Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Ecclesiastic   /ɪklˌiziˈæstɪk/   Listen
Ecclesiastic

adjective
1.
Of or associated with a church (especially a Christian Church).  Synonym: ecclesiastical.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Ecclesiastic" Quotes from Famous Books



... Speaking of the ceremony of priestly prelibation as it was practiced in the Kingdom of Malabar, Forbes writes as follows: "The ecclesiastic power took precedence of the civil on this particular point, and the sovereign himself passed under the yoke. Like the other women, the queen had to submit to the right of prelibation exercised by the high priest, who had a right to the first three nights, and who was paid ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... seems to stand in the way of it. It is felt that we show better taste in leaving the essentials of the soul's development to chance, even that such development is not wholly desirable or manly: that the atrophy of one aspect of "man's made-trinity" is best. I have heard one eminent ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punctual attendance at morning service in a mood of non-comprehending loyalty was the best sort of spiritual experience for the average Englishman. Is not that a statement which should make the Christian teachers who are responsible for the average Englishman, feel ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... of abuses in the ecclesiastical administration and in the life of the clergy. What aid could be derived by those who really hungered for spiritual food, or what strength could accrue to the thoughtless faith of the light-hearted majority, from many of the most common varieties of the English ecclesiastic of the later Middle Ages? Apart from the Italian and other foreign holders of English benefices, who left their flocks to be tended by deputy, and to be shorn by an army of the most offensive kind of tax-gatherers, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... Rome we enjoyed the beautiful sight of the cataract at Terni, the place where Queen Caroline sojourned for some time. We were particularly fortunate that day, as the brightest sunshine heightened its picturesque effects beyond description. We found old Rome very full, and to see it and its ecclesiastic governors to advantage, the Holy Week is certainly the properest time. From morning to noon the Prince was at seeing sights, and he made so good a use of his time, that I don't think that something really remarkable was left unseen. Upon this very principle, we paid our respects ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria

