Word Finder - idolatry

definition

The worship of idols.

definition

The excessive admiration of somebody or something.

Kabir denounced idolatry and the ritualistic practices of the Hindus.

Under his influence the Hale Naua Society was organized in 1886 for the spread of idolatry and king-worship; and in the same year a " Board of Health" was formed which revived the vicious practices of the kahunas or medicine-men.

By 1815 idolatry was abolished in the larger islands of the group and there ensued the task of building up a Christian community.

The creed in all its forms lies behind worship, which it preserves from idolatry, and behind ethics, to which it supplies a motive power which the pre-Christian system so manifestly lacked.

Its opening section, recalling to its hearers the passing of the mists of idolatry before the revelation in Jesus Christ, is markedly similar in tone and tenor to passages in the Epistle to Diognetus.

In the 6th century Scandinavian hordes poured in with their northern idolatry and lust of plunder, but in time they adopted the language and faith of the islanders.

For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored (for that were idolatry, to be abhorred of all faithful Christians); and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at one time in more places than one."

Idolatry and all deification of created beings, such as the worship of Christ as the Son of God, are unsparingly condemned.

And can we regard the prohibition of polytheism and the prohibition of idolatry as one commandment?

This may be accounted the keystone of the fabric of Brahmanism, which accepts and even encourages the rudest forms of idolatry, explaining everything by giving it a higher meaning.

The reaction into idolatry and Babylonian star worship in the long reign of Manasseh synchronized and was connected with vassalage 1 There is some danger in too strictly construing the language of the prophets and also the psalmists.

Next, the Judaean compiler regularly finds in Israel's troubles the punishment for its schismatic idolatry; nor does he spare Judah, but judges its kings by a standard which agrees with the standpoint of Deuteronomy and is scarcely earlier than the end of the 7th century B.C. (§§ 16, 20).

With the latter attitude alone does the present article deal, and it may conveniently be called idolatry or image worship. For the history of the use of images in Christian worship see Iconoclasts.

The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were far from idolizing him as a revolutionist.

They had to avoid idolatry, sorcery, avarice, falsehood, fornication, &c.; above all, they were not allowed to kill any living being (the ten commandments of Mani).

In the days of idolatry the only dress worn by the men was a narrow strip of cloth wound around the loins and passed between the legs.

Pictures and stories, carved or painted, seemed no longer necessary now that the open Bible was in the hands of the common people; they had been too often prostituted, moreover, to idolatrous uses, - and " idolatry " was the worst of blasphemies to the re-discoverers of the Old Testament.

The excavations (at Gezer, Megiddo, Jericho, &c.) indicate a persisting gross and cruel idolatry, utterly opposed to the demands of the law and the prophets.'

While the first has the form of a treatise, the second is an address to God; the first, though it has the Jewish people in mind, does not refer to them by name except incidentally in Solomon's prayer; the second is wholly devoted to the Jewish national experiences (this is true even of the section on idolatry).

God being what He is, at once moral and all-powerful, the immoral life is doomed to overthrow, whether the immorality consist in grasping rapacity, proud self-aggrandizement, cruel exaction, exulting triumph or senseless idolatry.

He appears to have had no great sense of natural beauty, in which point he resembled his generation (though one remarkable story is told of his being deeply affected by Alpine scenery); and, except in his passion for the stage, he does not seem to have cared much for any of the arts, Conversation and literature were, again as in Johnson's case, the sole gods of his idolatry.

Mecca itself was taken; plundering was forbidden, but the tombs of the saints and all objects of veneration were ruthlessly destroyed, and all ceremonies which seemed in the eye of the stern puritan conqueror to suggest the taint of idolatry were forbidden.

It was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1017-18; about 150o Sultan Sikandar Lodi utterly destroyed all the Hindu shrines, temples and images; and in 1636 Shah Jahan appointed a governor expressly tQ " stamp out idolatry."

The invectives against idolatry of the early Jewish and Christian apologists, of Philo, Minucius Felix, Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius and others, are very good reading and throw much light on the question how an ancient pagan conceived of his idols.

The existence of this degraded class up to the Exile throws considerable light upon the phraseology of the prophets in referring to idolatry as adultery and the scenes connected with it as prostitution.

In 1678, in a Discourse of Idolatry, he had endeavoured to fasten the practices of heathenish idolatry on the Church of Rome, and in a sermon which he published in 1681 on Discretion in Giving Alms was attacked by Andrew Pulton, head of the Jesuits in the Savoy.

Though less superstitious than the Tahitians, the idolatry of the Sandwich Islanders was equally barbarous and sanguinary, as, in addition to the chief objects of worship included in the mythology of the other islands, the supernatural beings supposed to reside in the volcanoes and direct the action of subterranean fires rendered the gods objects of peculiar terror.

The requisitions of their idolatry were severe and its rites cruel and bloody.

The native religion was an admixture of idolatry and hero-worship, of some ethical but little moral force.

They declared Christ to be the Son of God only through grace like other prophets, and that the bread and wine of the eucharist were not transformed into flesh and blood; that the last judgment would be executed by God and not by Jesus; that the images and the cross were idols and the worship of saints and relics idolatry.

In May 1559 John Knox preached in St John's his famous sermon in denunciation of idolatry.

In the first of these senses the word is applied to objects ranging from the unworked stone to the pot or the wooden figure, and is thus hardly distinguishable from idolatry.

Thus to take the preface as a distinct word is not reasonable unless there are cogent grounds for uniting the commandments against polytheism and idolatry.

In his first year abroad he consulted Calvin and Bullinger as to the right of the civil "authority" to prescribe religion to his subjects - in particular, whether the godly should obey "a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion," and whom should they join "in the case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous sovereign."

Hansson has been as ardent in the idolatry of woman as Strindberg has been in his hostility to the sex.

If candles are lit before their tombs, are these the ensigns of idolatry ?

There is, however, no mention of ceremonial candles in the detailed account of the services of the Church of England given by William Harrison (Description of England, 1570); and the attitude of the Church towards their use, until the ritualistic movement of the 17th century, would seem to be authoritatively expressed in the Third Part of the Sermon against Peril of Idolatry, which quotes with approval the views of Lactantius and compares " our Candle Religion " 3 This is common to the Eastern Church also.

In this connexion it is worth pointing out that the homily against idolatry was reprinted, without alteration and by the king's authority, long after altar lights had been restored under the influence of the high church party supreme at court.

In August he was forced to sign a further declaration, confessing his own wickedness in dealing with the Irish, his father's blood-guiltiness, his mother's idolatry, and his abhorrence of prelacy, besides ratifying his allegiance to the covenants and to Presbyterianism.

It is true also that he shares in the traditional idolatry of Brutus, that he strikes at Augustus in his mention of the "three disciples of Sulla," and that he has no word of recognition for what even Tacitus acknowledges as the beneficent rule of Trajan.

The stains of idolatry, vice and fraud are not visible on the flesh, yet they resemble real dirt.

The early Christians had naturally preferred the formless marriage of the Roman law as being free from all taint of pagan idolatry; and the ecclesiastical authorities recognized concubinage also.

The sons of Sebert relapsed into idolatry and left the church to the mercy of the Danes.

Three groups of sins, classified as (I) idolatry, which included apostasy, (2) adultery or fornication, and (3) murder, were held to exclude the guilty person from sharing in the eucharist until death, that is to say, if he had committed the sin after baptism.

Idolatry of his father's hero and leader had now superseded the earlier superstition inculcated by his mother.

With all this, however, there has long existed a kind of idolatry, which in its origin is simply fetishism - the belief in charms - as having power to procure various benefits and protect from certain evils.

Together with this idolatry there is also a firm belief in the power of witchcraft and sorcery, in divination, in lucky and unlucky days and times, in ancestor worship, especially that of the sovereign's predecessors, and in several curious ordeals for the detection of crime.

How far the Christian feeling of the 4th and 5th centuries was from being settled in favour of the employment of the fine arts is shown by such a case as that of Eusebius of Caesarea, who, in reply to a request of Constantia, sister of Constantine, for a picture of Christ, wrote that it was unlawful to possess images pretending to represent the Saviour either in his divine or in his human nature, and added that to avoid the reproach of idolatry he had actually taken away from a lady friend the pictures of Paul and of Christ which she had.

The order thus imposed lasted twenty-four years, until a military revolution placed a soldier of fortune, half Armenian, half Persian, named Leo, on the throne; he, like his soldiers, was persuaded that the ill-success of the Roman arms against Bulgarians and other invaders was due to the idolatry rampant at court and elsewhere.

Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.