What is "effluence"

Usage examples of "effluence".

While in Brahminism man was deprived of his individuality, and regarded only as an effluence from Brahma, and tormented by the fear of hell, and by the thought of a ceaseless process of countless new births awaiting him after death, whence the necessity of the most painful penances and chastisements, Sakya-muni began with man as an individual, and in morals put purity, abstinence, patience, brotherly love, and repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification, and opened to his followers the prospect, after this weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana, or nothingness.

Light may not be an effluence from the Deity, as has been agreed by all the religions of all the Ages of the World.

The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all.

I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels, and in that darkness at noon, that planned, deliberated disaster, with the bale-fire light of the burning wells flickering in the distance with a dirty, guttering flame, I was reduced to a numb, dumb realisation of our unboundedly resourceful talent for bloody hatred and mad waste, but stripped of the means to describe and present that knowledge.