Exasperation

“ In the dark, or against the flaring skyline, they look like yours, bent, murky shapes with bumps upon them, and some of your men trail off with the other party. And though you pity your men more than yourself, it is difficult sometimes to be gentle with them, difficult not to yield to the intense exasperation of it all, and curse foolishly.... ”

“ That reciprocal exasperation engendered by reasonable propinquity, so essential to the life of altercations, was therefore a perpetual stimulus to both men, confirming each in his obstinate opinion of the other as a malicious and dangerous enemy of all that men hold dear. ”

“ And continually, in the rapid transitions of excited feeling, as the vision of triumphant good receded behind the actual predominance of evil, the threats of coming vengeance against vicious tyrants and corrupt priests gathered some impetus from personal exasperation, as well as from indignant zeal. ”

“ Excommunication is more fitting in your case than absolution.” I waited some time before I again spoke, during which she sobbed bitterly. “My daughter,” observed I, “before I can decide upon what is to be done to save you from everlasting perdition, it is necessary that you humble yourself before the religious man, whose person you have abused. Send to the convent to which he belongs, and entreat him to come; and when you have confessed your crime, offer to him the same implements of punishment, which through your instigation were so sacrilegiously applied. ”

“ In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten Me, saith the Lord God.—They have used the gifts of God for evil purposes, even to slay God's holy martyrs; they have even practised extortion upon those close to them. ”

“ Entring upon Sequester'd Livings had been Oppression: taking away mens Estates had been Robbery; Imprisoning of their Persons had been Tyranny; using the name of God to all This, would have been Hypocrisy, forcing of Contradictory Oaths had been Impiety, and Shedding the Blood both of the King, and his People, had been Murther: And all This would have appear'd so to be, if the Cause had come to be Try'd by the Known Laws either of God, or of Man. ”

“ If one of these medicine-men can obtain possession of some of the excrement of his intended victim, or some of his hair, in fact anything belonging to his person, it is the most easy thing in the world to bewitch him.”— (Personal letter from John F. Mann, Esq., Neutral Bay, New South Wales.)
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“The disposal of excreta is not so much for the sake of cleanliness as to prevent any human substance from falling into the hands of an enemy.”— (Idem.) ”

“ Dimmer and dimmer, as the generations pass away, this tremendous terror, this all-pervading espionage of evil, this active incarnation of motiveless malignity, presents itself to the imagination. The once imposing and solemn rite of exorcism has become obsolete in the Church. Men are no longer, in any quarter of the world, racked or pressed under planks to extort a confession of diabolical alliance. ”

“ But if, even then, he do not better himself—if he understands how great the penalty is —he shall be subject to excommunication. But, if he is a wicked man, he shall be given over to corporal punishment.
24. What ought to he the measure of the excommunication. According to the amount of the fault the measure of the excommunication or of the discipline ought to be extended: which amount of the faults shall be determined by the judgment of the abbot. If any brother, however, be taken in lighter faults, he shall be prevented from participating at table. ”

“ They felt themselves excommunicated, whether justly or not, from the world and its institutions, and knew too well that society, and the laws by which it is regulated and protected, were hunting them like beasts of prey for their destruction. ”

“ Excommunication had real terrors when a frightened world was willing to execute its penalties—when the object of the censure was cut off from the services of religion and was regarded as a pariah and an outlaw. ”

“ But if claiming a field by the inscription of a title, be a crime deserving of excommunication in a priest,—when for two whole centuries the pontiffs have been meditating nothing but wars, effusion of blood, slaughter of armies, storming and pillaging cities, the destruction of nations, the devastation of kingdoms, for the sole purpose of seizing the dominions of others,—what excommunications can be sufficient for the punishment of such examples? ”

“ We likewise forbid all and everyone under pain of excommunication reserved to us and our successors to dare to assail either in secret or in public, verbally or in writing, by disputes, injuries and affronts or by any other kind of contempt, anyone, no matter who he may be and least of all those who were members of the said Order. ”

“ If it may be conceived to have been possible that their feeble and degraded reason, in the absence of divine light and of sound human discipline, might by earnest exertion have attained in some small degree to judge better that exertion was precluded by indolence, by the immediate wants and unavoidable employments of life, by sensuality, by love of amusement, by subjection, even of the mind, to superiors and national institutions, and by the tendency of human individuals to fall, if we may so express it, in dead conformity and addition to the lump. ”

“ But if the people turn a deaf ear to the specious arguments used to dazzle them and realise that new life needs new conditions, and if they undertake the task themselves, then expropriation can be effected without any great difficulty. ”

“ The close espionage under which these poor creatures dwelt, engendered in them a cunning and artifice, which to them seemed only a fair and right attempt on their part, to cope with power and cruelty constantly in force against them. ”

“ Excommunications and suspensions are of perpetual occurrence, for crimes shocking in character, and of themselves sufficient to show the general state of morals; such, for example, as adultery, fornication, theft, lying, drunkenness, quarrelling, and fighting. ”

“ He also declares, that whoever forbids you to do what is commanded by the Lord, ought to be held in execration by all who love the Lord—he ought to be regarded as a false witness and a sacrilegious person. ”

“ The Furies, as soon as they hear of this new-fangled form of trial, are bewildered and begin to feel that they have been deceived. Their simple rule, that the doer shall suffer, is no longer holding good. ”

“ If enforced with rigour, excommunication is in fact a capital punishment, for it is interdictio aquâ et igne. No one can speak to, or eat, or drink with the proscribed person, nor even enter his house. The offender can neither buy nor sell, nor visit. ”

“ You take advantage of this distress, and you force as much out of him as you can under the circumstances. The old barons of the middle ages used, in general, the thumbscrew to extort property; we moderns use, in preference, hunger or domestic affliction: but the fact of extortion remains precisely the same. Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically;— morally, none whatsoever: we use a form of torture of some sort in order to make him give up his property ”

“ Thus the practices of the exorcist appear side by side with the doctrine of possession, from its first appearance in savagery to its survival in modern civilization; and nothing could display more vividly the conception of a disease or a mental affection as caused by a personal spiritual being than the proceedings of the exorcist who talks to it, coaxes or threatens it, makes offerings to it, entices or drives it out of the patient’s body, and induces it to take up its abode in some other. ”

“ Excommunications, anathemas, severe censures, by which they pretend to cut men off from Christ, and cast them into the power of the devil, but do indeed deliver them over to the secular power, that they may be put to death; and thus, notwithstanding their vile hypocrisy, they are justly charged with killing those whom they cannot corrupt. ”

“ In medicine, therefore, Exorcism is a thing of the past.
One aspect of the superstition still remains, as an obstacle to the progress of humanity; the possibility of legislating morality into men. Law-givers still cling to the power of “exorcism” by statute. Their blind creed is: “beatification and education by law.” “To them, laws are the cows, whose teats mankind should suck. To them, men are as dough, which their wisdom would knead.” ”

“ In204 truth, some exertion—at least, some appearance of authority—was become of absolute necessity, the mutinous spirit of the people and the contempt in which the Government was held, carrying various classes of men into most dangerous excesses. ”

“ This exaltation, which then affected humanity only in its head, is to be the experience also of the members. Our bodies also are to be delivered from the bondage of corruption, and we are to sit with Christ upon his throne. ”

“ But when I asked him to focus his attention on the associations to exoriare he gave me the word exorcism. This makes me think that the reinforcement of exoriare in the reproduction has really the value of such substitution. It probably came through the association exorcism from the names of the saints. However, those are refinements upon which no value need be laid. It seems now quite possible that the appearance of any kind of substitutive recollection is a constant sign—perhaps only characteristic and misleading—of the purposive forgetting motivated by repression. ”

“ In the power of excommunication you have a weapon more effective than any wielded by that emperor to save these poor suppliants from impending famine produced by the ravages of little beasts, which spare neither the corn nor the vines, ravages like those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by Homer in the first book of the Iliad, or those of the foxes sent by Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle and assailed even the husbandmen themselves. ”

“ Whilst the king himself set so notable an example of extortion, we may be sure that his commissioners, spies, and tools of all sorts were not slack in this business of ferreting out and putting through the torture of their secret courts the unhappy subjects of every corner of the kingdom who had any substance to prey upon. ”

“ So that excommunication is made use of, not as a punishment only, but as a remedy; that sinners, seeing the evil state they are in, being deprived of all hopes of salvation while they are out of the Church, may desire to be restored to God's grace, from which they are fallen, that they may work out their salvation with more fear for the time to come. ”

“ I am rejoiced to see that you have acquired that power of exertion, which is so useful both to young and old—and that you have the will, as well as the power, to conquer little habits that are disagreeable to your friends. ”

“ They have the power of sentencing to fine, to imprisonment, to corporal punishment, and to exile, independently of the spiritual power they possess, and which they not rarely exercise, of excommunication. ”

“ They crowded the corners of dimly lit rooms with the shadows of those departed, and the very teachings of religion were so distorted as to be made to supply exorcisms against agencies of evil and tokens calculated to render powerless their incantations. ”

“ In alleging that place, I intended no other persecution, but the church’s against such an heretic by excommunication.... Verily excommunication is a persecution, and a lawful persecution, if the cause be just offence; as the angel of the Lord is said to persecute the wicked, Psal. xxxv. 6.... Sure it is the Lord Jesus accounteth it a persecution to his disciples, to be delivered up into the synagogues, and to be cast forth out of the synagogues, Luke xxi. ”

“ EXORCISM (Gr. ἐξορκίζειν, to conjure out) , the expulsion of evil spirits from persons or places by incantations, magical rites or other means. As a corollary of the animistic theory of diseases and of belief in Possession (q.v.) , we find widely spread customs whose object is to get rid of the evil influences. These customs may take the form of a general expulsion of evils, either once a year or at irregular intervals ”

“ A novel teaching! With authority does he dictate even to the unclean spirits and they obey him.’ Now Flavius Josephus has told me that he himself has known a conjurer or exorcist cast out an unclean spirit or demon—in the presence of Vespasian and his officers—and make it knock over a bucket of water in its exit: but he never told me—and you may be sure he would never have supposed—that the conjurer, on the strength of his exorcisms, would claim to preach a gospel! ”

“ Has the acquisition been worth the sacrifice? It is the nature of the devil of tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves. Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism? ”

“ An unwearied application, which commenced in the dawn and failed not till the very extinction of the last gleam of life, gave constancy and energy to the exertion of faculties far exceeding such as are entrusted to the majority. ”

“ Unless the people be able to convince them of errors and mistakes in their sentence, they are bound to joyn their judgment with theirs to the compleating of the sentence. (4) The sentence thus compleatly issued is to be solemnly passed and pronounced upon the delinquent by the ruling Elder whether it be of censure or excommunication.” In this passage it is clear that the effective power of discipline is regarded as being wholly in the power of the individual church or congregation. ”

“ These they shake and flourish about in all directions, jumping, dancing, and trembling in a most frightful manner. Their hair is loose and flowing, and, by their inflamed eyes and general appearance, I should suppose that they are prepared for the occasion by intoxicating liquids or drugs .... Their power as exorcists is exercised on any person supposed to be possessed with the devil. ”