be independent of the State, and that celibacy of the clergy should be practically enforced. But the Cluniacs instead of withdrawing from the world began to dominate it, losing many of the essential features of monasticism. Hence another reform movement ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... to some extend an indictment of the celibacy of the priesthood, though it has to be admitted that the issue is not put quite fairly, inasmuch as the Abbe was, at the time of his lapse, in entire forgetfulness of his sacred office. As a whole, the book contains some of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... said Mrs. Lahens. 'It is not well that anything should outlive its day. But sometimes it happens so. But look,' she exclaimed, laughing nervously, 'how Agnes is listening to St. Clare. Those two were made for each other. Celibacy and Work. Which is Celibacy and ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... possessed the faculty of spiritual generation: and this extraordinary privilege might compensate, in some degree, for the painful celibacy which was imposed as a virtue, as a duty, and at length as a positive obligation. The religions of antiquity, which established a separate order of priests, dedicated a holy race, a tribe or family, to the perpetual service of the gods. Such institutions were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... highest dignities in the Church. Humanism was triumphant at the Papal Court, but, unfortunately, religion was neglected. Though in his personal life Leo X. could not be described as a deeply religious man, yet he was mindful of his vows of celibacy, attentive to the recitation of the divine, office, abstemious, and observant of the fasts of the Church. As a secular ruler he would have stood incomparably higher than any of the contemporary sovereigns of Europe, but he was out of place considerably as the head of a great religious organisation. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... social rank, are exempt from taxes, but do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Their ranks are recruited by heredity or from the nobility; and it is not uncommon for a prince to surrender his claim of succession to assume the office of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... repetition of it always cost him tears. In this movement Beethoven used the word Beklemmt (Beklommen) (oppressed, anxious) at a point where it modulates into another key. His loneliness, superinduced by his life of celibacy, by his deafness, his disappointment in his nephew, all had the effect of separating him from the world. The spiritual side of his nature, always active, had been brought into new life during his work on the Mass, as ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... I added, "you must admit that as a true friend I was right in advising him against your proposal. Do you recollect having told me that you never married for the very same reason? Do you recollect your strong arguments in favour of celibacy while we were at Parma? Consider also, I beg, that every man has a certain small stock of selfishness, and that I may be allowed to have mine when I think that if M. Dandolo took a wife the influence of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... illumination which had the right of way over the testimony of the senses. The Shakers called their establishment the Church of Christ and the original foundation the Mother Church. The Shakers forbade audible prayer and enjoined celibacy. There are parallels enough here to sustain Milmine's contention that Mary Baker was at least largely influenced by suggestions from her ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... a life of celibacy, determine also to be the most wholesome, and normal, and all around liberal, womanly spinster the ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... having previously been procured from Lhassa, this marriage had been effected by the Lamas, in order to counteract the efforts of the Dewan, who sought to exercise an undue influence over the Rajah and his family. The Tupgain Lama having only spiritual authority, and being bound to celibacy, the temporal authority devolved on the second son, who was heir apparent of Sikkim; he, however, having died, an illegitimate son of the Rajah was favoured by the Dewan as heir apparent. The bride was brought from Tibet, and the marriage party were feasted for eighteen days at the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... this persuasion certain of the Aztec priests practised complete abscission or entire discerption of the virile parts, and a mutilation of females was not unknown similar to that immemorially a custom in Egypt.[147-2] Such enforced celibacy was, however, neither common nor popular. Circumcision, if it can be proven to have existed among the red race—and though there are plenty of assertions to that effect, they are not satisfactory to an anatomist—was ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... The former may marry, and they recognize the authority of the Bantsine, who resides in Techow Loumba, and is chief of the civil administration in Thibet. We, the yellow lamas, have taken the vow of celibacy, and our direct chief is the Dalai-Lama. This is the difference which separates the two religious orders, the respective rituals of ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... he several times asked his friend Melanchthon to pray for him on this account. Then Fate would have it that during these very weeks the restless mind of Carlstadt in Wittenberg fell upon the question of the marriage of priests, and reached the conclusion, in a pamphlet on celibacy, that the vow of chastity was not binding on priests and monks. The Wittenbergers in general agreed—first of all, Melanchthon, whose position in this matter was freest from prejudice, since he had never received ordination and had been ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Zoroaster lays aside the prophet, assumes the legislator, and discovers a liberal concern for private and public happiness, seldom to be found among the grovelling or visionary schemes of superstition. Fasting and celibacy, the common means of purchasing the divine favor, he condemns with abhorrence, as a criminal rejection of the best gifts of Providence. The saint, in the Magian religion, is obliged to beget children, to plant useful trees, to destroy noxious animals, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... punished only because she and her lad made a blundering choice before their judgments were formed. But, if the woman is spirited and aggressive, then the lookers-on see part of a hideous game which might well frighten the bravest into celibacy. She is self-assertive, she desires—very rightly—to be first, and at the first symptom of a slight from her husband she begins the process of nagging. The man is refined, and the coarseness which he ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... exclaimed Mericour, in a low voice, but with a sudden light on his countenance. 'The tonsure was given me as a child, but no vow of celibacy has ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... There are perpetual allusions to these "secret woes" in his correspondence; for, although he had the fortitude to refuse marriage, he had not the stoicism to contract his own heart in cold and sullen celibacy. He thus alludes to this subject, which so often excited far other emotions than those of humour:—"It is long since I have considered myself as undone. The world will not, perhaps, consider me in that light entirely till I ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... statement that Aunt Aggie found herself drawn towards an evangelical and purer form of religion. The Archdeacon subsequently married, or rather became guilty of ecclesiastical bigamy. But Aunt Aggie throughout life retained pessimistic views respecting the celibacy of ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... a bachelor. If questioned on the subject, his invariable reply is, "Eh, married? Not I! Women are a kind of cattle, don't you see, that I never did understand. If it was anything about a horse now—" There are some, however, who attribute his celibacy to another cause, and deem that he has never yet seen any one calculated to efface the memory of his sincere though eccentric attachment to ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... a known and peculiar votary to the state of celibacy, I judged it would do you no disservice to acquaint you of a late occurrence, which sufficiently evidences, that after the most mature consideration, some of our wisest and best men do prefer the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... accounted as one person, for nature seemed in a manner to have bestowed on them a single body. Halfdan, stung with this shameful affront, accepted the challenge; meaning to wipe out with noble deeds of valour such an insulting taunt upon his celibacy. And while he chanced to be walking through a shady woodland, he plucked up by the roots all oak that stuck in his path, and, by simply stripping it of its branches, made it look like a stout club. Having this trusty weapon, he composed ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the earth may never be scourged with celibacy, but the ever-increasing variety of bachelors, male and female, creates in me a feeling of apprehension. Nor can I make out whether a bachelor of arts is bigger and better than bachelors of science and pedagogy. The arts folks claim ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... aspersions upon his moral character, asserting, as Ritson puts it, "in his bigoted and foul-mouthed way," that "he continued a hater of truth, and under the disguise of celibacy a filthy adulterer to the last;" and in his Declaration of Bonner's articles (1561, fol. 81), he condescends to an instance to the effect that "Doctoure Barkleye hadde greate harme ones of suche a visitacion, at Wellys, before he was Quene Maryes Chaplayne. For the woman whome ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... chase, and appears with a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows at her back, and on her side is a hound. She devoted herself to perpetual celibacy, and her chief joy was to speed like a Dorian maid over the hills, followed by a train of nymphs in ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Spiritual Marriage," as there set forth, in especial abhorrence, and we have no doubt Mrs. Jameson does so also. We are well aware of the pernicious effect which this doctrine has exercised on matrimonial purity among the southern nations; that by making chastity synonymous with celibacy, it degraded married faithfulness into a restriction which there were penalties for breaking, but no rewards for keeping. We see clearly enough