Word Finder - sanctity

definition

Holiness of life or disposition; saintliness

definition

The condition of being considered sacred; inviolability

definition

Something considered sacred.

He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church.

In like manner (2) the officiant prepared himself for his task; but in his case the natural sanctity of the priest relieved him of the necessity of undergoing all that the common man had to pass through; in fact, this was one of the causes which brought him into existence, the other being the need of a.

Why, that would destroy the sanctity of contract !

The sanctity of special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians.

On the other hand, he came to look upon the Old Testament prophets as approved by their antiquity, sanctity, mystery and prophecies to be interpreters of the truth.

The fourth guru, originally called Jetha, was attracted to the third guru by his reputation for sanctity.

Here Krishna and his brother Balarama fed their cattle upon the plain; and numerous relics of antiquity in the towns of Muttra, Gobardhan, Gokul, Mahaban and Brindaban still attest the sanctity with which this holy tract was invested.

In their case, the single life is a witness to the sanctity of marriage.

At Sukhi it pierces through the Himalayas, and turns south-west to Hardwar, also a place of great sanctity.

The town of Multai contains an artificial tank, from the centre of which the Tapti is said to take its rise; hence the reputed sanctity of the spot, and the accumulation of temples in its honour.

Celtic altar-bell of hammered iron, known as the "Ronnell bell."' Such is the odour of sanctity of this venerable church that there is an old local saying that "to be thrice prayed for in the kirk of Birnie will either mend or end ye."

The Lady Chapel The Lady Chapel, set off the east end of the nave is a place of special sanctity.

The point of junction with both the Gumti and the Gogra has more or less pretension to sanctity.

Jerome "is one of the few Fathers to whom the title of Saint appears to have been given in recognition of services rendered to the Church rather than for eminent sanctity.

The two principal ones necessary to salvation are baptism and the Eucharist; then come the water of aspersion and the wearing of cinders, and so forth; these advance a man in sanctity.

Some 200,000 pilgrims from the Shiite portions of Islam are said to journey annually to Kerbela, many of them carrying the bones of their relatives to be buried in its sacred soil, or bringing their sick and aged to die there in the odour of sanctity.

The cherub-images, where such occur, represent to the imagination the supernatural bearers of Yahweh's throne or chariot, or the guardians of His abode; the cherub-carvings at least symbolize His presence, and communicate some degree of His sanctity.

As a single loaf could not satisfy the hunger of many, the rehearsal in these meals of Christ's own action must have been a crowning episode, enhancing their sanctity.

His fame collected round him a host of followers, emulous of his sanctity.

Alaric was an Arian Christian who trusted to the sanctity of Easter for immunity from attack, and the enemies of Stilicho reproached him for having gained his victory by taking an unfair advantage of the great Christian festival.

It owes its sanctity to its being the reputed confluence of three sacred streams - the Ganges, the Jumna and the Saraswati.

East of the Khan-el-Khalil is the mosque of El Hasanen, which is invested with peculiar sanctity as containing relics of Hosain and Hasan, grandsons of the Prophet.

There is probably a superstitious reason for the preference shown by the dead for offerings of this kind; no wish is commoner than that one may receive bread and beer that had gone up on to the altar of the local god, or with which the god had been sated; something of the divine sanctity still clung about such offerings and made them particularly desirable.

A leader appeared in the person of Mahommed Ahmed, born in 1848, who had taken up his abode on Abba Island, and, acquiring great reputation for sanctity, had actively fomented insurrection.

The occasion came in 1820 when Ali, emboldened by impunity, violated the sanctity of Stamboul itself by attempting to procure the murder of his enemy Pacho Bey in the very precincts of the palace.

The Germans waged war for saline streams, and believed that the presence of salt in the soil invested a district with peculiar sanctity and made it a place where prayers were most readily heard (Tac. ut sup.).

In the very earliest times of the most remote animism we find the belief that a person, rapt from all sense of the outside world, possessed by a spirit, acquired from that state a degree of sanctity, was supposed to have a degree of insight, denied to ordinary mortals.

On the removal of the seat of residence of the Assyrian kings to Calah (c. 1300 B.C.), and then in the 8th century to Nineveh, the centre of the Assur cult was likewise transferred, though the sanctity of the old seat at Assur continued to be recognized.