... over his coat-collar, and has put on a spotless suit of black cloth, and sports his gold chain and seals conspicuously, and wears his spectacles easily, and drops them in a genteel manner on the silk ribbon that is suspended around his neck; and if he is altogether neat and spruce, as becomes an ecclesiastic of some standing in his diocese, is that a reason why he should be stared at, and why men should put their hands in their pockets and whistle, and why rather perky young fellows should cry "Hallo!" and whisper, "Who's ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... their several objects. Human nature is the same all over the world; but its operations are so varied by education and habit, that one must see it in all its dresses in order to be intimately acquainted with it. The passion of ambition, for instance, is the same in a courtier, a soldier, or an ecclesiastic; but, from their different educations and habits, they will take very different methods to gratify it. Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good-breeding, as it is called, which is the manner ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... moved by this assertion, but he remained silent, and suffered the ecclesiastic to proceed. Emboldened by this attention, Caussin did not scruple to declare that the Cardinal had usurped an amount of power which tended to degrade the royal authority; that the subjects of France were reduced ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... his name was Monteverde. I had him cut to pieces, as was just: for, believe me, Senor, wherever I am, people live according to the law. But the corruption of morals among the monks is so great in this land that it is necessary to chastise it severely. There is not an ecclesiastic here who does not think himself higher than the governor of a province. I beg of thee, great King, not to believe what the monks tell thee down yonder in Spain. They are always talking of the sacrifices they make, as well as of the hard and bitter life they are forced to lead in America: ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... Cintra contains about eight hundred inhabitants. The morning subsequent to my arrival, as I was about to ascend the mountain for the purpose of examining the Moorish ruins, I observed a person advancing towards me whom I judged by his dress to be an ecclesiastic; he was in fact one of the three priests of the place. I instantly accosted him, and had no reason to regret doing so; I found ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... repressing all useless signs of grief in the presence of the venerable lady, who herself showed none, but simply recommended her accepted daughter to pray daily. "I can neither confess nor pray," Vittoria said to the priest, a comfortable, irritable ecclesiastic, long attached to the family, and little able to deal with this rebel before Providence, that would not let her swollen spirit be bled. Yet she admitted to him that the countess possessed resources which she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... preliminary step to following Christ is the leaving the dead to bury their dead." Perhaps this hypothetical anticipation is to be classed with the surmise of Cardinal Wiseman (if Father Prout rightly attributed to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of Men and Women in The Rambler) that Browning himself would one day be found in the ranks of converts to Catholicism. In each case a wish was father to the thought; Browning recognised the fact that Shelley assigned ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... Criticon, an allegory of the Spring, Autumn, and Winter of life. The Discreto was one of his minor works. All that he wrote was published, not by himself, but by a friend, and in the name of his brother Lorenzo, who was not an ecclesiastic.] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... brought in his suite Monsignor Pamphilio, who afterwards became Innocent X. The Cardinal paid a visit to Du Monstier in his studio, where Monsignor Pamphilio spied, on a table, "L'Histoire du Concile de Trent"—the good edition, the London one. "What a pity," thought the young ecclesiastic, "that such a man should be, by some accident, the possessor of so valuable a book." With these sentiments Monsignor Pamphilio slipped the work under his soutane. But little Du Monstier observed him, and said furiously to the Cardinal, that a holy man should not bring thieves and robbers in his ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... clergyman at my side. He was the vicar, the person who had been letting himself go on the organ; a slight man with a handsome, pale, ascetic face, clean-shaven, very dark-eyed, looking more like an Italian monk or priest than an English clergyman. But although rigidly ecclesiastic in his appearance and dress, there was something curiously engaging in him, along with a subtle look which it was not easy to fathom. There was a light in his dark eyes which reminded me of a flame ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... been given and accepted, I felt some curiosity to witness the firmness with which he would face a large and enlightened audience, and, in the intellectual sense, grace his canonical robes. No conveyance having been provided, and wishing the young ecclesiastic to proceed to the place of his exhibition with some decent respectability, I agreed with a common friend, the late Mr. Charles Danvers, to take Mr. C. over to ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... wrote a letter to the Count of Champagne, on his entering the order (1123), praising the act as one of eminent merit in the sight of God; and it was determined to enlist the all-powerful influence of this great ecclesiastic in favor of the fraternity. "By a vow of poverty and penance, by closing his eyes against the visible world, by the refusal of all ecclesiastical dignities, the abbot of Clairvaux became the oracle of Europe and the founder of one hundred and sixty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... is crowned by a wide Tuscan hat and feather. The artist's knowledge and love of animals and wild nature comes out in them, and his interest in beauty and chivalry as opposed to the outworn conventionalities of ecclesiastic demands. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... refused the delay, but granted some other demands which he had made. Garat sent for Edgeworth de Firmont, the ecclesiastic whom Louis XVI. had chosen, and took him in his own carriage to the Temple. M. Edgeworth, on being ushered into the presence of the King, would have thrown himself at his feet, but Louis instantly ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... patrimony of St. Peter—as Dante saw—as Machiavelli saw,—as all clear-sighted Italians have seen,—as we are seeing it now in these very days—has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself; ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... sweetness and growth. There was no one to whom she could turn. Had good Dr. Bayly been at home—but he was away on some important mission from his lordship to the king: and indeed she could scarcely have looked for refuge from such misery as hers in the judgment of the rather priggish old-bachelor ecclesiastic. Gladly would she have forsaken the castle, and returned to all the dangers and fears of her lonely home; but that would be to yield to a lie, to flee from the devil instead of facing him, and with her own hand to fix the imputed smirch upon ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... English proverb: 'You may lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink.' Unfortunately, the Abbe Paquin's good influence was counteracted by that of the Abbe Chartier, the cure of the neighbouring village of St {96} Benoit, a rare case of an ecclesiastic lending his support to the rebel movement, in direct contravention of the orders of his superiors. On several occasions the Abbe Chartier came over to St Eustache and delivered inflammatory addresses ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles

... a pattern differing from the adjoining one; the large slab of marble which laid in the second bay from the east, and from which the memorial brass has long disappeared, remains in situ, it is not known to whose memory it was originally placed, but evidently to some dignified ecclesiastic. Towards the west the floor has been lowered so as to shew the bases of the columns which had for many years been hidden. A semicircular roof-shaft runs from the floor to the top of the wall between the bays, but the roof, until lately, was open to ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous

... of the Caesars, which Vopiscus says Tacitus wrote, must have been the "History," ten copies of which the Emperor Tacitus ordered to be placed every year in the public libraries among the national archives. (Tac. Imp. x.) Orosius, the Spanish ecclesiastic, who flourished at the commencement of the fifth century, has several references to Tacitus in his famous work, Hormesta. This great proficient in knowledge of the Scriptures and disciple of St. Augustin ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... The legate himself went on leisurely to Rochester, where he was entertained by Lord Cobham, at Cowling Castle. So far he had observed the instructions brought to him by Paget, and had travelled as an ordinary ecclesiastic, without distinctive splendour. On the night of the 23rd, however, Pate returned from the court with a message that the legatine insignia might be displayed. A fleet of barges was in waiting at Gravesend, where Pole appeared early on the 24th; and, as a further augury of good fortune, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... for obtaining additional power and beating down all opposition. Early in the reign, the old royal council, which traditionally consisted of twelve members, including representatives of each of the three orders of the state, was reconstituted so as to consist of one ecclesiastic, three nobles, and eight or nine letrados, or lawyers. [Footnote: Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos, 112, etc.] The last class, who made up its majority, were men learned in the Roman law, and therefore devoted to the idea of absolute ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... interesting case of somnambulism on record, is that of a young ecclesiastic, the narrative of which, from the immediate communication of an Archbishop of Bordeaux, is given under the head of somnambulism in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... most interesting points in Peru. All the coast tribes were very superstitious. We have already referred to the celebrated temple near Lima. The temple at Pachacamac was of still greater renown. Arriaga, a famous ecclesiastic, took an active part in extirpating their idolatrous belief. From his accounts, it seems they were much addicted to fortune-telling. Their gods were made to give out oracles and their temples became renowned just in proportion as their priests were ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... give an idea of the double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the old monkish doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modern times, professes himself highly tickled with the "a stick" chiming to "ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a species of pun, a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... clergy, clericals, ministry, priesthood, presbytery, the cloth, the desk. clergyman, divine, ecclesiastic, churchman, priest, presbyter, hierophant[obs3], pastor, shepherd, minister; father, father in Christ; padre, abbe, cure; patriarch; reverend; black coat; confessor. dignitaries of the church; ecclesiarch[obs3], hierarch[obs3]; ebdomarius[Lat]; eminence, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... movement of the Florentines was the outcome of dissatisfaction with musical conditions brought about as much by indulgence of the appetite for the purely sensuous elements in music as by blind adherence to the restrictive laws of ecclesiastic counterpoint. ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, The prim ecclesiastic rout Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... of precedence was observed in the mode of distributing the charity, which consisted in bread, beef, and a piece of money, to each individual of all the three classes. The almoner, an ecclesiastic of grave appearance and demeanour, superintended in person the accommodation of the Catholic mendicants, asking a question or two of each as he delivered the charity, and recommending to their prayers the soul of Joscelind, late ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... l'abb, 'my big brother the clergyman,' i.e. Henri Daudet, professor at the College of the Assumption at Nmes. He died at the early age of twenty-four. The term abb originally meant the Superior of an abbey, then was extended to any ecclesiastic. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet

... this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to assume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and the great majority of them, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... justice was, and perhaps is, as much influenced by secret considerations as Balzac loves to represent it, we must agree with that member of the Listomere society who pointed out that no tribunal could possibly uphold such an obviously iniquitous bargain. As for Troubert, the idea of the Jesuitical ecclesiastic (though Balzac was not personally hostile to the Jesuits) was a common one at the time, and no doubt popular, but the actual personage seems to me nearer to Eugene Sue's Rodin in some ways ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... to the Church; or as an act of deep penance for some crime divulged at the confessional, they yielded up all. To preserve this property and possibly to cause it to produce an income for the Church, certain priests became active planters. Extreme ecclesiastic rule, as has been said, is greatly modified in Spain and her colonies, the natural reaction of the hateful ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... character of the accused, and it was essential that the result of this inquiry be added to the proces verbal and form a part of it. You remember that that was the first thing they did before the trial at Poitiers. They did it again now. An ecclesiastic was sent to Domremy. There and all about the neighborhood he made an exhaustive search into Joan's history and character, and came back with his verdict. It was very clear. The searcher reported that he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... When Science is thus commanded to surrender her intellectual convictions, may she not ask the ecclesiastic to remember the past? The contest respecting the figure of the earth, and the location of heaven and hell, ended adversely to him. He affirmed that the earth is an extended plane, and that the sky is a firmament, the floor of heaven, through which again and again ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... Christianity in India. It is so in the West to-day. The organized churches of the West have within themselves an ever diminishing portion of the vital Christian life and aspirations of the country. Christianity has overleapt ecclesiastic bounds. Its spirit is overflowing, in living streams, into the life of a thousand organizations which are altruistic and philanthropic, outside the limits of ecclesiastical Christianity. It will be so in India, and throughout the world. And the Christian Church must take ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... strange combination in harmony to those who now seek to separate the Christian faith from its supernatural origins. Christianity exhorts us not to believe every spirit, but to "try the spirits whether they are of God," whilst the ecclesiastic bids us chase away the spirits, which he ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... control. This reckless lad the Lady Godiva vainly tried to educate for the monkish life, but he utterly refused to adopt her scheme, would not master any but the barest rudiments of learning, and spent his time in wrestling, boxing, fighting and all manly exercises. Despairing of making him an ecclesiastic, his mother set herself to inspire him with a noble ideal of knighthood, but his wildness and recklessness increased with his years, and often his mother had to stand between the riotous lad ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... Kennedy had made an especial point of missing a train to Washington to have an hour's chat with him. In the afternoons he would have a rubber of whist with the archdeacon who lived across the Square—a broad-minded ecclesiastic, who believed in relaxation, although, of course, he was never seen at the club; or he might drop into the Chesapeake for a talk with Richard or sit beside him in his curious laboratory at the rear of his house where he worked out many of the problems that absorbed ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... and important manuscript work, written two hundred years ago by Francisco Ximenes, an ecclesiastic, is preserved in Guatemala. He, being drawn to inquiries concerning the antiquities and ancient history of the country, was able to get possession of several of the old books, one of them being that known as "Popol-Vuh." His manuscript, arranged in four great volumes ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England not long ago characterized the present age as pre-eminently the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took up book, or magazine, or sermon, he was confronted with some ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... young officer, pale like the cardinal, like all in fact, approached the great ecclesiastic, and ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... them the Abbe de Tesieu in all the political parts of their business; for I will not suppose that so reverend an ecclesiastic entered into any other secret. This Abbe is the Regent's secretary; and it was chiefly through him that the private treaty had been carried on between his master and the Earl of Stair in the King's reign. Whether ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke

... the palm of engraving, hailing him as Corypheus of the art. Among his successful portraits is that of a CAT; but all yield to what are known as the GREAT BEARDS, being the portraits of WILLIAM DE RYCK, an ophthalmist at Amsterdam, and of GELLIUS DE BOUMA, the Zutphen ecclesiastic. The latter is especially famous. In harmony with the beard is the heavy face, seventy-seven years old, showing the fulness of long-continued potation, and hands like the face, original and powerful, if ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner

... society; her dress, houses, streets, lanes, byeways and squares; her architecture, fountains, statues, courts of law, convents, gardens; her fashion and its drawing-rooms, the various professions and their habits, high life and middle class, tradesmen and beggars, priest, friar, lay-ecclesiastic, cardinal and Pope. Nowhere is this pictorial and individualising part of Browning's genius more delighted with its work. Every description is written by a lover of humanity, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... called 'The Parnell Testimonial Fund,'" so ran the rescript, "cannot be approved, and consequently it cannot be tolerated that any ecclesiastic, much less a bishop, should take any part whatever ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... poet, and detained him. Petrarch, knowing that Milan was a troubled city and a stormy court, told the Prince that, being a priest, his vocation did not permit him to live in a princely court, and in the midst of arms. "For that matter," replied the Archbishop, "I am myself an ecclesiastic; I wish to press no employment upon you, but only to request you to remain as an ornament of my court." Petrarch, taken by surprise, had not fortitude to resist his importunities. All that he bargained for was, that he should have a habitation sufficiently distant from ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... attempt to deal with the life of Jesus upon purely historical methods would have been not only contemned as irrational, but stigmatized as impious. And even in the eighteenth century, those writers who had become wholly emancipated from ecclesiastic tradition were so destitute of all historic sympathy and so unskilled in scientific methods of criticism, that they utterly failed to comprehend the requirements of the problem. Their aims were in the main polemic, not historical. They thought more of overthrowing current ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... her duties, habits, and affections; not without a hope that the repeal of her lover's outlawry might be eventually obtained, by a judicious distribution of some of his forest spoils among the holy fathers and saints that-were-to-be,—pious proficients in the ecclesiastic art equestrian, who rode the conscience of King Henry with double-curb bridles, and kept it well in hand when it showed mettle and seemed inclined to rear and plunge. But the affair at Gamwell feast ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... the opera, the ballet-dancers, upper servants, chambermaids, etc. Most of these creatures excite the passions of many people, but they would consider it immodest to inform a lawyer, a mayor, an ecclesiastic or a laughing world of the day and hour when they surrendered to a lover. Their system, justly blamed by an inquisitive world, has the advantage of laying upon them no obligations towards men in general, towards the mayor or ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... life and expression, most delicately and truly rendered, but the colouring also of the whole work would seem to have been given by the hand of a saint, or of an angel like themselves. It is not without sufficient reason therefore, that this excellent ecclesiastic is always called Frate Giovanni Angelico. The stories from the life of Our Lady and of St. Dominic which adorn the predella, moreover, are in the same divine style; and I, for myself, can affirm with truth, that I never see this work but it ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino

... Geoffrin says, is manque par tout; guerrier manque, ambassadeur manque, homme d'affaires manque, and auteur manque—no, he is not homme de naissance manque. He would think freely, but has some ambition of being governor to the Dauphin, and is more afraid of his wife and daughter, who are ecclesiastic fagots. The former out-chatters the Duke of Newcastle; and the latter, Madame de Gisors, exhausts Mr. Pitt's eloquence in defence of the Archbishop of Paris. Monsieur de Nivernois lives in a small circle of dependent ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole

... passenger saloon was on the upper deck, and had a tile roof. To this humplike structure the ship owed her name. Her designer had erected several churches—that of St. Ignotus is still used as a brewery in Hotbath Meadows—and, possessed of the ecclesiastic idea, had given the Camel a transept; but, finding this impeded her passage through the water, he had it removed. This weakened the vessel amidships. The mainmast was something like a steeple. It had a weathercock. From this ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... both those which are now in force, and those which have been repealed; and to send, to the next, and every succeeding, Convention, an accurate list of their officers for the time being, together with an account of the place of their abode, and of the offices, civil, military, or ecclesiastic, which they may sustain, with the number of members of which they consist: that it be further recommended, to the several Societies, to send, annually, to the Convention, an accurate list of all those persons who have been relieved and liberated by their agency; and, also, ...
— Minutes of the Proceedings of the Second Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies Established in Different Parts of the United States • Zachariah Poulson

... curb such evils, and to organise, administer, and rule the land. The Normans succeeded in this as signally as the Saxon barons, introduced under Saint Margaret, Malcolm Canmore's Saxon queen, had failed. David I was by education a Norman knight. At heart he was an ecclesiastic. As Scotland's king, he was, in theory, owner of Scotland's soil from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth, and he disposed of it to his feudal barons, mainly Norman, and to religious foundations on Norman lines, as ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray

... After some time, he was awakened by hearing the door open, and, looking up, he saw two persons enter the room. One was Villegagnon, who carried a lamp in his hand; the other was, he saw by the person's costume, an ecclesiastic. They advanced across the room towards the window, where stood a table and a couple of chairs. Villegagnon threw himself into one of them, with his back towards him, the other imitating his example. The latter produced writing materials, and several papers, ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston

... better known by his Latin name, Frusius, was born at Chartres, in the beginning of the sixteenth century. He embraced the life of an ecclesiastic, and obtained the cure of Thiverval, which he held many years with great credit to himself. The high reputation of Ignatius Loyola, who was then at Rome, with authority from the Holy See to found ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various

