vastation

• The book serves up a series of essays on terms—aftermath, vastation, revel, infection, sighting, thickening, and more—that arise in viewing horror with the eye of a literary critic, which Clute is par excellence . —  AnalogSFF,May2007
• Typical of that indiscriminate and radical sacrifice, or "vastation," of our lower nature, which is insisted upon as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all,* the great religions of the world. —  Five Years of Theosophy
• He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. —  Representative Men
• But those of them who are such that they can be saved, are in places of vastation, and are there reduced to the last degree of despair; for evils and falsities of this kind cannot otherwise be subdued and removed. —  Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There
• The scholars are busy with punctuation, chronology, and the lives of the little great, so that their visit is a vastation, and I must turn them out of doors. —  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms