Paganel

“ Nothing but a sharp recall from Glenarvan kept the boy in proper order.
The country now became more diversified, and the rising ground indicated their approach to a mountainous district. Rivers were more numerous, and came rushing noisily down the slopes. Paganel consulted his maps, and when he found any of those streams not marked, which often happened, all the fire of a geographer burned in his veins, and he would exclaim, with a charming air of vexation:
“A river which hasn’t a name is like having no civil standing. It has no existence in the eye of geographical law.” ”

“ About one o’clock, Glenarvan and his companions met again in the valley. Glenarvan was completely crushed with grief. He scarcely spoke. The only words that escaped his lips amid his sighs were,
“I shall not go away! I shall not go away!”
No one of the party but could enter into his feeling, and respect it.
“Let us wait,” said Paganel to the Major and Tom Austin. “We will take a little rest, and recruit our strength. We need it anyway, either to prolong our search or continue our route.”
“Yes; and, as Edward wishes it, we will rest. He has still hope, but what is it he hopes?” ”

“ We shall be drenched to the skin again. Whatever you may say, Paganel, a nest cannot suffice a man, as you will soon learn to your cost."
"Oh, yes, it can, with philosophy," briskly replied the geographer.
"Philosophy does not prevent you from getting wet."
"No, but it warms you."
"Well, then," said Glenarvan, "let us join our friends and persuade them to envelop us with their philosophy and their ponchos as closely as possible, and especially to lay in a stock of patience, for we shall need it." ”

“ Did you not get away together?"
"No, my Lord!" said Robert, taken aback by the disappearance of his friend Paganel.
"Well, lose no more time," said the Major. "Wherever Paganel is, he cannot be in worse plight than ourselves. Let us go."
Truly, the moments were precious. They had to fly. The escape was not very difficult, except the twenty feet of perpendicular fall outside the grotto.
After that the slope was practicable to the foot of the mountain. From this point the prisoners could soon gain the lower valleys ”

“ The name of Pagan is an injurious and ignoble term derived from the Latin Paganus, which signifies a rustic, a peasant. When Christianity had entirely triumphed over Greek and Roman polytheism, and when by the order of the Emperor Theodosius, the last temple dedicated to the gods of the nations had been destroyed in the cities, it was found that the people in the country still persisted a considerable time in the ancient cult, which caused them and all their imitators to be called derisively Pagans. ”

“ Pagiel stared at the speaker with amazement. "Thou hast forgotten thyself," he said haughtily.
"Nay, I have not forgotten; thou art the son of my lord's sister, I am the son of Kish the herdsman. Yet in the desert what matters it, am I not a man like unto thee?"
Pagiel was silent a moment. "It shall be so," he said at length. "It is true thou art a man, and my daughter is, after all, only a woman; I have sons also, thanks be to Jehovah!" ”

“ Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did believe it,—merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. ”

“ And we can confidently affirm that all those who do not make for themselves, apart from the crowd, a kind of Thebaid—and there are such—are pagans. They are pagans, because the pleasures of the senses and of the mind alone interest them, and they have not once, during the year, an impression of the moral law, unless the sentiment, which some of them detest, recalls it to them. They are pagans, like the beautiful, worldly Catholics of the fifteenth century—loving luxury, rich stuffs, precious furniture, literature, art, themselves, and love. ”

“ The dictates of nature in the heart of the honest Pagan, constantly employed in long, lonely, and dangerous voyages, awakened him often to reflect who that Providence was that invisibly governed him, supplied his wants, and often mercifully saved him from the destruction into which his own ignorance or rashness were leading him. Poisoned by no system, perverted by no prejudice, he wished to know and adore his Benefactor, with purity and simplicity of heart, free from these fopperies and follies with which ignorant priests and monks had disguised his worship. ”

“ Thousands and thousands of Pagans—men dedicated to the Pagan service, now found it to their interest to seek employment under the new religion; and in order to make it permanent and to give it the appearance of consequence it was deemed necessary to incorporate into it some of the Pagan rites and ostentatious display. Degeneracy, almost universal degeneracy was the result. In a few centuries the religious power had grown almost equal to the former civil power of Rome. ”

“ It is a valuable example to us of the complete and radical difference that existed between the Pagan and the Christian ideas of worship. The Pagan world had no idea of gathering a congregation together, any more than I may say have the old canons of Florence, or of S. Peter's, Rome, who shut themselves into glass boxes, of bringing all men into one building to unite in prayer and praise. The sanctuaries of the Pagan gods were quite small and dark. Worship was simply an individual matter, a bringing of a sacrifice to an altar. ”

“ Paganism was in no sense disestablished, and Christianity was only in a very limited sense established. Paganism was still the official religion of the empire. Whatever might be the individual faith of the sovereign, yet, as the head of the State, he was still the chief representative of heathenism, both in life and in death. In life he was the supreme pontiff, the fountain head of authority over all the priests, temples, rituals, throughout the empire; in death the representation was transformed from earth to heaven. By his apotheosis he became a patron divinity of Rome. ”