the cowardice, the shortsightedness, of fancying that man can insure the safety of his soul by fleeing from the world—in ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the Lass of seventeen who failed to get her Hooks on some roaming specimen of the Opposite Gender was in danger of being whispered about as an Old Maid. Celibacy was ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... of the two houses, as they appeared to her before the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to them Dr. Johnson's celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... wedlock; wedding, nuptials, espousals, nuptial rites. Antonyms: celibacy, divorce, bachelorhood, maidenhood. Associated Words: misogamy, misogamist, affiance, affianced, affinity, intermarriage, conjugality, misalliance, agamist, benedict, betroth, betrothal, desponsory, ante-nuptial, sponsal, hymeneal, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... country parish, revolving in an actual world of petty details, and in another world of grim theological speculation and absorption in the contemplation of death, must have seldom smiled. The young pastor was bound by no vow of celibacy, but he knew that his life must be brief, and he gladly surrounded himself with children in the guise of pupils, and when he died he left a Bible to his church, a small sum for the education of heathen youth in America, some manuscript sermons to his parents, and the rest of his little property ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... had two prominent rites: baptism, and what Tertullian calls the "oblation of bread." Each had for officers, deacons, presbyters, ephemerents. Each sect had monks, nuns, celibacy, community of goods. Each interpreted the Old Testament in a mystical way—so mystical, in fact, that it enabled each to discover that the bloody sacrifice of Mosaism was forbidden, not enjoined. The most minute likenesses ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort of man that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the second, by means of a very superior degree of art and attention, during the dark ages, when the laity were sunk in ignorance, the catholic clergy contrived to entail the church property, from generation to generation, upon the whole body: at the same time, enjoining celibacy, by which all chance of alienation, even of personal property, was done away. As to the means of acquiring property, and of augmenting it; they were many, and, in every contest with the secular authority, they had ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... at the age of thirty, in the very prime of their life, the young husband and wife found themselves condemned to celibacy. He grew moody, his complexion became grey and his eyes lost their lustre. Her rich beauty faded, her fine figure wasted away, and she suffered all the sorrows of a mother who sees her children growing ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... slaves and come North to rouse the people, and was creating a sensation on the lecture platform. Her burning words in Pennsylvania Hall had helped to make the mob furious. Whittier's humorous arraignment of his friend for breaking his promise of celibacy was written at this critical time, and he was obliged to disguise himself when he carried his epithalamium on the wedding night to the door of the bridegroom. He had been invited to assist at the wedding service, but as the bride was marrying "out ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... are bound to the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy and cessation from business, and on the positive side ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... its translation, contained a most comprehensive curse upon any man who ventured to interfere with the personal sanctity of this same Royal Lady of Amada, who, apparently in virtue of her office, was doomed to perpetual celibacy like the vestal virgins. I do not remember all the terms of the curse, but I know that it invoked the vengeance of Isis the Mother, Lady of the Moon, and Horus the Child upon anyone who should dare such a desecration, and in so many words doomed him to death by violence "far ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... of voluntary continency, particularly for those who consecrate their lives to the sacred ministry. "There are eunuchs who have made themselves such for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake. He who can take it, let him take it."(515) Our Lord evidently recommends here the state of celibacy to such as feel themselves called to embrace it, in order ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of ordinary life. On the return of a settled government, they were startled for a moment in their security; the conduct of some among them had become so unbearable, that even Henry VII., who ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... reason to assume,—though positive historical evidence is wanting,—that he bound the Norwegian Church to the payment of Peter's pence to the Holy See. He also effected extensive reforms as regards the celibacy of the clergy; but, in spite of his great influence, does not seem to have been able to carry them so far as he could have wished. Various rites and ceremonies of religion, into which abuses had crept, were purged by him. ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which taught them that in the person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been proved to be most human, that which was most human had been proved to ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... their children to ride, to shoot the bow, and to speak the truth. To prize the pursuits of agriculture and horticulture, was a part of their religion. They allowed a plurality of wives, and concubines with them; but there was one wife to whom precedence belonged. Voluntary celibacy in man or woman was ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Edward Elliston, an East India captain: their daughter and heiress Catherine was married in the year 1756 to Edward Eliot, Esq. (now lord Eliot), of Port Eliot, in the county of Cornwall; and their three sons are my nearest male relations on the father's side. A life of devotion and celibacy was the choice of my aunt, Mrs. Hester Gibbon, who, at the age of eighty-five, still resides in a hermitage at Cliffe, in Northamptonshire; having long survived her spiritual guide and faithful companion Mr. William Law, who, at an advanced age, about the year 1761, died in her house. In ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... was in due time cultivated in the persecutions women endured under witchcraft and celibacy, when all women were supposed to be in collusion with the spirit of evil, and every man was warned that the less he had to do with the "daughters of men" the more perfect might be his communion with the Creator. Lecky in his History of Rationalism ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... is such that she can scarcely speak. She is no chicken, but she has not grown tough with age and celibacy. Her heart is very tender, her compassion very genuine, her homage very real. Beneath the locket with the fishy eye in it, Miss Tox bears better qualities than many a less whimsical outside; such qualities as will outlive, by many courses of the sun, the best outsides ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... to identify art in the Middle Age with philosophy and theology. Its pleasing falsity could be adapted to useful ends, much in the same way as matrimony excuses love and sexual union. This, however, implies that for the Middle Age the ideal state was celibacy; that is, pure ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... proved himself such an arrant gossip as to discount every word that he had said before I placed him in his proper type: it is one which I have encountered elsewhere, that of the middle-aged bachelor who will and must talk, and he had confessed his celibacy almost in his first breath; but a more pronounced specimen of the type I am in no hurry to meet again. If, however, there was some comfort in the thought of his more than probable exaggerations, there was none at all in the knowledge that these would be, if they had not already ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... to its decay that affected the entire life of the Church during these centuries. The superior sanctity attached to the unmarried state, that brought about the celibacy of the priests, gradually changed the active beneficent existence of the old-time deaconesses into the cloistral life of nuns. Statutes were passed forbidding her to marry. Gradually grew up the dangerous ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues practised by this puritan among ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... definite interest, of picturesque arrangement, and of sustained and disciplined power. Schefer is a scholar, and his didactic purpose is plain enough, and well enough managed. The Teutonic character has always instinctively revolted against the practice of celibacy, a form of ascetism quite natural, and sometimes perhaps inevitable, as a reaction against the unbridled sensualism of the Africans and Asiatics, but quite out of place in climes so temperate and races so moderate, conscientious, and self-respecting ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... never known the love of a sister or a mother's care. He did not, however, go the length of condemning marriage altogether; on the contrary, he blames the philosophers who did so. But it is equally obvious that he approves of celibacy as a "counsel of perfection," and indeed his views on the subject have so close and remarkable a resemblance to those of St. Paul that our readers will be interested in ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... is a form of monasticism—it is a getting away from the world. Monasticism does not necessarily imply celibacy, but as unrequited or misplaced love is usually the precursor of the monastic impulse, celibacy or some strange idea on the sex problem usually is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... "Hag" was looked upon as a saint-like and long-suffering martyr to the weaknesses and inconsistency of the "Fool." That, after erecting this new house at her request, he had suddenly "gone back" on her; that his celibacy was the result of a long habit of weak proposal and subsequent shameless rejection; and that he was now trying his hand on the helpless schoolmarm, was perfectly plain to Five Forks. That he should be frustrated in his ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... candor, its benign good-nature. And he understood women so well! He flattered their foibles so insensibly; he commanded their affection with so gracious a dignity. Above all, what with his accomplishments, his