... hundred and twenty-three feet at the base. Its structure appears to consist of alternate strata of bricks and clay. In the midst of this pyramid there is a church, where mass is, every morning, celebrated by an ecclesiastic of Indian extraction, whose ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... the article in The Catholic Magazine I thought I perceived from a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written by an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that, consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... Capdepont himself has not a little too much of that synthetic character which I have discussed elsewhere—whether he is quite a real man, and not something of a composition of the bad qualities of the peasant type, the intriguing ecclesiastic type, the ambitious man, the angry man, and so on—must, I suppose, be left to individual tastes and judgments. If I am not so enthusiastic about the book as some have been, it is perhaps because it seems to me rather a ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... As an example of the gravity and formality with which proceedings in matters of this nature were conducted, even as late as the end of the sixteenth century, take the subjoined palinode or recantation of a Flemish ecclesiastic, who had been guilty of the offence of doubting the evection, or bodily transport through the air, of witches and wizards. The original may be found in Delrio, at the end of the Appendix, in his ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... to a theory so pleasing. In matters of this kind, much depends upon subjective considerations; in one sense, at least, "all things are possible to him that believeth." For my own part, I profess no opinion. I am neither an archaeologist nor an ecclesiastic, and speak simply ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... which have fallen into my hands, are the Institutes of Canon Law, by the Abbe de Fleury, and the Civil History of Naples, by Giannone. Their moderation was the effect of situation as well as of temper. Fleury was a French ecclesiastic, who respected the authority of the parliaments; Giannone was an Italian lawyer, who dreaded the power of the church. And here let me observe, that as the general propositions which I advance are the result ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... the hold of the Church upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular excitement. Quieta non movere was his motto; and he was not interested in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... "It was also one of the grievances in Lower Canada that Protestants alone were appointed Executive Councillors, and that while the chief Protestant ecclesiastic was admitted, the Roman Catholic Church was not allowed to be represented. Great offence was also caused by this to the great majority of the inhabitants, which was made to be felt the more keenly by the determination of the Council ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... Beza, who had seen several of his co-religionists burned in France for their faith, likewise wrote in 1554, in Calvinistic Geneva: "What crime can be greater or more heinous than heresy, which sets at nought the word of God and all ecclesiastic discipline? Christian magistrates, do your duty to God, Who has put the sword into your hands for the honor of His majesty; strike valiantly these monsters in the guise of men." Theodore of Beza considered the error ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... 1856-58, in Washington Territory, furnished another outlet for Derby's effective wit. A Catholic priest was taken prisoner by the savages at that time and led away into captivity, and in caricaturing the scene Derby represented an ecclesiastic in full canonicals walking between two stalwart and half-naked Indians, carrying a crook and crozier, with a tooth-brush attached to one and a comb to the other; while the letters "I. H. S." on ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... proof of the weakness of the case when this letter is the most favorable that can be presented from any ecclesiastic. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... sincerely admired, and when he entered Holy Church, none of his charming friends believed that he would do more than modify the proper and agreeable conventionalities of his former life. They thought that he would add to the grace of his worldly manner the suavity of the ecclesiastic, that he would choose a pulpit of Paris, and that, sitting at his feet, they could enjoy the elegant phrases with which he would embellish a refined and delicately attenuated religion. But an aged prelate of the far South judged the new priest differently, he had sounded the heart ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... uniform was a showy figure, and that his captaincy had been bought and paid for was a matter that troubled nobody. The pair was married, and when once tied by an ecclesiastic knot, they proceeded to get acquainted. A captain in the English Army who has a few good working sergeants is nothing and nobody. If he has enough money he can pay to get the work done, and the only disadvantage is that real soldiers scorn him, for soldiers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... physicians, and among the rest the austere, pious Hecquet, and after him Lorry, attributed the conduct of the Convulsionnaires to natural causes. Men of distinction among the upper classes, as, for instance, Montgeron the deputy, and Lambert an ecclesiastic (obt. 1813), stood forth as the defenders of this sect; and the numerous writings which were exchanged on the subject served, by the importance which they thus attached to it, to give it stability. The revolution finally shook the structure of this pernicious mysticism. It ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... the ecclesiastical judge to do penance, no doubt, nowhere save in the prisons of the Church. The ecclesiastic in pace, however severe it might be, would at the least withdraw her from the hands of the English, place her under shelter from their insults, save her honor. Judge of her surprise and despair when the Bishop coldly said, "Take her back ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... days hence, let me receive thy shrift at the convent of Saint Bridget," continued the ecclesiastic. "There also I will hear thy secret. But tell me," he added, looking round the room with some surprise—"how comest thou here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... which had unhappily taken possession of her whole soul, would not have been inspired, had there not subsisted an early difference, in their systems of divine faith. Had she been early taught what were the sacred functions of a Roman ecclesiastic, though all her esteem, all her admiration, had been attracted by the qualities and accomplishments of her guardian, yet education, would have given such a prohibition to her love, that she would have been precluded from it, as by that barrier which divides ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... I have not reached the age of thirty-nine, without a stain upon my reputation, thank God! to compromise myself now, even for the empire of the Great Mogul. You and I are of an age when we both know the meaning of words. For an ecclesiastic, you certainly have ideas that are very incongruous. Fie! ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... two Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he and about sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but just as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco de Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot. Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiring energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery, had endeared himself to all, and become ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... few years later from another mouth, that there were two powers, secular and spiritual, and that the secular authority could not interfere with the spiritual jurisdiction, or depose any bishop or ecclesiastic without leave from Rome. "True enough, he cannot be 'deposed,'" cried the young king, "but by a shove like this he may be clean thrust out!" and he suited the action to the words. A laugh ran round the assembly at the king's ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green

... heard the call and challenge of sentinel and outpost from the bank above. Thereafter presently appeared Giles (that chanced to be captain of the watch) very joyously haling along a little man placid and rotund. A plump little man whose sober habit, smacking of things ecclesiastic, was at odds with his face that beamed forth jovial and rubicund from the shade of his wide-eaved hat: a pilgrim-like hat, adorned with many small pewter images of divers saints. About his waist was a girdle where hung a goodly ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... her watch and frowning, she gave the impression of a commanding little person, much accustomed to having her own way—and with no talent for resignation. And when, a few moments later, another individual appeared upon the deck, a tall, thin, dark-robed ecclesiastic, evidently of high degree, with fine features and a stately bearing, she hastened to express her annoyance. To his polite greeting she ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell

... passage in the Gregorian Decretals, but the later writers refused to disallow it.[1] The following passage from Dr. Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce correctly represents the attitude of the Church towards commerce at the end of the Middle Ages: 'The ecclesiastic who regarded the merchant as exposed to temptations in all his dealings would not condemn him as sinful unless it were clear that a transaction were entered on solely for greed, and hence it was the tendency for moralists to draw additional distinctions, and refuse to pronounce against business ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien

... notice to quit the premises, as he hath provided a friend of his own for the curacy.' 'What!' cried the knight, 'does he mean to take your bread from you, without assigning any other reason?' 'Surely, sir,' replied the ecclesiastic, 'I know of no other reason. I hope my morals are irreproachable, and that I have done my duty with a conscientious regard; I may venture an appeal to the parishioners among whom I have lived these seventeen years. After all, it is natural ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and school-houses there were ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... earlier. For the hard-working country parish priest came yearly to Naples for a few days before Christmas, as he had said, and the first visit he made, after depositing his slender luggage at the house of the ecclesiastic with whom he always stopped, was to Bosio ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... been Jews or Hindus or Mussulmans, it would have been a very different business, this war. These yellow-robed monks, instead of sitting in their monasteries, would have pervaded the country, preaching against us and organizing. No one organizes better than an ecclesiastic. We should have had them leading their men into action with sacred banners, and promising them heaven hereafter when they died. They would have made Ghazis of them. Any one of these is a religion worth having. But what is the use ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... studies in psychology; but they are truthful, natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate; the honest and impulsive youth placed between ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... Bakkus. With his white hair, ascetic, clean-shaved face and deep dark eyes he looked like an Italian ecclesiastic. One's glance instinctively sought the tonsure. He would come forward on to the open-air platform beneath the thick foliage of the park with the detached mien of a hierophant; and there he would sing like an angel, one of those who quire to ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... but lightened by the prospect of his son's preferment in an ancient communion. There would still have been the possibility of a career for the boy, a career which his father could watch, or at least anticipate, with emotions of pride; for the bishop was too purely an ecclesiastic to under-estimate professional success in the Church of Rome. The career of a Cardinal Newman, for example, was one that challenged his respect, however much he regretted the loss of such talents to the Anglican faith, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... blackguards had lashed and frightened his horses to a runaway pace, singing and hallooing in the filthy way he heard, it being a standing joke among such roisterers to put quiet tradesmen of his melancholy profession into a false and ridiculous position.' He did not convince, but only half puzzled the ecclesiastic, who muttering, 'credat Judaeus,' turned his back upon Mr. Tressels, with an angry whisk, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... Williams, afterwards Archbishop of York, was then Bishop of Lincoln, the last ecclesiastic who was Lord Keeper ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... and Talmash, or their Instrument Gnawbit, was clear, I think, from what Captain Handsell told me:—That the Person bringing the letter—the Pardon itself being in the hands of a King's Messenger—had the appearance, although dressed in a lay habit, of being a Foreign Ecclesiastic. The crafty Extortioner of a Knight and Alderman makes answer that I had not come with the other Transports to London, but had been left sick at Brentford, in the care of an agent of his there; but he entreats the Foreign ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... the servants were grouped—Clara, comely of face and of person, neat notwithstanding the demoralisation of feminine attire incident to prolonged travel. Winter, the Brockhurst butler, clean-shaven, gray-headed, suggestive of a distinguished Anglican ecclesiastic in mufti. Miss St. Quentin's lady's-maid, Faulstich by name, a North-Country woman, angular of person and of bearing, loyal of heart. And Zimmermann, the colossal German-Swiss courier, with his square, yellow beard ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... spoke, the Squire, leaning heavily on the Parson's left shoulder, extended his cane in a line parallel with the right of that disputatious ecclesiastic, so that he might guide the organ of sight to the object he ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... months ago the governor presented Juan de Miranda for a racion that was vacant. He is a good ecclesiastic and necessary for that ministry; for setting aside his virtue, example, and good life, he is an excellent singer, and has been reared from childhood in this church. Accordingly I gave him the office very willingly. I petition your Majesty to be ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various

