Everywhere were seen the rites of magical incantations, the pretended virtue of amulets and charms, soothsayers laughing at their own predictions,nowhere the worship of the one God who created the heaven and the earth, nor even a genuine worship of the Pagan deities, but a general spirit of cynicism and atheism.

It was his province to propitiate the Deity with sacrifices, to surround himself with mysteries, to inspire awe by dazzling rites and emblems, to work on the imagination by symbols, splendid dresses, smoking incense, slaughtered beasts, grand temples.

It was his to trace the Spirit of the boundless and the eternal, faintly breathing in every part of the mystic circle of superstition,unquenched even amidst the most barbarous rites of savage tribes, and in the cold and beautiful shapes of Grecian mould.

The churches were everywhere shut; the dead were unburied in consecrated ground; the rites of religion were suspended; gloom and fear sat on every countenance; desolation overspread the land.

And with such maimed rites?

The priest believes she died by suicide, only calls her death doubtful to excuse their granting her so many of the rites of burial.]

Yet heere she is allowed her Virgin Rites, [Sidenote: virgin Crants,] Her Maiden strewments, and the bringing home Of Bell and Buriall.

Men believed that they were surrounded by fiends watching for every opportunity to harm them, that pestilences, storms, eclipses, and famines were the work of the Devil; but they believed as firmly that ecclesiastical rites were capable of coping with these enemies.

The worship of Reason, with rites modelled on the Catholic, was organized in Paris and the provinces.

The researches of students of anthropology and comparative religion—such as Tylor, Robertson Smith, and Frazer—have gone to show that mysterious ideas and dogma and rites which were held to be peculiar to the Christian revelation are derived from the crude ideas of primitive religions.

Paulus Jovius, in the fourth book of the life and deeds of Pope Leo Decimus, his noble patron, concludes in these words, "Because I cannot honour him as other rich men do, with like endeavour, affection, and piety, I have undertaken to write his life; since my fortunes will not give me leave to make a more sumptuous monument, I will perform those rites to his sacred ashes, which a small, perhaps, but a liberal wit can afford."

In the night, when he should come to perform those nuptial rites, Venus steps between him and his wife (unseen or felt of her), and told her that she was his wife, that he had betrothed himself unto her by that ring, which he put upon her finger: she troubled him for some following nights.

The rites deriv'd from ancient days, With thoughtless reverence we praise; The rites that taught us to combine The joys of musick and of wine, And bade the feast, and song, and bowl O'erfill the saturated soul: But ne'er the flute or lyre applied To cheer despair, or soften pride; Nor call'd them to the gloomy cells Where want repines and vengeance swells; Where hate sits musing to betray, And murder meditates his prey.

The rites deriv'd from ancient days, With thoughtless reverence we praise; The rites that taught us to combine The joys of musick and of wine, And bade the feast, and song, and bowl O'erfill the saturated soul: But ne'er the flute or lyre applied To cheer despair, or soften pride; Nor call'd them to the gloomy cells Where want repines and vengeance swells; Where hate sits musing to betray, And murder meditates his prey.

He instantly gave Joseph an order, by which he was authorised to take down the body of the King of the Jews from the Cross, and to perform the rites of sepulture at once.

You condemn the new life to perpetuate the empty rites of the tomb....

"He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites and beliefs of ancient history.

[-46-] At this time they declared Augustus immortal and assigned to him attendants and sacred rites, making Livia (who was already called Julia and Augusta) his priestess.

" The text (he observed) involved the principle, that man was not made to observe certain ceremonies and obey certain precepts, but that the observance of rites and laws was enjoined for man's own sake.

It was he who gave names to all the rivers and divisions of land; he was their first priest, and taught them the proper rites wherewith to please the gods and appease their ill-will; he was the patron of the healers and diviners, and had disclosed to them the mysterious virtues of plants; in the month

The description of some such rites as these is, no doubt, what led the worthy Hernandez to suppose that the Mayas had Trinitarian doctrines.

Their close relation with Itzamná is evidenced, not only in the fragmentary myth preserved by Hernandez, but quite amply in the descriptions of the rites at the close of each year and in the various festivals during the year, as narrated by Bishop Landa.

Disloyalty to the law and the distinctive rites of Judaism was treason.

War, I, 7:4, 5] Now Pompey admired not only the other examples of the Jews' fortitude, but especially that they did not at all intermit their religious services, even when they were surrounded with darts on all sides; for, as if the city were in full peace, their daily sacrifices and purifications and all their religious rites were still carried out before God with the utmost exactness.

The same rites were repeated at sunset.