peculiar reputation, his long celibacy, and the soft melancholy of his sentiments, he always contrived to interest them. There was not a charming woman by whom this charming man did not seem just on the point of being caught! It was like the sight of a splendid trout in a transparent ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the property of the parents proves a most powerful incentive to matrimony, and there is not perhaps any country on the face of the earth where marriage is more general than here, instances of persons of either sex passing their lives in a state of celibacy being extremely rare. The necessity of purchasing does not prove such an obstacle to matrimony as is supposed. Was it indeed true that every man was obliged to remain single till he had accumulated, from the produce of his pepper-garden, a sum ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... in together crossed one another upon the bottom, it was a sign that the person who let them fall would be married within a year. As I could distinguish none that were crossed, I concluded that all who had made the experiment here were condemned to celibacy. This form of superstition—doubtless of Celtic origin wherever met with—is much more frequent in Brittany ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... public life of any kind; where the rich are condemned to involuntary idleness, and the poor to enforced misery; where there is a population of some ten thousand ecclesiastics in the prime of life, without adequate occupation for the most part, and all vowed to celibacy; where priests and priest-rule are omnipotent, and where every outlet for the natural desires and passions of men is carefully cut off—if you take in fully all these conditions and their inevitable consequences, you will not be surprised if to me, as to any one who knows the truth, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... husband, Pionkhi; and Shapenuapit, succeeding her adopted mother, had reigned over Thebes in the Ethiopian interest during many years. There is nothing to show that she was married, and perhaps she was compensated for her official celibacy by being authorised to live the free life of an ordinary Pallacide;** her minister Montumihait directed her affairs for her so completely that the Assyrian conquerors looked upon him as petty king of Thebes. Tanuatamanu confirmed him in his office ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Simony, with drunkenness.[519] The case against the monasteries was complete; and there is no occasion either to be surprised or peculiarly horrified at the discovery. The demoralization which was exposed was nothing less and nothing more than the condition into which men of average nature compelled to celibacy, and living as the exponents of a system which they disbelieved, were certain ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... any other class, the scholars of their day—are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Oda.—Another side of the Church's work, the maintenance of a high standard of morality, was, in the time of Eadred, represented by Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury. The accepted standard of morality differs in different ages, and, for many reasons, it was held by the purer minds in the tenth century that celibacy was nobler than marriage. If our opinion is changed now, it is because many things have changed. No one then thought of teaching a girl anything, except to sew and to look after the house, and an ignorant and untrained wife could only be a burden to a man who was intent upon the growth of the ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... strange things. And yet celibacy is as old as civilisation, and the Will to Live has denied itself since first It was conscious. It cannot be pished and pshawed away, by you or ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... approve of William. It was not so much that she took exception to the trail of tobacco ash that followed in his wake, or the unusual litter he created during his inventive period. She resented the fact that he was unmarried, having, at all times, a strong objection to celibacy. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... of religion in respect to the opposite duties of leading celibate lives, and of continuing families, have been contradictory. In many nations it is and has been considered a disgrace to bear no children, and in other nations celibacy has been raised to the rank of a virtue of the highest order. During the fifty or so generations that have elapsed since the establishment of Christianity, the nunneries and monasteries, and the celibate lives of Catholic ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... was at her years, and before she had become acquainted with grief. When death deprived me of my wife I returned to Scotland, enriched by the marriage; and, would you think it, Duncan! the suffering angel had remained in the heartless state of celibacy twenty long years, and that for the sake of a man who could forget her! She did more, sir; she overlooked my want of faith, and, all difficulties being now removed, she took me ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... marry, he will suffer no serious loss of vital power; there will be no tendency to spermatorrhoea or congestion, nor will he be afflicted with any one of those ills which certain vicious writers and quacks would lead many people to believe. Celibacy is perfectly consistent with mental vigor and physical strength. Regularity in the habits of life will always have its good effects on the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... the faculty of spiritual generation: and this extraordinary privilege might compensate, in some degree, for the painful celibacy which was imposed as a virtue, as a duty, and at length as a positive obligation. The religions of antiquity, which established a separate order of priests, dedicated a holy race, a tribe or family, to the perpetual service of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the real presence; 2d, celibacy; 3d, monastic vows; 4th, low mass; 5th, auricular confession; 6th, withholding ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... society to their union; the parental instinct gives birth to children and leads the father and mother to protect the child through the long years of dependence. Marriage and parenthood are twin obligations that the individual owes to the race. Celibacy makes no contribution to the perpetuation of the race, and unregulated sexual intercourse is a blight upon society. Marriage lays the foundation of the home and makes possible the values that belong to that institution. Children hold the family together; separation and divorce are ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... ebb, and the course of the Reformation was to preach against abuses. Zwingli drew his knowledge and faith from the Bible, holding that for authority one ought to return to it or to the primitive church. He advocated the abolition of image-worship, and, in addition, the abolition of enforced celibacy, nunneries, and the celebration of the mass. He held, too, that there ought to be a return to local church government, and {386} that all of the cloisters should be converted into schools. He objected to so many days being devoted to the festivals ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... To prize the pursuits of agriculture and horticulture, was a part of their religion. They allowed a plurality of wives, and concubines with them; but there was one wife to whom precedence belonged. Voluntary celibacy in man or woman was counted ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... found the Utopia of the prophets and poets, an actual place, here in Pennsylvania. We will go there together, shut out the trade-world, and devote ourselves with these lofty enthusiasts to a life of purity, celibacy, meditation,—helpful and loving to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... out his purpose of exalting the Papal See above all prelates and princes, Gregory, as soon as he became Pope, set about two important reforms,—the enforcement of celibacy among the secular clergy, and the suppression of simony. By the first measure he aimed to effect not only a much-needed moral reform, but, by separating the clergy from all the attachments of home and neighborhood ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Church and Society at large; for instance, the difference between the Church and a religious sect; the respective prerogatives of the Church and the civil power; what the Church claims of necessity, what it cannot dispense with, what it can; what it can grant, what it cannot. A Catholic hears the celibacy of the clergy discussed in general society; is that usage a matter of faith, or is it not of faith? He hears the Pope accused of interfering with the prerogatives of her Majesty, because he appoints an hierarchy. What is he to answer? What ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... another, do away with marriage. "Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future." Let the woman be free forever from the drudgery of family life, free from the slavery of the marriage relation, free to "live," to "work," to have a "career." Men and women were intended ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... shocked, you vaguely approve the mental misdeeds which I confess to you. You let me relieve myself and you don't charge me anything for the service. Frankly, that is what you are here for. I spoil you with care and attentions because you are the spiritual vent of solitude and celibacy, but that doesn't prevent you, with your spiteful way of looking at me, from being insufferable at times, as you ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... tax, which Cato as censor (570) laid on this most abominable species of slaves kept for luxury, would not be of much moment, and besides fell practically into disuse a year or two afterwards along with the property-tax generally. Celibacy—as to which grave complaints were made as early as 520—and divorces naturally increased in proportion. Horrible crimes were perpetrated in the bosom of families of the highest rank; for instance, the consul Gaius Calpurnius Piso ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... celibacy of men of genius Inaccuracies in his Apophthegms Baillie, Joanna, the only woman capable of writing tragedy Baillie, Dr., Lord Byron put under his care ——, Dr. Matthew, consulted on Lord Byron's supposed insanity Baillie 'Long' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Celibacy. — N. celibacy, singleness, single blessedness; bachelorhood, bachelorship[obs3]; misogamy[obs3], misogyny. virginity, pucelage[obs3]; maidenhood, maidenhead. unmarried man, bachelor, Coelebs, agamist[obs3], old bachelor; misogamist[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... us to meet without mutual offence. I agree to put my handkerchief up to my nose when I sneeze in his presence, and he contracts not to wipe muddy boots on my sofa. I undertake not to shock his wife by parading my hideous immorality before her eyes, and he binds himself not to aggravate my celibacy by beating her or kissing her when I am paying a call. I agree, by wearing an arbitrarily fixed costume when I dine with him, to brand myself with the stamp of a certain class of society, so that his guests shall receive me without question, and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... "simply what I am always repeating in my clinique, that save in the case of those who are really called to celibacy,—the Newmans, the Spencers, and the Nietzsches of this world,—physical and spiritual health is difficult ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... own music made such an impression on him; that even the repetition of it always cost him tears. In this movement Beethoven used the word Beklemmt (Beklommen) (oppressed, anxious) at a point where it modulates into another key. His loneliness, superinduced by his life of celibacy, by his deafness, his disappointment in his nephew, all had the effect of separating him from the world. The spiritual side of his nature, always active, had been brought into new life during his work on the Mass, as we have seen. It was never thenceforth allowed to fall into abeyance, ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... by which summary process the slightest 'incompatibility of temper' received the relief of a divorce more rapid and easy than even Germany could afford, and the estate lost nothing by any prolongation of celibacy on either side. Of course, the misery consequent upon such arbitrary destruction of voluntary and imposition of involuntary ties ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the times in which these laws were passed? Was it not when virtue was seldom inculcated as a moral duty that we were required to relinquish the most rational of all our amusements, when the clergy were enjoined celibacy, and when the laity were denied the right to read their Bibles? He thought that it must have been from a notion of penance that they erected the drama into an ideal place of profaneness, and spoke of the theatre as of the tents of sin. He did not mean to dispute that there were many ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... typical literature and art, produced by typically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed to the same new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelong companionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable than death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the most typical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrified Emilia or a Sophia of a ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... twenty-four hours, and I am trying to give her some training for her future duties. We can never forget our native land so long as we have her with us, for she is a perfect specimen of the Puritan spinster, though too young in years, perhaps, for determined celibacy. Do you know, we none of us mentioned wages in our conversations with her? Fortunately she seems more alive to the advantages of foreign travel than to the filling of her empty coffers. (By the way, I have written to the purser of the ship that she crossed in, to see if I can recover the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wares. They abused Confession by pardoning men who never intended to amend their evil ways. They allowed men of the vilest character to be ordained as priests. They degraded marriage by preaching the doctrine that it was less holy than celibacy. They distorted the original design of Extreme Unction, for instead of using it to heal the sick they used it to line their own pockets. And all these blasphemies, sins and follies were the offspring of that adulterous union between the Church ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... he had become enamored of the charms of Dona Carmen de Torrencevara, as that lady passed to her matutinal devotions. Untoward circumstances, hastened, perhaps, by a wealthier suitor, brought this amour to a disastrous issue; and Father Jose entered a monastery, taking upon himself the vows of celibacy. It was here that his natural fervor and poetic enthusiasm conceived expression as a missionary. A longing to convert the uncivilized heathen succeeded his frivolous earthly passion, and a desire to explore ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... his advantage; but he would never be satisfied, even tho'f she should sweat blood and water in his service — I have a great notion that our aunt, who is now declining into the most desperate state of celibacy, had formed some design upon the heart of Sir Ulic Mackilligut, which she feared might be frustrated by our abrupt departure from these lodgings. Her brother, eyeing her askance, 'Pardon me, sister (said he) I should be a savage, indeed, were I insensible ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the name of one of the Buddhist sects which flourish in Japan. It was founded in 1174 A.D.—by one Honen, according to Griffis; by Genku, according to Rein. Iyeyasu and his successors were adherents and benefactors of this sect. "Its priests strictly insisted upon celibacy, and abhorred the eating of flesh. They taught that the health of the soul depends less upon virtue and moral perfection than upon the strict observance of pious practices" (Rein). See Griffis's account of Buddhism in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... them because of some fancied slight. Chopin was of umbrageous nature, Liszt tells us. Watteau never married, and never, as far as is known, had a love affair. He is an inspired painter of women. (Perhaps, because of his celibacy.) He loved to depict them in delicious poses, under waving trees in romantic parks or in the nude. A gallant artist, he was not a gallant man. He had the genius of friendship but not the talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... but his want of "prospects" induced the prudent parents to break off the intimacy. The expectant fellowship indeed would have afforded him sufficient means, but a barbarous statute was in force which imposed celibacy upon the fellows, and barred his hopes. If this disappointment had happened to a man of strong resolute will it would, in all likelihood, after the first shock was over, have thrown him back upon his studies more determinedly than ever, but on a nature like that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... wavering between the two systems, or who have made a system for themselves out of parts selected from both. They seem to hold some of the Romish rites and doctrines in high respect. They treat the vow of celibacy, for example, so tempting, and, in later times, so common a subject for ribaldry, with mysterious reverence. Almost every member of a religious order whom they introduce is a holy and venerable man. We ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and talking. With the peasants, they cannot like anything or anybody. Their love and feelings are imaginary. Their thoughts and sentiments pass without trace like futile words. My companions, therefore, soon began to violate the regulations of the Order. Then I introduced the condition of celibacy, the entire negation of woman, of the comforts of life, of superfluities, according to the teachings of the Yellow Faith; and, in order that the Russian might be able to live down his physical nature, I introduced the limitless ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... hear a famous Carmelite preacher inveigh against the Wycliffe doctrines. A Lollard, indeed, had the courage to nail to the doors of St. Paul's twelve articles of the new creed denouncing the mischievous celibacy of the clergy, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and other mistaken and idolatrous usages. When Henry Bolingbroke (not yet crowned Henry IV.) came to St. Paul's to offer prayer for the dethronement of his ill-fated cousin, Richard, he paused ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the elements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women's inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a hazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberate organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack of responsibility and general ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... father, and retained the free disposition of her property. Poligamy was not permitted; and relationship within certain degrees rendered the parties incapable of contracting marriage, and these rules as to forbidden degrees have been substantially adopted in England. Celibacy was discouraged. The law of Augustus Julia et Papia Poppaea contained some seven regulations against it, which were abolished by Constantine. Concubinage was allowed, if a man had not a wife, and provided the concubine ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... disputed questions; but the book which received the imprimatur of Convocation and of the King was in the main a restatement of the doctrines of the Bishops' Book with a more explicit declaration on Transubstantiation and on Celibacy in accordance with the Law as laid down in the Six Articles. Throughout the preliminary discussions, Cranmer had championed the most advanced views which had hitherto been held compatible with orthodoxy; and, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... of C. S. Solitary vice. This vice compared with intemperance. A set of wretches exposed. Apologies sometimes made. Nature of the evils this error produces. The law of God. Medical testimony. Entire celibacy, or purity, not unfavorable to health. Youth ought to consider this, and study the human frame. Causes of the error in question. 1. False delicacy. Our half Mohammedan education. 2. Books, Pictures, &c. Great extent of this evil. Opinion ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavory morsel always at another's board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another's fireside, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Don Ruy with feigned complaint, "Think you not that your rigid rules for the journey might have stopped short of hopeless celibacy for all of us?