The honest lovers of liberty will, we doubt not, pardon that long digression into which we were led at the close of the last chapter, to prevent our history from being applied to the use of the most pernicious doctrine which
priestcraft had ever the wickedness or the impudence to preach.
Two persons whose desires are moderate may live well enough in Brussels on an income which would scarcely afford a respectable maintenance for one in London: and that, not because the necessaries of life are so much dearer in the latter capital, or taxes so much higher than in the former, but because the English surpass in folly all the nations on God's earth, and are more abject slaves to custom, to opinion, to the desire to keep up a certain appearance, than the Italians are to
priestcraft, the French to vain-glory, the Russians to their Czar, or the Germans to black beer.
Several old women, a fly-flapping girl of eleven, and two young men who had graduated from the canoe house of the youths and who were studying
priestcraft under the master, composed the household and waited upon Jerry.
This the young woman did afterwards effectually, so that there was no
priestcraft used here; and I should have thought it one of the most unjustifiable frauds in the world to have had it so.
The
priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private life.
By this I observed, that there is
priestcraft even among the most blinded, ignorant pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret of religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, not only to be found in the Roman, but, perhaps, among all religions in the world, even among the most brutish and barbarous savages.
Of equal interest is the more lengthy description of the Enlightenment critique of such practices and the campaign to discipline them in the interests of social order and republican freedom from the impostures of "
priestcraft." Enlightenment thinkers debunked oracles, experimented with ventriloquism, and explored mechanical means of producing and magnifying sound.
I sometimes think that he became immersed in Paul's epistles during his last days at Oates because he was drawn to what he cited in his Preface to A Paraphrase and Notes as "those many large parentheses," which admittedly made things difficult for readers, but also contained words that either recalled his own or applied to him: "(I speak in a human way)"; "(I speak as a fool)"; "(as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say)"; "(for I speak to them that know the law)"; "(being not without law to God, but under the law to Christi." Both Paul and Locke tried to shed their texts of the accrued obscurities of orthodoxy and
priestcraft, clearing out the rubbish, in order to call forth the glory of God.
Whitman also dismissed the other towering literary figure of his intellectually formative years--William Wordsworth--claiming that this British predecessor "lacks sympathy with men and women--that does not pervade him enough by a long shot." He condemned the whole Lake School for beginning "with the rights of man" but then coming out "for kingcraft,
priestcraft, obedience ..." (qtd.
Because they had been urged in church to resist Protestant conformity, to "recite their own Catholic prayers" and "not to be ashamed," they are seen in some quarters as mindless slaves to
priestcraft. The most important Republican Party newspaper in Boston (Republicans were the liberals then) editorializes: "We are unalterably, sternly opposed to the encroachments of political and social Romanism, as well as to its wretched superstition, intolerance, bigotry and mean despotism." When Whall and his father sue the assistant for excessive force, the court vindicates school authority, ruling that the child's disobedience threatened the stability of the school, hence the foundation of the state.
(37) In the event, Tutchin served as a kind of pointman for attacks upon Jacobite and High Church "
priestcraft": in April of 1702, he began issuing what would be the bi-weekly paper The Observator with its persistent condemnations of Tory politics and culture (to which Leslie would later found his Rehearsal as a High Church response).
Madoc is compelled at the end of his poem to Christianize the heathen Hoamen people for their own protection against what has been manifestly revealed throughout as Aztec
priestcraft, a religion thoroughly dependent upon tools of empire.