9 Quotes by Alexander Hislop

A gude conscience is the best divinity.

A man with a bad character is liable to be blamed for any misdeed which may be done; while a person who is not open to suspicion may commit depredation without challenge.

A gude paymaster ne’er wants hands to work.

WHEN Linacer, a distinguished physician, but bigoted Romanist, in the reign of Henry VIII., first fell in with the New Testament, after reading it for a while, he tossed it from him with impatience and a great oath, exclaiming, “Either this book is not true, or we are not Christians.” He saw at once that the system of Rome and the system of the New Testament were directly opposed to one another; and no one who impartially compares the two systems can come to any other conclusion.

There never has been any difficulty in the mind of any enlightened Protestant in identifying the woman “sitting on seven mountains,” and having on her forehead the name written, “Mystery, Babylon the Great,” with the Roman apostasy. “No other city in the world has ever been celebrated, as the city of Rome has, for its situation on seven hills.

But can any man of the least Christian enlightenment believe that the exalted Saviour can look on such rites as doing honour to Him, which pour contempt on His all-perfect atonement, and represent His most “precious blood” as needing to have its virtue supplemented by that of blood drawn from the backs of wretched and misguided sinners? Such offerings were altogether fit for the worship of Moloch; but they are the very opposite of being fit for the service of Christ.

Hence, from the mere jingle of words, persons and things essentially different were confounded; and Paganism and Christianity jumbled together, that the towering ambition of a wicked priest might be gratified; and so, to the blinded Christians of the apostasy, the Pope was the representative of Peter the apostle, while to the initiated Pagans, he was only the representative of Peter, the interpreter of their well-known Mysteries.

Among the Red Indians of America there had evidently been something entirely analogous to the Babylonian custom of wearing the horns; for, in the “buffalo dance” there, each of the dancers had his head arrayed with buffalo’s horns; and it is worthy especial remark, that the “Satyric dance,” or dance of the Satyrs in Greece, seems to have been the counterpart of this Red Indian solemnity;.

In Pagan Rome the same appears to have been the case. The necklaces which the Roman ladies wore were not merely ornamental bands about the neck, but hung down the breasts, just as the modern rosaries do; and the name by which they were called indicates the use to which they were applied. “Monile,” the ordinary word for a necklace, can have no other meaning than that of a “Remembrancer.