“ A deadly stillness now overspread the face and form of the Pagan, as he looked down steadfastly on the deities of his worship engendering his destruction beneath him. His cheek—the cheek which had rested in boyhood on his mother's bosom—was pressed against the gilded breast of the god Serapis, his taskmaster in life—his pillow in death!
'I rise! I rise to the world of light, with my deities whom I have served!' he murmured; 'the brightness of their presence is like a flaming fire; the smoke of their breath pours forth around me like the smoke of incense! ”

“ The intimation had the next thing, in a flash, taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself if he weren’t perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan. This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that gratified his mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan—yes, that was, wasn’t it? what Chad would logically be. It was what he must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and, instead of darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. ”

“ Paganism is conceived generally to be that state of the ancient world, Greek and Roman, but chiefly Greek, in which men lived in a kind of Abbey of Thelema, doing what they would, satisfying the flesh according to their desires, devoid of morals altogether, using the word "morals" in its customary modern sense. Insensibly, when anyone speaks of Paganism, one thinks of garlands and dances, of the Bacchic fury, of the breasts of the nymph in the brake, of the Satyrs lurking in the grove of dark ilexes. ”

“ So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight hundred years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. ”

“ Each pagus had its own sacred rites, and an annual festival called Paganalia. The pagani, or inhabitants of the pagi, had their regular meetings, at which they passed resolutions. The division of the country-people into pagi continued to the latest times of the Roman empire. The term Pagani is often used in opposition to milites, and is applied to all who were not soldiers, even though they did not live in the country. ”

“ Paul; and another Urbanus was an early pope, from whom it travelled into other tongues as Urbano, Urbani, and Urban.
In opposition to this word comes that for the rustic, Pagus, signifying the country; the word that in Italian becomes paese, in Spanish pais, in French pays. The Gospel was first preached in the busy haunts of men, so that the earlier Christians were towns-folk, and the rustics long continued heathen; whence Paganus, once simply a countryman, became an idolater, a Pagan, and poetized into Paynim, was absolutely bestowed upon the Turks and Saracens in the middle ages. ”

“ It is true that we have sufficient historical evidence to show that pagan temples were still to be found at Rome after its sack by the Goths, and that many Pagans were employed, in the Western as well as in the Eastern empires, in some of the most important offices of the state; but their number was fast disappearing, and the exercise of their religion was generally confined to the domestic hearth, to the worship of the Lares and Penates. ”

“ Here, of course, revealed religion comes nearest to the circle of ideas of paganism. Baal, no less than Jehovah, is supposed to give to his servants the produce of the soil. But what a principle difference between the attitude in which paganism entertains this idea and the spirit in which the prophet expects Israel to cherish it! The pagan cult cleaves to the sod, and buries itself in the heaps of grain and the rivers of oil, and remembers not, except in the most external way, the god who gave. The worship sits loosely upon the life ”

“ I see around me a land given over to idolatry and sensual crime, as if the old Pagans were returned again to earth; and here around me I see the symbols of the Pagan worship and of the Pagan sin, and I hear no other talk than that which would have befitted the Pagan revels and the Pagan darkness which overhung the world to come. ”

“ However, can we speak of one pagan religion? Did not the blending of the races result in multiplying the variety of disagreements? Had not the confused collision of creeds produced a division into fragments, a communication of churches? Had not a complacent syncretism engendered a multiplication of sects? The "Hellenes," as Themistius told the Emperor Valens, had three hundred ways of conceiving and honoring deity, who takes pleasure in such diversity of homage. [1] In paganism a cult does not die violently, but after long decay. A new doctrine does not necessarily displace an older one. ”

“ Never for an instant did the remembrance of his ruined projects desert his memory, or his mad determination to revive his worship abandon his mind. At every relic of Paganism, however slight, that he encountered on his way, he found a nourishment for his fierce anguish, and employment for his vengeful thoughts. Often, in the little villages, children were frightened from their sports in a deserted temple by the apparition of his gaunt, rigid figure among the tottering pillars, or the sound of his hollow voice as he muttered to himself among the ruins of the Pagan tombs. ”

“ The Pagan's shield with painted flowers bedecked Is shattered and his hauberk torn away. Through his heart's core the pennon of the Knight [173] Is driven, bearing death,—or laugh or weep Who may. At such a blow the French exclaim: "Barons, strike ever! Strike and be not slack Against the Pagan hordes; to Carle belongs The right. With us the justice true of God!" ”

“ The Pagan too, in turn, when bowed down with grief and sorrow, finds some relief in anticipation of a future existence—some shady forest filled with game—some delightful prairie of blooming flowers—some humble heaven behind the cloud-topped hill, where he hopes to join his wife, his children, his brothers, his fathers; and in their society to spend a peaceful eternity in all the enjoyments of domestic life, while his faithful horse and dog shall bear him company. ”

“ If that is the case, [26] there is no doubt that a lot of Pagans have slipped in among us—perhaps they have also been proselytising. Don’t let us proselytise too far, don’t let us forget the faith of our forefathers. It must have taken a tremendous faith mixed with a double dose of courage to have crossed the Atlantic in a shell of a boat—yet they did. They were not Pagans. ”

“ The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell, entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could walk unstained among the world's impurities. "Bring back then, I say, in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on the cheek. But you cannot bring back the best age of Paganism, the age when Paganism was a faith. None will again behold Apollo in the forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the long lustre of her golden locks. ”