—Why a moon like that and Venus ascendent unless to ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... field of labor, to which the Landgrave of Hesse called him, Francois Lambert performed services far more important than any he was permitted to render his native land. As the first French monk to throw aside his habit—above all, as the first to renounce celibacy and defend in a published treatise the step he had taken (1523), no French reformer, even among those of far greater abilities and wider influence, was regarded by the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church with so intense ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... used in the first ages, as Tertullian, and others after him, observe; that Virginity[629] is a more perfect state than marriage, as the Fathers taught; that the Romish Church preserved the ancient discipline of the Western Church with regard to the celibacy of the Priests; that Jesus Christ himself taught[630] that such as lived in celibacy were more proper for the ecclesiastical functions; that the African Church agreed in this point with that of Rome; and that, besides, ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... told me to-day that nothing would ever induce him to marry. He would practise celibacy, though he would not ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... into a canter which lasted fully a mile. How beautiful she was, when at length they slowed down into a walk! Her cheeks were flaming, her eyes dancing and full of luster, her hair was tumbled about and tendrils fluttered down her cheeks. She was Diana: only he hoped that she was not inclined to celibacy. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... demand advanced by Luther, while pushing further his inquiries into the moral and social regulations and condition of the Church, is the abolition of the celibacy of the clergy. If Popes and bishops wish to impose upon themselves the burden of an unmarried life, he has nothing to say to that. He speaks only of the clergy in general, whom God has appointed, who are needed by every Christian community for the service of preaching ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Riches, Titles, and Power are to reward his Cession, and your Acquiescence? Believe me, charming Vorompdap, our Imans have adapted our Religion to their own Views and Passions, without Regard to that genuine and perfect Model, the Will of God. The Vow of Celibacy, upon which they value themselves, as renouncing Marriage, would be an insupportable Yoke to them, it would be soon shaken of, were it not for their Hopes, which indeed are too often verified, of taking Advantage of the Misunderstandings betwixt the Husband and Wife, ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... this account. Then Fate would have it that during these very weeks the restless mind of Carlstadt in Wittenberg fell upon the question of the marriage of priests, and reached the conclusion, in a pamphlet on celibacy, that the vow of chastity was not binding on priests and monks. The Wittenbergers in general agreed—first of all, Melanchthon, whose position in this matter was freest from prejudice, since he had never received ordination and had ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... says O'Halloran, "we find in Ireland females devoted to celibacy. There was in Tara a royal foundation of this kind, wherein none were admitted but virgins of the noblest blood. It was called Cluain-Feart, or the place of retirement till death," &c ... "The duty of these virgins was to keep up the fires of Bel, or the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... system of military organisation in force in that country, which, in my opinion, is much superior to that inaugurated by Chaka in Zululand, inasmuch as it permits of even more rapid mobilisation, and does not necessitate the employment of the pernicious system of enforced celibacy. Lastly, I have scarcely spoken of the domestic and family customs of the Kukuanas, many of which are exceedingly quaint, or of their proficiency in the art of smelting and welding metals. This science they carry to considerable ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... for the enjoyment of that recreation he kept a number of excellent horses, and several packs of hounds, particularly galgos (greyhounds), for some of which he paid 150 or 200 dollars. In the most shameless way he violated the ecclesiastical vow of celibacy, and he was usually surrounded by several of his own children, who called him uncle, addressing him by the appellation of tio, the term usually employed in Peru to express that sort of relationship. The Padre used to boast of his alleged friendship with ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the two—a healthy, happy-hearted woman, full of beauty and vigour, made to bloom in the sunshine, not to languish in the shadow of some old grief. Women of her stamp do not die of broken hearts or condemn themselves to life-long celibacy as a sacrifice to the shade of the departed. If unfortunately No. 1 is removed, as a general rule they shed many a tear and suffer many a pang, and after a decent interval very sensibly turn their attention ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits—yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings—as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, than expressed; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... nodded agreement. Mr. Sinclair's inveterate celibacy was a standing grievance with ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Canada would for ever compromise the holy (?) Church of Rome. She knew too well how the priests, through the confessional, select their victims, and help themselves, in their company, in keeping their solemn vows of celibacy! What would have become of the respect paid to the priest, if she had been taken by the hand and invited to speak, bravely, boldly, before ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... a touch of his mother's indignation. Surely, if his grandmother wished to cultivate a grand passion, she might have chosen a more sightly object of devotion. Not that there was much to be said for Yossel's taste either. When after seventy-five years of celibacy the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she had money. He put the question ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... its benign good-nature. And he understood women so well! He flattered their foibles so insensibly; he commanded their affection with so gracious a dignity. Above all, what with his accomplishments, his peculiar reputation, his long celibacy, and the soft melancholy of his sentiments, he always contrived to interest them. There was not a charming woman by whom this charming man did not seem just on the point of being caught! It was like the sight of a splendid trout in a transparent stream, sailing pensively to and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... much where they lived, and after William came into possession of his uncle's princely fortune, her life was spent in ease and affluence. He is likely to become one of the richest men in the country, and he is loved for his kindness and respected for his virtues. Your marriage doomed him to celibacy." ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... his deepest nasal bass: "It is only, then, because you don't fancy her now so much as you did last year—fact, you are soured on her and fly off the handle. Such things do happen. The same thing has happened to myself, sir. In my days of celibacy, there was a gal at Saratoga whom I gallantised, and whom, while I was at Saratoga, I thought Heaven had made to be Mrs. Morley: I was on the very point of telling her so, when I was suddenly called off to Philadelphia; and at Philadelphia, sir, I found that Heaven had made another ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through an organised dominant priesthood separated from the world, but no less powerful than the secular forces; with the pope, God's mouthpiece, and vice-regent, at its head. The temporal powers were to be instruments in his hand, subject to his supreme authority. Clerical celibacy acquired a political value; the clergy would concentrate on the glory of the Church those ambitions which made laymen seek to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... under some horrible outbreaking of stifling passion and terrible ante-Protestantism. Over this path, on which, in earlier ages, the mitre and rosary and violet robe and confessional, and doctrines of celibacy and monkery and nun-nism, and bell and consecrated taper, and still deeper dogmas or doctrines, wandered from the East into the Church, came also heresies, terrible as Knights Templars', which in due time warred against the Church, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Guises, in the same spirit, had at one time proposed as a candidate for Margaret's hand the Cardinal of Este, for whom they hoped easily to obtain from the Pope a dispensation from his vow of celibacy. Walsingham to Cecil, Feb. 18, 1571, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... still a bachelor. If questioned on the subject, his invariable reply is, "Eh, married? Not I! Women are a kind of cattle, don't you see, that I never did understand. If it was anything about a horse now—" There are some, however, who attribute his celibacy to another cause, and deem that he has never yet seen any one calculated to efface the memory of his sincere though eccentric attachment to my ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... she had a tendency to arrive at similar results by other means. She was so afraid of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that she would fain shut up her child so as to keep her from the reach of all evil. Vowed celibacy was abominable to her, because it was the resource of the Roman Catholics; and because she had been taught to believe that convent-walls were screens for hiding unheard-of wickedness. But yet, on behalf of her child, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... and increased attraction in the performance of your duties; nor can I overlook the fact that the life of the unmarried man, in this age particularly, is under peculiar and insidious temptations to selfishness, unless his celibacy arise from a very strong and definite course of self-devotion to the service of God and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... discussed society under the second Empire. Le Ventre de Paris described the great market of Paris. La Conquete de Plassans spoke of life in the south of France. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret treated of the results of celibacy. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon dealt with official life. L'Assommoir was a tract against the vice of drunkenness. Some think this the strongest of the naturalist series. Its success was prodigious. In this the marvellous ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... honourable protection of my name. My views, as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon an anointed servant of the altar, have, since I knew her, undergone a—a change.... And it occurs to me, when she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been deceived and played with by a person of Lord Beauvayse's ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... grosser vices. Even in some of the religious houses the brothers would meet at night for unseemly revels, splashing the stone floors with wine and shrieking in a delirium of drunkenness. The rules of the Church enjoined temperance, continence, and celibacy; but the decrees of Leo IX. and Nicholas II. and Alexander II. and Gregory were ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... not always contradict us; he has one view of an object, and we have another; each describes what he sees with equal fidelity, and each regulates his steps by his own eyes: one man with Posidippus, looks on celibacy as a state of gloomy solitude, without a partner in joy, or a comforter in sorrow; the other considers it, with Metrodorus, as a state free from incumbrances, in which a man is at liberty to choose his own gratifications, to remove from place ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which taught them that in the person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been proved to be most human, that which was most human ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... persecuted by the outside world, her followers, after her death, formed a community in which to live and enjoy their religion alone and: undisturbed. Their principles may be summed up as special revelation, spiritualism, celibacy, oral confession, community, non-resistance, peace, the gift of healing, miracles, physical health and separation from the world. Like the Rappists, they neither marry nor have any substitute for marriage, receiving all their children by adoption. They live in large ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton were not in themselves without excuse. To be the favourite of Elizabeth, who had now herself attained the sixtieth summer of her immortal charms, was tantamount to a condemnation to celibacy. The vanity of Belphoebe would admit no rival among high or low, and the least divergence from the devotion justly due to her own imperial loveliness was a mortal sin. What is less easy to forgive in Raleigh than that at the age of forty he should have rebelled at last against this tyranny, is that ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... fly at higher game. But there were the Miss Athelings, the daughters of a neighbouring clergyman, who were ready to go all lengths with him in High-Church matters, except as that one tremendously papal step of celibacy; and the two Miss Hesterwells, of Hesterwell Park, the younger of whom boldly declared her purpose of civilising the savage; and Mrs Opie Green, a very pretty widow, with a very pretty jointure, who lived in ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... but religious customs, which had declined. Temples were erected, and the shrines of gods were restored. Marriage was encouraged, and the morals of the people were regulated by sumptuary laws. Severe penalties were enacted against celibacy, to which the people had been led by the increasing profligacy of the times, and the expenses of living. Restrictions were placed on the manumission of slaves. The personal habits of the imperator were simple, but dignified. His mansion on the Palatine was moderate in size. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... silence ensued. I remembered that his business was to save souls. This old man loved that young girl whom he had watched growing up, defenceless in her own home; he loved her with a great strength of paternal instinct that no vow of celibacy can extinguish, and with a heroic sense of his priestly duty. And I was not to say him nay. The sea—so be it. It was easier to think of her dead than to think of her immured; it was better that she should be ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... what he thought the common right of mankind. So perfect a harmony naturally prevented all those connections of gallantry which are so often fatal to the peace of families. This evil was prevented by early marriages, for no one passed his youth in a state of celibacy. As soon as a young man arrived to the proper age, the community built him a house, broke up the lands about it, and supplied him with all the necessaries of life for a twelvemonth. There he received the partner whom he had chosen, and who brought ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... continued to live at Waverley-Honour in the style of an old English gentleman, of an ancient descent and opulent fortune. His sister, Miss Rachel Waverley, presided at his table; and they became, by degrees, an old bachelor and an ancient maiden lady, the gentlest and kindest of the votaries of celibacy. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... not like his face—the face of an old female devotee, whitened by celibacy, and ravaged by stern observance of the rites; and so, as Don Vigilio—his head weary and his hands burning with fever—had not resumed his work, the young man ventured to question him. Oh! Abbe Paparelli, he was a man of the liveliest faith, who from simple ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... The question of celibacy is too large and complicated to be here discussed in its moral and sociological aspects. It is a condition that confronts us, must be accepted, and the best made of it. Whether by economic compulsion or ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... countries of antiquity. Mr. Baring-Gould says that "the idea, that man without woman and woman without man are imperfect beings, was the cause of the great repugnance with which the Jews and other nations of the East regarded celibacy." (Legends of the Old Testament, vol. i, p. 22.) But this, I think, is not very probable. The aversion of Asiatics from celibacy is rather to be ascribed to their surroundings in primitive times, when neighbouring clans were almost constantly at war ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Prince,'[10] I cannot love again; nor, branded by the shame of self-surrender, am I fit to perform 'the service of towel and comb';[11] and of the bitterness of the long celibacy which awaits me, what need ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... had lived before the death of Mr. Horton; nor upon that event had he thought it necessary, notwithstanding his religious vow of celibacy, to fly the roof of two such innocent females as Mrs. Horton and her niece. On their part, they regarded him with all that respect and reverence which the most religious flock shews to its pastor; and his friendly society they not only esteemed ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... through over-exertion. With the monks the case was different. In this quiet retreat, where man reigned alone, as Adam in the Garden of Eden; where the cares and anxieties of married life were unknown within the sacred walls of celibacy, a single representative of the other sex existed in the ubiquitous shape of a "maid of all work;" and as Eve caused the first trouble in the world, so the monastery "maid" disturbed the otherwise peaceful ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... have for the most part undergone this amputation. Hitherto we have not been able to trace out the cause of this usage. At first we supposed it to be peculiar to the married women, or those who had borne children; but this conclusion must have been erroneous, as we have no right to believe that celibacy prevails in any instance, and some of the oldest of the women are without this distinction; and girls of a very tender age ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... transmittable taint of insanity and consumption. There are some people in the world now, who, knowing the possibility of afflicting offspring with hereditary disease, have lived in ascetic celibacy. But where do we find a criminal who denies himself offspring, lest he endow posterity with the horrible capacity for murder ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... reference to one mother and one child only; it must hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be made ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... woman to admire a beard, intimates her desire to leave celibacy; but she is threatened ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... more horrible than any out of hell!' He adds, that 'this barbarity is not their national character, for no people sympathize so much at the execution of a criminal; but it is the damnable nature of their religion, and the most diabolical spirit of their priests; their celibacy deprives them of the affections of men, and their creed gives them the ferocity of devils.' Geddes saw one man gagged, because, immediately he came out of the Inquisition gates, he looked up at the sun, whose light for many years had ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... eyes;—things are never as bad as they seem. To my thinking, you are the last man alive who should indulge in melancholy forebodings. You have led a peaceful and happy life, graced with the reputation of many good deeds, and you are generally beloved by the people of whom you have charge. Then, though celibacy is your appointed lot, heaven has given you a niece as dear to you as any child of your own could be, who has won a pre-eminent place among the world's great artists, and is moreover endowed with beauty and distinction. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... authorities or by Protestant clergymen will be living in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy. To the above list, as given by Gladstone, one might add many issues, such as birth control, which ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... wife? Was that what was the matter with him? Was that why he went about all day and every day, these last weeks, feeling as if half of him were asleep? He had always been a strong advocate of the celibacy of the clergy, as far as his own case went. Nothing, he had always assured himself, should ever come between him and his work. A wife would be a perpetual distraction: she would want money, and amusement, and ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... on ethics to the neglect of the spiritual world. Taoism inculcates physical discipline; but in practice it has become the mother of degrading superstition—dealing in magic and necromancy. Buddhism saps the foundations of the family and enjoins celibacy as the road to virtue. Metempsychosis is its leading doctrine, and to "think on nothing" its mental discipline. It forbids a flesh diet and deprecates scholarship. Through imperial patronage it acquired a footing in China, but it was long before it felt at home there. As late as ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... their color is ascribed to the singeing which they got in the flames of hell. They do not believe in disease; but, like the Mundurucus on the Tapajos, say that death is always caused by the sorceries of an enemy. They usually bury in the church or in the tambo of the deceased. Celibacy and polygamy, homicide and suicide, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... farther on: "There is no fact in Irish history more singular than the complete and, I believe, unparalleled absence among the Irish priesthood of those moral scandals which in every Continental country occasionally prove the danger of vows of celibacy. The unsuspected purity of the Irish priesthood in this respect is the more remarkable, because, the government of the country being Protestant, there is no special inquisitorial legislation to insure it, because of the almost unbounded ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... Rome, and in all the large towns of the States of the Church. The police is too paternal to refuse the consolations of the flesh to three millions of persons out of whom five or six thousand have taken the vow of celibacy. But in proportion as it is indulgent to vice, it is severe in cases of scandal. It only allows light conduct in women when they are sheltered by the protection of a husband.