... the age of 10 masturbated, and later had homosexual feelings, that the same feelings and practices continued after she had taken the veil, though from time to time they assumed religious equivalents. The mere contact, indeed, of a priest's hand, the news of the presentation of an ecclesiastic she had known to a bishopric, the sight of an ape, the contemplation of the crucified Christ, the figure of a toy, the picture of a demon, the act of defecation in the children entrusted to her care (whom, on this account, and against the regulations, she would accompany ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... ill-kempt pupils marched the grave professors and teachers, in square ecclesiastic caps and long gowns, whose colours marked their degrees and the Universities that had conferred them—some thin, some portly, some jocund, others dreamy; some observing all the humours around, others still intent on Aristotelian ethics; all men of high ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... again, had been lost and was found. He was amazed at the change of front in himself. She had worn the guise of strange women; she had been a woman of every class, from the dignified daughter of some ecclesiastic or peer to a Nubian Almeh with her handkerchief, undulating to the beats of the tom-tom; but all these embodiments had been endowed with a certain smartness, either of the flesh or spirit: some with wit, a few with talent, and even genius. But the new impersonation had apparently nothing ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... been told several times that a young ecclesiastic, in a seminary at Paris, had a genius who waited upon him, and arranged his room and his clothes. One day, when the superior was passing by the chamber of the seminarist, he heard him talking with some one; ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... promiscuous slaughter with which we are familiar at the end of a play. Marianne (let us hail the appearance of a Christian-named heroine at last), a small child of the tenderest years, is, with the exception of an ecclesiastic, who takes to his heels and gets off, the sole survivor of a coachful of travellers who are butchered by a gang of footpads,[331] because two of the passengers have rashly endeavoured to defend themselves. Nothing ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... cathedral, after the Romano-Byzantine style of architecture; the Palacio, built after Spanish notions of magnificence, around a courtyard shaded by rare trees; and many other edifices, used for official and ecclesiastic purposes. The streets are paved with cobblestone and laid out regularly in squares, in accordance with the plan of De Legaspi, so that one side or the other will be always in the shade. Beautiful plazas, with their palms and statues, frequently relieve the glare ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... is one long record of cruelty, tyranny, and wrong— committed, suffered, or revenged. Over the whole continent of Europe people seem to have had no homes; the merchant, the student, the soldier, the ecclesiastic were always on the move. Young men made no difficulty in crossing the Alps to attend lectures at Bologna, or crossing the Channel to or from Oxford and Paris. The soldier or the scholar was equally a free-lance, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... their religions ready made. Their daily tasks leave them no time or opportunity for a personal search. The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs. Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science. These two factors, of innate mental inertia and force of repetition, are well manifested by the present tactics of advertising. The manufacturer of any product well knows that ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... instances of Perez, the admiral departed from the monastery of Rabida, accompanied by that ecclesiastic, and went to the camp of St Faith, where their Catholic majesties were then carrying on the siege of Granada. Perez here made such pressing instances to Isabella, that she was pleased to order a renewal of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... make it such as He pleases, and address Him in the affecting language of David, "O God, create in me a clean heart," the Prince is arrested by the words, pauses, as if occupied with some great thought; then calling the ecclesiastic who had suggested the idea, he says: "I have never doubted the mysteries of religion, as some have reported." Christians, you ought to believe him, for in the state he then was he owed to the ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... attracting and gathering together some of the most excellent and able persons in France—among them Blaise Pascal, a man of marvellous genius and depth of thought, and Racine, the chief French dramatic poet. Their chief director, the Abbot of St. Cyran, was however, a pupil of Jansen, a Dutch ecclesiastic, whose views on abstruse questions of grace were condemned by the Jesuits; and as the Port-Royalists would not disown the doctrines attributed to him, they were discouraged and persecuted throughout ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... somewhat incoherent note we may assume that the MS. was written in the course of the year 1787 by the notorious Syrian ecclesiastic Dom Denis Chavis, the accomplice of Cazotte in the extraordinary literary atrocity shortly afterward perpetrated by the latter under the name of a sequel or continuation of the Thousand and One Nights [6] ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... The abbot spoke with an ease and glibness that only the ecclesiastic on his own ground can show to those ignorant of his subject. He wrapped his lore, made easy for the beginner, in such technical phraseology, that Shu[u]zen could grasp at the meaning without knowing ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... John!" he broke off, as an ecclesiastic, muffled up to the throat in wrappings, entered the room. ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty

... did the Hebrew people produce so attractive and versatile a figure—at once a man of prayer and of action, of clear swift purpose, daring initiative, and resistless energy, and endowed with a singular power of inspiring others with his own enthusiasm. He forms an admirable foil to Ezra the ecclesiastic; and it is a matter of supreme satisfaction that we have the epoch-making events in his career told in his ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... they have no fuel. I believe my shirt was once white, but I am not sure. I invested a few weeks ago in a pair of cheap boots. They are my torment. They have split in various places, and I wear a pair of gaiters—purple, like those of a respectable ecclesiastic, to cover the rents. I bought them on the Boulevard, and at the same stall I bought a bright blue handkerchief which was going cheap; this I wear round my neck. My upper man resembles that of a dog-stealer, my lower man that of a ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... conciliated by the fact that he was the friend of Cardinal Morone. This learned and enlightened prelate had been imprisoned by the savage and fanatical Paul IV., on a charge of favouring opinions analogous to Protestantism, but Pius IV., the easy-going Milanese jurisconsult, turned ecclesiastic, enlarged him by one of the first acts of his Papacy, and restored him to the charge ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... led, the "Roman" provincials, or in other words the Latin-speaking laity, generally followed. Immediately after his baptism Clovis received a letter of enthusiastic welcome Into the true fold, written by Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, the most eminent ecclesiastic of the Burgundian kingdom. "I regret", says Avitus, "that I could not be present in the flesh at that most glorious solemnity. But as your most sublime Humility had sent me a messenger to inform me of your intention, when night fell I retired to rest already secure ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin



Words linked to "Ecclesiastic" :   Thomas a Kempis, pardoner, church, reverend, man of the cloth, ordainer, Bruno, pluralist, Saint Bruno, St. Bruno, a Kempis, clergyman



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org