Around their tombs their descendants settle, and thus sacred villages, often of considerable size, spring up. Almost every village, too, has its saint or prophet, and disputes as to their relative sanctity and powers cause fierce feuds.

But the practice had been engrained in Hindu opinion by the authority of centuries, and had acquired the sanctity of a religious rite.

That the theory of the triple manifestation of the deity was indeed only a compromise between Brahmanical aspirations and popular worship, probably largely influenced by the traditional sanctity of the number three, is sufficiently clear from the fact that, whilst Brahma, the creator, and at the same time the very embodiment of Brahmanical class pride, has practically remained a mere figurehead in the actual worship of the people, Siva, on the other hand, so far from being merely the destroyer, is also the unmistakable representative of generative and reproductive power in nature.

The banks of the great rivers such as the Ganga (Ganges), the Yamuna (Jumna), the Narbada, the Krishna (Kistna), are studded with them, and the water of these rivers is supposed to be imbued with the essence of sanctity capable of cleansing the pious bather of all sin and moral taint.

Rivers (The Todas, 448) gives an interesting analysis of the grades of sanctity apparent in Toda religion.

Still lower is the dairyman, who is in no way divine, yet has sanctity as one who maintains a condition of ceremonial purity.

Woman, for certain physiological reasons, is always for primitive peoples hedged round with sanctity, whilst man does all he can to inspire awe of his powers in woman by keeping religion largely in his own hands.

In churches of the Greek rite a little of the old year's chrism is left in the jar to communicate its sanctity to that of the new.

In the neighbourhood of the temple was a grove of peculiar sanctity in which the bodies of the victims were hung up. After the introduction of Christianity the importance of Upsala began steadily to decline, and owing to its intimate associations with the old religion the kings no longer made it their residence.

In Mysore state the Cauvery forms the two islands of Seringapatam and Sivasamudram, which vie in sanctity with the island of Seringam lower down in Trichinopoly district.

It is said that his reputation for sanctity attracted the attention of Timur, who sought him out in his abode, and was so charmed by the visit that he released, at the holy mans request, a number of captives of Turkish origin, or Georgians, taken in the wars with Bayezid.

At this time Barlaam, an eremite of great sanctity and knowledge, dwelling in the wilderness of Sennaritis, divinely warned, travels to India in the disguise of a merchant, and gains access to Prince Josaphat, to whom he imparts the Christian doctrine and commends the monastic life.

In the 6th century B.C. the influence of the Delian Apollo was at its height; Polycrates of Samos dedicated the neighbouring island of Rheneia to his service and Peisistratus of Athens caused all the area within sight of the temple to be cleared of the tombs by which its sanctity was impaired.

The ancient books, preserved in the Pali Pitakas, being mainly occupied with the details of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the eyes of those whose attention was being directed to the details of Bodhisatship. And the opinion that every leader in their religious circles, every teacher distinguished among them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive learning, was a Bodhisat, who might have and who probably had inherited the karma of some great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood of superstitious fancies.

They are either connected with genuine memories of the Prophet and his times, or have spurious legends to conceal the fact that they were originally holy stones, wells, or the like, of heathen sanctity.

In its official declarations the school maintained the sanctity of the Christian law of marriage.

His homiletic books, Epistle on Sanctity (Iggereth ha-qodesh) and Law of Man (Torath ha-Adam), which deal respectively with the sanctity of marriage and the solemnity of death, are full of intense spirituality, while at the same time treating of ritual customs - a combination which shows essential Rabbinism at its best.

Even the earliest name Nigantha, which means "free from bonds," may not be without allusions to this curious belief in the sanctity of nakedness, though it also alluded to freedom from the bonds of sin and of transmigration.

Moreover, he had a genuine regard for the sanctity of a promise, the one thing in which his father had been most wanting.

But what, in the opinion of most modern Moslems, and especially the Persians, confers the greatest sanctity on the day of Ashoora is the fact of its being that on which El-Hoseyn, the prophet's grandson, was slain a martyr at the battle of the plain of Karbala."

Exceptional influence depends upon exceptional sanctity or ability.

He wore the royal diadem, assumed the title of lord, and introduced a complicated system of ceremonial and etiquette, borrowed from the East, in order to surround the monarchy and its representative with mysterious sanctity.