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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
The food with which the Israelites were miraculously fed in the wilderness, a term which means "What is this?" being the expression of surprise of the Israelites on first seeing it.
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The founder of the Order of the Jesuits, born in the castle of Loyola, in the Basque Provinces of Spain, of a noble Spanish family; entered the army, and served with distinction, but being severely wounded at the siege of Pampeluna, he gave himself up to a life of austere religious devotion, and conceived the idea of enlisting and organising a spiritual army for the defence of the Church at home and the propagation of the faith in the realms of heathendom; it seemed to him a time when such an organization should be formed, and he by-and-by got a number of kindred spirits to join him, with the result that he and his confederates did, on Ascension Day, 1534, solemnly pledge themselves in the subterranean chapel of the Abbey of Montserrat to, through life and death, embark in this great undertaking; the pledge thus given was confirmed by the pope, Pope Pius III., the Order formed, and Ignatius, in 1547, installed as general, with absolute authority subject only to the Pope, to receive canonization by Gregory XV. in 1622 (1481-1566).
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The French name for the English Channel, so called from its resemblance to a sleeve, which the word in French means.
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The general name given by the Romans to the departed spirits of good men, who are conceived of as dwelling in the nether world, and as now and again ascending to the upper.
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The grandson of the preceding and his successor; had in 1770 married Marie Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, and a woman young, beautiful, and accomplished, in high esteem for the purity of her character; his accession was hailed with enthusiasm, and he set himself to restore the ruined finances of the country by taking into his counsel those who could best advise him in her straitened state, but these one and all found the problem an impossible one, owing to the unwillingness of the nobility to sacrifice any of their privileges for the public good; this led to the summoning of the States-General in 1789, and the outbreak of the Revolution by the fall of the Bastille in July of that year; in the midst of this Louis, well-intentioned but without strength of character, was submissive to the wishes of his court and the queen, lost his popularity by his hesitating conduct, the secret support he gave to the Emigrants, his attempt at flight, and by his negotiations with foreign enemies, and subjected himself to persecution at the hands of the nation; he was therefore suspended from his functions, shut up in the Temple, arraigned before the Convention, and condemned to death as "guilty of conspiracy against the liberty of the nation and a crime against the general safety of the State"; he was accordingly guillotined on the 21st January; he protested his innocence on the scaffold, but his voice was drowned by the beating of drums; he was accompanied by the Abbé Edgeworth, his confessor, who, as he laid his head on the block, exclaimed, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven" (1754-1793).
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The great charter, extorted from King John by the barons of England at Runnymede on June 5, 1215, that guaranteed certain rights and privileges to the subjects of the realm, which were pronounced inviolable, and that established the supremacy of the law over the will of the monarch.
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The great glacier of the Alps near Chamouni, was the subject of the experiments of Professor J. D. Forbes of Edinburgh about 1843, and on which the movement of the glaciers was first observed.
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The great god of the Hindus; an appellation of Siva, as Mahadevi is of Durga, his wife.
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The great Protestant Reformer, born at Eisleben, in Prussian Saxony, the son of a miner, was born poor and brought up poor, familiar from his childhood with hardship; was sent to study law at Erfurt, but was one day at the age of 19 awakened to a sense of higher interests, and in spite of remonstrances became a monk; was for a time in deep spiritual misery, till one day he found a Bible in the convent, which taught him for the first time that "a man was not saved by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God"; this was his awakening from death to life, and to a sense of his proper mission as a man; at this stage the Elector of Saxony was attracted to him, and he appointed him preacher and professor at Wittenberg; on a visit to Rome his heart sank within him, but he left it to its evil courses to pursue his own way apart; if Rome had let him alone he would have let it, but it would not; monk Tetzel arrived at Wittenberg selling indulgences, and his indignation was roused; remonstrance after remonstrance followed, but the Pope gave no heed, till the agitation being troublesome, he issued his famous "fire-decree," condemning Luther's writings to the flames; this answer fired Luther to the quick, and he "took the indignant step of burning the decree in 1520 at the Elster Gate of Wittenberg, Wittenberg looking on with shoutings, the whole world looking on"; after this Luther was summoned to the Diet of Worms, and he appeared there before the magnates, lay and clerical, of the German empire on April 17, 1521; how he demeaned himself on that high occasion is known to all the world, and his answer as well: "Here stand I; I can do no other; so help me God"; "it was the grandest moment in the modern history of man"; of the awakening this produced Luther was the ruling spirit, as he had been the moving one, and he continued to be so to the end of his life; his writings show the man as well as his deeds, and amid all the turmoil that enveloped him he found leisure to write and leave behind him 25 quarto volumes; it is known the German Bible in use is his work, executed by him in the Castle of Wartburg; it was begun by him with his back to the wall, as it were, and under the protestation, as it seemed to him, of the prince of darkness himself, and finished in this obstructive element pretty much throughout, the New Testament in 1522, the Pentateuch in 1523, and the whole, the Apocrypha included, in 1534; he was fond of music, and uttered many an otherwise unutterable thing in the tones of his flute; "the devils fled from his flute," he says; "death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other, I could call these," says Carlyle, "the two opposite poles of a great soul, between these two all great things had room.... Luther," he adds, "was a true great man, great in intellect, in courage, in affection, and integrity,... great as an Alpine mountain, but not setting up to be great at all—his, as all greatness is, an unconscious greatness" (1488-1546).
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The Herald's College of Scotland, consisting of three heralds and three pursuivants.
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