[12] It casts the cloak of Japhet over the vices of the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... it amazing how good old Sally, herself conceived for celibacy, yearned to mate up every one within her ken! Nature's little way of evening up, perhaps; if Sarah herself was to carry on the race chain, was she to make it up by tireless toil in urging others on? "Sally, Michael Daragh, as I've tried to make clear, is an over-soul. His large feet lug ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... probably drawn up by this minister. It was enacted in the parliament of 1539: a vast number of persons were soon after imprisoned for transgressing it; and Cranmer himself was compelled, by the clause which ordained the celibacy of the clergy, to send away ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... approach of acidulated spinsterhood. But, to do her justice, this regrettable state of single blessedness was far from being her own fault. If her good fortune had but equalled her courage and energy she should have relinquished celibacy years ago. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... women still remain they have formed a camp near the fort and seem to be determined to lay close sege to us but I beleive notwithstanding every effort of their wining graces, the men have preserved their constancy to the vow of celibacy which they made on this occasion to Capt C. and myself. we have had our perogues prepared for our departer, and shal set out as soon as the weather will permit. the weather is so precarious that we fear by waiting untill the first of April that we might be detained several days longer ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Moreover, it had been followed by one from Sir Arthur to her father expressing great regret at the turn which matters had taken, but saying that, after repeated conversations with Vane, he had been forced to the conclusion that his resolve to enter the Church and devote himself to a life of celibacy and mission work at home was really ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... considered the ruling powers could not fail to adopt them in their own interests. It is the nature of a reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of Saint-Pierre touched naivete. Thousands might have agreed with his view that the celibacy of the Catholic clergy was an unwholesome institution, but when he drew up a proposal for its abolition and imagined that the Pope, unable to resist his arguments, would immediately adopt it, they might be excused for ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... love without having nursed its germs, suited not my native enthusiasm, nor were calculated to inspire it.” She wrote in 1767, from Gotham Rectory, “to a female mind, that that can employ itself ingeniously, that is capable of friendship, that is blessed with affluence, where are the evils of celibacy? For my part, I could never imagine that there were any, at least, compared to the ennui, the chagrin, the preclusion, which hearts, cast in the warm mould of passion, must feel in ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... thus acts with primitive economics[331] in keeping the earliest groups small in numbers, and creating a spreading out from these groups of the males cast out. We have male supremacy in its crudest form accompanied by an enforced male celibacy, so far as the group in which the males are born is concerned, on the part of those who survive the struggle for supremacy and wander forth on their own account. Marking the stages from point to point, in order to ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... population is numbered periodically, that there is an excess of females. In England there are thirty women in every hundred who never marry, and there are three millions who earn their own living. It is there contended that all effort is improper which is directed toward making celibacy easy for women, and that marriage, their only true vocation, should be promoted at any cost, even at that of distributing through the colonies England's half million of unmarried ones. Some declare that it is impossible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... details. Paul allows second marriages to women[217]; but thinks it better for a widow to remain as she is.[218] It is better to marry than to burn; yet would he prefer that men and women should remain in celibacy.[219] The power of the father to arrange a marriage for his daughter was, under Roman law, limited by her consent; but the words of Paul make it clear that it was now to be a Christian precept that a father could determine on his own responsibility whether his daughter ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... of course, is understood to apply only to those unmarried persons whom a mean and Snobbish fear about money has kept from fulfilling their natural destiny. Many persons there are devoted to celibacy because they cannot help it. Of these a man would be a brute who spoke roughly. Indeed, after Miss O'Toole's conduct to the writer, he would be the last to condemn. But never mind, these are ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enthusiastic youth, glowing with deep, ripe feeling, and needy of human love. He had little joy in the acquisition of what, in other circumstances, might have been considered his enviable fortune. He thought only of the miserable destiny that sentenced him to celibacy or death. His immediate predecessor, riding across a heath to take a last farewell of his bride, had been struck dead by lightning, and the maiden herself had been hurled from life at the edge of a precipice. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... one—from the word 'lama,' superior. It admits of two classes of monks, the red and the yellow. The former may marry, and they recognize the authority of the Bantsine, who resides in Techow Loumba, and is chief of the civil administration in Thibet. We, the yellow lamas, have taken the vow of celibacy, and our direct chief is the Dalai-Lama. This is the difference which separates the two religious orders, the respective ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... awful relief to his mind, as he considered goin' without pants durin' service the enterin' wedge for Popish tricks; and if things went on like that, nobody knew where we would land. Then some of the women got talkin', and said that the rector practiced celibacy, and that some one should warn him that the parish wouldn't stand for any more innovations, and he'd better look out. So one day, Virginia Bascom, the Senior Warden's daughter, told him what was being said about him. The parson ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... they have already taken away all the documents connected with his former absolution that might have served for his defence, despite the opposition of his poor mother, who preserved them as her son's license to live. Even now they affect to regard a work against the celibacy of priests, found among his papers, as destined to propagate schism. It is a culpable production, doubtless, and the love which dictated it, however pure it may be, is an enormous sin in a man consecrated to God alone; but this poor priest was far from ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... was so long seeking elsewhere in vain; I find in its forms the true symbols of a universal religion; and I now perceive that the seeming errors, in which I was for a time permitted to stray, were wisely designed to convince me of the sublime truth, that celibacy is the single condition befitting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... very proud of him," his good wife answered, as he shook his stick. "How could he help taking orders when he was under orders to do so? And his views are sound to the last degree, most strictly correct and practical—at least except as to celibacy." ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... rising tide of dogmatic Medievalism, with its crassly materialistic view of the Eucharist; its insistence on the saving grace of asceticism and celibacy; and its scarcely veiled contempt for women, overwhelmed the original conception. Certain of the features of the ancient ritual indeed survive, but they are factors of confusion, rather than clues to enlightenment. Thus, while the Grail still retains its character of a Feeding Vessel, comes ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... on not being exposed, like other people, to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion on the celibacy of priests. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... you are right,' said Mrs. Lahens. 'It is not well that anything should outlive its day. But sometimes it happens so. But look,' she exclaimed, laughing nervously, 'how Agnes is listening to St. Clare. Those two were made for each other. Celibacy and Work. Which is ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... who had been invited to balance him in the scale of celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse them of a ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... said Mrs. Windsor, "that is what I always think. There is something so beautiful in not eating and drinking, and not marrying, and all that; but at least we must acknowledge that celibacy is quite coming into fashion. Our young men altogether refuse to marry nowadays. Let us hope that is a step in ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in my prayers, that Thou wouldest help me; but my spirit was wholly intent on learning, and restless to dispute. And Ambrose himself, as the world counts happy, I esteemed a happy man, whom personages so great held in such honour; only his celibacy seemed to me a painful course. But what hope he bore within him, what struggles he had against the temptations which beset his very excellencies, or what comfort in adversities, and what sweet joys Thy Bread had for the hidden mouth of his spirit, when chewing the cud thereof, I ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... in many a college, for lack of the presence of men now translated to another place. As to the "society" of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... church of Rome," and whom Hooker terms "the greatest among the school divines," (Eccl. Pol. b. 3. 9), was born of noble parents, who anxiously, but vainly, endeavoured to divert him from a life of celibacy and study; and died in 1274, at the age of fourty-seven. Echard and Quetif, ibid. p. 271. See also Purgatory Canto XX. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... in the dry, staccato tone of one who repeats a French exercise, and I knew that as far as Millie McKillop was concerned, Wumples was devoted to a lifelong celibacy. ...
— Reginald • Saki
... rebelliousness—another family trait, in me passive not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval absurdity—why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only possible sort of outlet. One needn't marry her in the end; but for the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental either—for my part I could never care for mere coarse, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... six articles," said Gardiner, whose malicious face now glowed with bitter hatred. "He reprobates auricular confession, and believes not that the voluntarily taken vows of celibacy ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... the Sahara; and the struggle of the civil wars, which followed this expansion, was the clash of giants. But this vigour was accompanied by an ideal, whether of irresponsibility or of comfort, which gave rise to the growing habit of celibacy—a habit which was to stir the eloquence of many a patriotic statesman and finally lead to the intervention of the law. When the censor of 131 uttered the memorable exhortation "Since nature has so ordained that we cannot live comfortably with a wife nor ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... she sought so eagerly. After each disappointment in marriage, the poor lady, led to despise mankind, began to see them all in a false light. Her character acquired, necessarily, a secret misanthropy, which threw a tinge of bitterness into her conversation, and some severity into her eyes. Celibacy gave to her manners and habits a certain increasing rigidity; for she endeavored to sanctify herself in despair of fate. Noble vengeance! she was cutting for God the rough diamond rejected by man. Before long public opinion was against her; for society accepts the verdict an independent ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... upon a life of celibacy, determine also to be the most wholesome, and normal, and all around liberal, womanly spinster the ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... all gene and etiquette, marry Roman women and fix here for life: so that among this class you meet with more foreign names than Roman; and it is this sort of colonisation which keeps up the population of Rome, which would otherwise greatly decrease as well from the celibacy of the number that become priests, as from the malaria that prevails in and about the city in July ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... throughout antiquity, and were probably obeyed by large numbers. The rule of continence was far less strict than in the Catholic 'religious' life; but Empedocles, according to Hippolytus, advised abstinence from marriage and procreation, and the tendency to regard celibacy as part of the 'philosophic life' increased steadily. The Cynic Antisthenes is quoted by Clement of Alexandria as having expressed a wish to 'shoot Aphrodite, who has ruined so many virtuous women'. But the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... history we find many striking analogies with the sects of our own day. It was in 1770 that the "Shakers" believed Christ to have reincarnated in the body of Anne Lee, the daughter of a Manchester blacksmith. Although married, she preached—like Mrs. Eddy a hundred years later—the benefits of celibacy, the only state approved by God. Her convictions were so sincere, and her expression of them so eloquent, that when charged with heresy she succeeded in converting her accusers. The cult of virginity was adopted by her followers, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... card as soon as needed, And as for Mrs. Dawes, she was too anxious to get into the genteelest of all (Hollingford) society to object to whatever Miss Browning (who, in right of being a deceased rector's daughter, rather represented the selectest circle of the little town) advocated, celibacy, marriage, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... are normal and not morbid; their inheritance as in the Jukes family; epileptics and their nervous instability; insanity; religious rapture; strange views of the insane on individuality; their moody segregation; the religious discipline of celibacy, fasting and solitude (see also 125); large field of study ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... have no regular priesthood, supported by the government; it depends on voluntary contributions and endowments of the rich; it has its monasteries, where numbers of both sexes devote themselves to celibacy; but, in general, it seems, as a body, to have less influence than in most countries. In all rich families, there is a shing-shang, or astrologer, who is consulted on all occasions; he is the tutor, and generally the writer; ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... justified by this end. Castes are found no more; only those are bound to the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy and cessation from business, and on the positive ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... review of the two houses, as they appeared to her before the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to them Dr. Johnson's celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... you—blessed if I don't! I intended to run over and see her in the morning, anyway. Did it ever strike you that matchmaking is the proper business of old maids? They atone for celibacy through vicarious marriage!" ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... scholar in the world, and who had at last withdrawn to sanctity and prayer. Although Bernard knew that his father expected a brilliant future for him, and that he hoped to effect for him a marriage in some family of the great of those days, yet he took upon himself the vow of celibacy. "God lives in virgin souls," he said. There is a record of an argument with Germain, in which his tutor tries to test the strength of his purpose. Germain tells him that even in a monastery evil cannot be excluded, and that many even of the most austere monks live lives of petty jealousy ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... does not pay an annuity to some one else's wife, married women speak of him as a poor-spirited creature, a man given to low vice, a lover of servant girls. Soon adultery becomes the most respectable form of marriage, and widowhood and celibacy are commonly practised. No one takes a wife unless he takes her away from some one else. Now men vie with one another in wasting what they have stolen, and in collecting together what they have wasted with the keenest avarice; they become utterly reckless, scorn poverty in others, fear ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... kind is the life of that extraordinary couple, Harry Tersett and his lady. Harry was, in the days of his celibacy, one of those pert creatures who have much vivacity and little understanding; Mrs. Rebecca Quickly, whom he married, had all that the fire of youth and a lively manner could do towards making ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Scarborough might have succeeded with his entail; but yet he was aware that his present income was chiefly dependent on his uncle's good-will. To be reduced to live on his fellowship would be very dreadful. And that income, such as it was, depended entirely on his celibacy. And he had, too, as he was well aware, engendered habits of idleness during the last two years. The mind of a young man so circumstanced turns always first to the Bar, and then to literature. At the Bar he did not think that there could be any opening for him. In the first place, ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... everything earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed to be better served by monks and nuns ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... which they themselves had excavated. To prove that their ideas on the nature of marriage, and the emancipation of women, were pure from any selfish or sensual calculations, they imposed upon themselves the law of celibacy. Morning and evening they nourished their mind with the words of the father, or, in the lives of the Christian saints read aloud, they found example, encouragement, and precept. Hymns, the music of which one of their members had composed, served ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Standish, who has been already mentioned, derived the right to limit the ecclesiastical prerogatives, from this among other grounds, that there were Christian churches in which they were altogether rejected, for instance the rule as to the celibacy of the clergy was not accepted by the Greeks. He inferred too, that, as no one disputed the claim of the Greek Church to be Christian, the conception of the universal Church must be different from that which ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... special favourite. Living as a fellow at Oxford, marriage with him had been out of the question, and it may be doubted whether he had ever allowed his heart to be touched. Though belonging to a church in which celibacy is not the required lot of its ministers, he had come to regard himself as one of those clergymen to whom to be a bachelor is almost a necessity. He had never looked for parochial duty, and his career at Oxford was utterly incompatible ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... sister, Mademoiselle de Mortemart, was so unfortunate as to fall in love with a young Knight of Malta, doomed from his birth and by his family to celibacy. Having set out upon his caravans,—[Sea-fights against the Turks and the pirates of the Mediterranean.]—he was killed in combat by ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
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