The people “afflicting their soul,” denoted the state in which every sinner must present p. 16 himself before God—for it is the broken and the contrite heart which God will not despise; the “confession of sin” on the head of the goat pointed out the first and necessary duty of the returning penitent—for “if we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins:” the laying the sins upon the head of the goat exhibited the act of faith, by which the condemnation of the sinner is transferred to his atoning sacrifice; and the leading away the goat into the wilderness, the full, perfect, and eternal pardon promised in the Gospel, of every sin to every repenting sinner.
— from An account of the Death of Philip Jolin who was executed for the murder of his father, in the Island of Jersey, October 3, 1829 by Francis Cunningham

In the earnest sentiment, the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues, freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David’s first pictures, there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that still gives them historical value.
— from The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century by Richard Muther

At one extreme stood the energetic Romans, sedulous first in agriculture and later in warfare; superstitious but unspeculative; making ritual religion a methodical province of polity, a part of the mechanism of the republic: at the other the Hindus, predestined to despotism by their physical and economic conditions, and to inaction by their climate, the true children of reverie, for whom religious evolution was a deepening absorption in boundless speculation.
— from A Short History of Christianity Second Edition, Revised, With Additions by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson