Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

Sabbath - a weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Age - That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

You don't have to be stupid to be a Christian, ... but it probably helps.

A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.