"Irreligion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Church!" exclaimed the missionary, crushing the paper in his excitement. "If the ministers of God become the creatures of the king, despotism and irreligion must inevitably ensue. How long will virtue be accounted a crime? Shall every faithful shepherd be supplanted, to make room for the wolf of lay investiture, the instrument of a lustful tyrant, raised by simony, and ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... the renascence. In her irreligion, as well as in her brilliancy and fancy, Elizabeth might fitly be called the child or product of the Pagan renascence or new birth, as the return to the freedom of classic literature, so powerful in the England of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... short years ago a pamphlet was published in which we find detailed the efforts made in France to spread irreligion by means of bad education. The letters of eighty of the Prelates of France are appended to the pamphlet. Alas! the sad forebodings of that noble episcopate have been too soon ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... since it was impossible to feel that the new bishop followed or intended to follow either. He experienced a wild impulse to spring to his feet and protest; he wondered if he only of all the persons in this crowded church recognized the shocking irreligion of that vow. He reflected that in the Catholic communion it would have been impossible for popular suffrage to raise to the bishopric a man like this, ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... deprived long together of anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by fanaticism, and fanaticism by ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... race. It was converted into a goblet, and used at Odin-like orgies. Though the affair was but a whim of youth, more odious than poetical, it caused some talk, and raised around the extravagant host the haze of a mystery, suggesting fantasies of irreligion and horror. The inscription on the cup is not remarkable ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... rationalistic philosophy; and we might add that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners, machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the love of life in the consciousness ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... churches refused to "fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was {444} stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... deceiving itself as to where it should go; slaking itself 'at the gilded puddles that the beasts would cough at,' instead of coming to the water of life!—that is the state of man without God. That is nature. That is irreligion. The condition in which every man is that is not trusting in Jesus Christ, is this—thirsting for God, and not knowing whom he is thirsting for, and so not getting ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dark closet that must be explored before men could receive the message of religion and self-control. So in 1843 he organized the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, which ever since has remembered how Hartley found alcoholism back of irreligion, and how back of alcoholism and poverty and ignorant indifference he found indecent housing, unsanitary streets, unwholesome ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... des Barreaux, born in Paris in 1602, was Counsellor of the Parliament of Paris, and gave up his charge to devote himself to pleasure. He was famous for his songs and verses, for his affability and generosity and irreligion. A few years before his death he was converted, and wrote the pious sonnet given above, which had been very widely praised and quoted. In his religious days he lived secluded at Chalon sur Saone, where he died, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... that the plan of education proposed by the author, "far from being in accordance with Christianity, is not fitted to form citizens, or even men." He accuses Rousseau of irreligion and of bad faith; he denounces him to the temporal power as animated "by a spirit of insubordination and of revolt." He sums up by solemnly condemning the book "as containing an abominable doctrine, calculated to overthrow ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... dissolve the whole enchantment, and leaves the reader in a state of cold and anxious scepticism. This most lame and impotent conclusion has been variously imputed to the taste or irreligion of Virgil; but, according to the more elaborate interpretation of Bishop Warburton, the descent to hell is not a false, but a mimic scene; which represents the initiation of AEneas, in the character ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... is indispensable, and will be impossible until the statesman can appeal to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is countered ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Christian Church has ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards religion in its highest and best sense. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... believe both to be true, but especially the latter; for if the Maxims, that were most instrumental in bringing about the Reformation, had been continued, they certainly would have prevented, at least in a great Measure, not only this Evil, but likewise another, which is worse, I mean the Growth of Irreligion and Impiety: Nay, I don't question but the same Maxims, if they were to be tried again would have that ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... ceases to be a matter of wonder that the fair tender plant of beautiful childhood refuses to grow in such a vitiated atmosphere. Here all distinctions between good and evil are speedily lost, if they were ever known; and men, women, and children become unnatural in vice, in irreligion, in manners and appearance. Such spots as these act like cankers, yearly spreading further and further their vitiating influences, preparing for all those fearful retributions in the shape of fever and pestilence which continually come down. Yet, lamentable as the state of such a population ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... while there had taken advantage of his official station to do a tremendous quantity of smuggling. He had also further and most deeply offended the Empress Maria Theresa, by outrageous debaucheries, by gross irreligion, and above all by a rather flat but in effect stingingly satirical description of her conduct about the partition of Poland. This she never forgave him, neither did her daughter Marie Antoinette; and accordingly, when he presented himself at ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of reformation. It dies, not only when you aim a fatal blow at its life principle—its foundation doctrine of man's right to property in man[B]—but it dies as surely, when you prune it of its manifold incidents of pollution and irreligion. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... simple, touching story of Alvira has brought a charm and a balm. Seeking to impart to others its interest, its amusement, and its moral, we cast it afloat on the sea of literature, to meet, probably, a premature grave in this age of irreligion and presumptuous denial of ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... religion, is, so far, arbitrary—the work, that is to say, of the editor rather than of the author; and secondly, that there is no difficulty, from the original preface and otherwise, of gathering the general order of Pascal’s ideas, and the method which appeared to him the true one of meeting the irreligion of his day, and vindicating the divine truth of Christianity—points which shall afterwards come ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... forward such an accusation; for in his youth Critias had been a companion of Socrates, and his later conduct was used as a proof that Socrates corrupted his surroundings. But it is always Critias's political crimes which are adduced in this connexion, not his irreligion. On the other hand, posterity looked upon him as the pure type of tyrant, and the label atheist therefore suggested itself on the ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... all the gravity and solidity of his discourse; but he contented himself with such a rational defence of a righteous, sober, and godly life, as he knew none of them could with any shadow of reason contest. He then challenged them to propose any thing they could urge, to prove that a life of irreligion and debauchery was preferable to the fear, love and worship of the eternal God, and a conduct agreeable to the precepts of his gospel. And he failed not to bear his testimony, from his own experience, (to one part of which many of them had been witnesses) that after having ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... of Theodoret against the twelve chapters of the celebrated Cyril, and the epistle which was said to have been written by Ibas to Maris the Persian—without alteration this synod renews in all points the ancient decrees of religion, chasing away the impious doctrines of irreligion. And this our holy and ecumenical synod, inspired of God, has set its seal to the creed of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, and again religiously confirmed by the one hundred and fifty, which also the other holy synods gladly received and ratified ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... the wars at home and in the Netherlands had sadly depleted the treasury, the credit of the country was far from good, and gradually, as a natural reaction after the religious exaltation which had marked the whole of the sixteenth century, a spirit of irreligion and licentiousness became prevalent in all classes of society. As Philip had grown older and more ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in 1598, the last restraint was gone, and there was no limit to the excesses ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... requires but a slight acquaintance with these compositions to enable the reader to recognize in the Galdrakinna of the Scalds the Stryga or witch-woman of more classical climates. In the northern ideas of witches there was no irreligion concerned with their lore. On the contrary, the possession of magical knowledge was an especial attribute of Odin himself; and to intrude themselves upon a deity, and compel him to instruct them in ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... cultivation are of great consequence to the welfare of the community. Some of these are of indispensable consideration to the legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in that general and moral view, in which ignorance in the lower orders is beheld the cause of their vice, irreligion, and consequent misery, that the subject is attempted, imperfectly and somewhat desultorily, to be ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... of these later poems are free from grammatical incorrectness or ambiguity of expression. Some are debased by the more serious fault of ribaldry and profaneness. His irreligion, however, seems to have been rather the fluctuating of a mind that had lost its hold on truth for a time, than the scepticism of one confirmed in error. He acknowledges his dependence on a Creator, though he casts off his belief in a Redeemer. His incredulity does not appear so ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... refuted those communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and to say to them, "You are communists, you desire to abolish property." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of personal interest ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... interesting feature in the policy of Venice, which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have already alluded, closed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... was no less than to extirpate the Senate, divide amongst themselves both the public and private treasures, and set Rome on fire. The causes which prompted to this tremendous project, it is generally admitted, were luxury, prodigality, irreligion, a total corruption of manners, and above all, as the immediate cause, the pressing necessity in which the conspirators were involved by their ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... crops, with the sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed—the great parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... seem to indicate a certain independence of spirit, but unhappily the accompanying symptoms are not so encouraging. With contempt for its ministers, has come disregard for the ordinances of the Church, the services of which are but scantily attended. Yet notwithstanding the irreligion which is spreading fast throughout the land, little tolerance is shown for adherents to other than the Greek Church. For example, Catholics are compelled to close their shops on the Greek feasts, of which there are not a few, under penalty of a fine. In the same liberal spirit the ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horrour; the wise and the pious caught the alarm; and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... years an experienced pastor in Brooklyn, Says: "The American theater is a concrete institution, to be judged as a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We, therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... village—before she died! Like his father, he thanked God that she was dead. He lifted her up tenderly and laid her down on a huge settle by the fireplace. He stood a moment, looking from one to the other. The irreligion of the age had not seized him. He knelt down and made a prayer. Having discharged that duty, he lifted his hands to heaven and his lips moved. Was he invoking a curse upon these enemies? He turned quickly and went out into ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... yet he imparted his kindness to those who were not supposed to favour his principles. He was an early encourager of Pope, and was, at once, the friend of Addison and of Granville. He is accused of voluptuousness and irreligion; and Pope, who says, that "if ever there was a good Christian, without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth," seems not able to deny what he is angry to ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... danger of "ordinary law, martial law, and flat fighting." Nor was the state of religious affairs at all more promising. The Deputy describes the kingdom as "overwhelmed by the most deplorable immorality and irreligion;"[427] the Privy Council, in their deliberations, gives a similar account. "As for religion, there was but small appearance of it; the churches uncovered, and the clergy scattered."[428] An Act of Parliament was then passed to remedy ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... woman! When I think of the mischief she's always done here, by her example and her irreligion—I can't forgive her. I don't believe you'll make any impression on Mr. Freeland; he's entirely under ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of his brother, and grieved for his irreligion, but hoped that grace would eventually bring him back to the fold of the Church. His brother encouraged him in his hopes, while laughing at them in private, but as they were both sensible men they never discussed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... influence of the gods on human affairs: ix. 1, 11, 'cum rerum humanarum maximum momentum sit, quam propitiis rem, quam adversis agant dis.' Superior to the gods is necessitas (ix. 4, 16), and fortuna is also powerful (ix. 17, 3; v. 37, 1). He condemns the irreligion of his own day (x. 40, 10, 'iuvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus'), cf. iii. 20, 5; viii. 11, 1. He retains the old belief in prodigies and portents, every war being introduced by a list of them, but recognizes that many reported instances were fictitious: xxi. 62, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... before the Maker he had outraged. The crimes he had committed, especially if unsuccessful, or the sorrows that had fallen upon him, would have sufficed to reduce nine-tenths of ordinary men to a condition of humble supplication. For, generally speaking, irreligion, or rather forgetfulness of God, is a plant of no deep growth in the human heart, since its roots are turned by the rock of that innate knowledge of a higher Power that forms the foundation of every soul, and on which we are glad enough to set our feet when the storms of trouble and emergency ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and boldly. He takes the position ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... earnestly than the Lord's own day. Those prelates that will not abase themselves to preach upon ordinary Sabbaths, think the high holidays worthy of their sermons. They have been also often seen to travel upon the Lord's day, whereas they hold it irreligion to travel upon an holiday. And whereas they can digest the common profanation of the Lord's day, and not challenge it, they cannot away with the not observing of ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... to the tinder of irreligion at the first Sunday meeting after his return. There were no premonitions, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... the youth of China.'' A single mission institution, like the Shantung Protestant University, with its union of the best educational methods and the highest ideals of Christian character, will do more for the real enlightenment of China than a dozen provincial colleges where gambling, irreligion and opium smoking are freely tolerated and a failure to worship the tablet of Confucius is deemed ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... and innumerable protestations of everlasting regard, he at last found that I was more affected with the loss of my innocence, than the danger of my fame, and that he might not be disturbed by my remorse, began to lull my conscience with the opiates of irreligion. His arguments were such as my course of life has since exposed me often to the necessity of hearing, vulgar, empty, and fallacious; yet they at first confounded me by their novelty, filled me with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... own time alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the great merit of not repeating his personal bons mots and of never speaking of his love-affairs, though his smiles and his airs and graces were delightfully indiscreet. The worthy gentleman used his privilege as a Voltairean noble to stay away from mass; and great indulgence was shown to his irreligion because of his devotion to the royal cause. One of his particular graces was the air and manner (imitated, no doubt, from Mole) with which he took snuff from a gold box adorned with the portrait of the Princess Goritza,—a ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... still behold a hundred savage nations who have none of the ideas of civilized people respecting God, the soul, another world, and a future life; who have formed no system of worship; and who nevertheless enjoy the rich gifts of nature in the irreligion in ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... may be met by saying that its chief influence was exerted on those whose habits of dissipation, immorality, and irreligion kept, them aloof from the religious instruction of the priest. But to those who know the Irish heart, it is not necessary to say that many a man addicted to drink is far from being free from the impressions of religion, or uninfluenced by many a generous and noble virtue. Neither ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... conclusions of these lives of 'Wits and Beaux' are, it is admitted, just: vice is censured; folly rebuked; ungentlemanly conduct, even in a beau of the highest polish, exposed; irreligion finds no toleration under gentle names—heartlessness no palliation from its being the way of the world. There is here no separate code allowed for men who live in the world, and for those who live out of it. The task of pourtraying such characters as the 'Wits and Beaux of Society' is a ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... immortalizing their names by edifices of an enormous magnitude, and a boundless expense. It is remarkable, that those stately pyramids, which have so long been the admiration of the whole world, were the effect of the irreligion and merciless cruelty ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... cholera with sacrilegious impiety. In consequence of the indisposition that kept me at home, and of another circumstance, I only received to-day the certificate of the death of this victim of intemperance and irreligion. I must proclaim it to the praise of his reverence"—pointing to Rodin—"that he told me, the worst enemies of the descendants of that infamous renegade would be their own bad passions, and that the might look to them as our allies against the whole impious race. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... language existed to a frightful degree. Criminals were hanged, five or six together, at Tyburn. Gibbets existed at all the cross-roads throughout the country. The people were grossly ignorant, and altogether neglected. Scepticism and irreligion prevailed, until Wesley and Whitfield sprang up to protest against formalism and atheism. They were pelted with rotten eggs, sticks, and stones. A Methodist preacher was whipped ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... they, that his life was continually in danger. Lord Brougham, in his "Men of Letters of the Time of George III.." says:—"Voltaire's name is so intimately connected in the minds of all men with Infidelity, in the minds of most men with irreligion, and, in the minds of all who are not well-informed, with these qualities alone, that whoever undertakes to write his life and examine his claims to the vast reputation which all the hostile feelings excited ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 2. Do. 3. Exceptions to the general charge of Irreligion brought against the Chinese. 4. Politeness. 5. Filial ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the king thus fluctuated, during his whole reign, between irreligion, which he more openly professed, and Popery, to which he retained a secret propensity, his brother the duke of York, had zealously adopted all the principles of that theological party. His eager temper and narrow understanding made him a thorough convert, without ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... those men, who in their hearts confess her divine right, and know the value of her laws, on whose fidelity and obedience can she depend? May such geniuses never descend to flatter vice, encourage folly, or propagate irreligion; but exert all their powers in the service of virtue, and celebrate the noble choice of those, who, like you, preferred ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... paganism which the Arabs, the Sarmathes, and the Scythians professed. Libels must at every moment show fresh traces of hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to make the sins of an individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny, murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... his head, David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence—upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... could not be free, the republic could not be reestablished because the old love for virtue and liberty had died out from among the people—had been overwhelmed by the rising tide of vice, corruption, sensuality, and irreligion that had set in ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have differed in respect of what is ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most, as an uncertain obscurity which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear, I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of a view, and for this reason, that I will ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the uses of a religion would be indispensable; viz. for the sanction of oaths, and as a channel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, the answer is easy: religion was degrading: but heavier degradations would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous peoples, viz. the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very use of their word religlo, their testimony to the degradation wrought by any religion that Paganism ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... hospitality of the Emperor that they had things as English as possible at the Palace-even providing an English chaplain for Sunday morning. In the afternoon, however, he backslid into French irreligion and natural depravity, and they all went to enjoy the fresh air, the sight of the trees, the flowers and the children in the Bois de Boulogne. The next day they went into the city to the Exposition des Beaux Arts, and to the Elysee for lunch and a reception—then ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... merely somewhat ludicrous, but even seriously injurious to truth. One and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen—each severally in his own age—with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken, concerning each of which some excellent writer may be cited to ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... worship of progress to a degrading philosophy. Consider with what a feeling of pride they lowered man, and you will understand why eternal nature gave place to sacred humanity. When France had fallen into the delirium of irreligion, it was not a little dust in an earthen vase which was offered for public adoration, but they led in procession through the streets of Paris a woman who ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 'Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees,' 'Contributions to a Classification of British Crustacea,' 'On Man as the Image of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... little increase his means; the promotion threw him out of the chances of the like at home; and the labour and toil of the half-constituted and enormous diocese, the needful struggles with English irreligion and native heathenism, and the perils of climate, offered a trying exchange for all that had made life delightful at Hodnet Rectory. A second little daughter too, whom he could not of course look to educating in India, rendered the decision more trying. But in his own peculiarly ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fine eye for nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... are told, the progress of Wesleyanism excited the jealousy of the clergy, not so tolerant as they are now, and a meeting was held at the Bull Hotel, Horncastle, at which it was argued that the "spread of Methodism was one of the causes of the awful irreligion" prevalent, that the ministers were "raving enthusiasts, pretending to divine impulse, and thus ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... accompanied and followed the march of her armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities, the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death. Such were the calamities that marked the course of these devastating hosts. And yet the evils inflicted by Jacobin France were less intense and less permanent than those exercised ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... is degradation in the life of irreligion. The things which the wanderer tried to live on were not husks only. They were husks which the swine did eat. Degradation means the application of a thing to purposes lower than that for which it was intended. It is degradation to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true food. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... ardent longings are overruled; he knows that until he can discount or conciliate that which commands his fortunes his condition is precarious and miserable. And through his eagerness to save himself he leaps to conclusions that are uncritical and premature. Irreligion, on the other hand, flourishes among those who are more snugly intrenched {215} within the cities of man. It is a product of civilization. Comfortably housed as he is, and enjoying an artificial illumination behind ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... truthfulness, remembering also his restless ambition, only one conclusion can be drawn from this silence. He could not categorically deny Cartwright's accusation and at the same time satisfy his own unsparing conception of honesty. That there was no real truth in the charge of irreligion, the allusions in the Speed letters abundantly prove. The tone is too sincere to be doubted; nevertheless, they give no clue to his theology. And for men like Cartwright, religion was tied up hand and foot in theology. Here was where Lincoln had parted company from his mother's world, and from its ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... a place for religious worship near St. Bartholomew's-chapel, still called Masshouse-lane; but the rude hands of irreligion destroyed it. There is now none nearer than Edgbaston, two miles distant; yet the congregation is chiefly supplied ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality. For the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort which charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts; they are torturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life with the same whips ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... by this conversation. While she regarded Paul Stepaside with a certain amount of admiration because of his strong personality and the position he had, in spite of difficulties, obtained in Brunford, she had a certain horror of his irreligion and his apparent vindictiveness. She recalled the words he had spoken to her on the two occasions on which they had met, words which revealed the passionate nature of the man. She was sorry she had spoken to him at all. She ought to have treated him with ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... essential elements, which may serve to the future elaboration of both. You will find deposited in it the rough materials, which some abler hands will perhaps one day employ in constructing an edifice, in which our youth may find a safe refuge from the storms of doubt, unbelief, and irreligion. I have purposed to avoid all exuberant ornaments of style, all pompous parade of erudition, and contented myself with a plain diction, and a strict laconism. I have not quoted authors who preceded me in the same field; I have not called up for investigation what of valuable or defective could be ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... achievements, ruthless causes, the triumph of evil, the defeat of good, the depth and intensity and prevalence of sin, the all-degrading idolatries, the all-defiling corruptions, the monstrous superstitions, the dreary irreligion—is not the whole a picture dreadful to look upon, capricious as chance, rigid as fate, pale as malady, dark as doom? How shall we face this fact, witnessed to by innumerable men in all ages and times, as the natural lot of their kind? ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... Catholic countries took no very active steps to curb the activity of the anti-Christian writers and philosophers, partly because they themselves were not unaffected by the spirit of irreligion, and partly also because they were not sorry to see popular resentment diverted from their own excesses by being directed against the Church. But, in a short time, they realised, when it was too late, that the overthrow of religious authority carries with ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... intense loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enter one of these sanctuaries without reflecting on the rapid progress of irreligion among a people who, six months before, were, on their knees, adoring the effigies which, at that period, they were eager to mutilate and destroy. Iron crows and sledge-hammers were almost in a state of requisition. In the beginning, it was a contest who should first aim a blow at the nose ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... no one think that irreligion is advocated in this book. With respect to religious tenets, I wish to observe that I am a member of the Church of England, into whose communion I was baptised, and to which my forefathers belonged. Its being the religion in which I was baptised, and of my forefathers, would be a strong inducement ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... men of pleasure (with their tooral ooral) got at least some social and communal virtue out of pleasure. The new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige of a tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion, anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselves with hashish or opium ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... science with theology. He chose, of course, the a-posteriori argument, and was brief, perhaps eloquent. Some passages of his discourse might pass unchallenged in the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... so admirable an answer to the charge of irreligion which some might make against us if they mistook our intentions, that as we shall not offer any other reply, we have not hesitated to present it entire as it stands to the eyes of ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... show that Omar gave himself up "avec passion a l'etude de la philosophie des Soufis"? (Preface, p. xiii.) The Doctrines of Pantheism, Materialism, Necessity, &c., were not peculiar to the Sufi; nor to Lucretius before them; nor to Epicurus before him; probably the very original Irreligion of Thinking men from the first; and very likely to be the spontaneous growth of a Philosopher living in an Age of social and political barbarism, under shadow of one of the Two and Seventy Religions supposed to ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... experience of the hurt received by the entertainment of the episcopal clergy, anno 1638, does now plead for their care to prevent it in time coming. (3.) Because the people under their ministry, have hitherto been, and are perishing in ignorance and irreligion; being either starved for want of faithful and spiritual instruction, or poisoned with false instruction; and therefore pity to them, and zeal to propagate the gospel, should prompt to all endeavours to purge them out. (4.) Because the settlement, purgation, and plantation of the church, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... braves"—CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1619-55), Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune, and Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires du Soleil. Cyrano's taste, caught by the mannerisms of Italy and extravagances of Spain, was execrable. To his violences of temper he added a reputation for irreligion. His comedy Le Pedant Joue has the honour of having furnished Moliere with the most laughable scene of the Fourberies de Scapin. The voyages to the moon and the sun, in which the inhabitants, their manners, governments, and ideas, are presented, mingle audacities ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... peace-makers, who were to adjust all difficulties and thus prevent lawsuits. The children were all taught some useful trade. When factors wronged their employees, they were to make satisfaction and one-third over. All causes for irreligion and vulgarity were to be suppressed, and no man was to be molested for his religious opinions. It was also decreed that the days of the week and the months of the year "shall be called as in Scripture, and not by heathen names (as are vulgarly used), as ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... By Charles Caldwell, M. D., Professor, &c. Containing, 1. An Introductory Address, intended as a Defence of the Medical Profession against the charge of Irreligion and Infidelity; with Thoughts on the Truth and Importance of Natural Religion. 2. A Dissertation in answer to certain Prize Questions, proposed by his Grace, the Duke of Holstein Oldenburg, respecting the "Origin, Contagion and general ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... manifest intention to benefit his fellow creatures. In his temper he was naturally warm, though kindly and affectionate. In the friendships he formed, he was ardent, zealous and sincere. So far from being inclined to irreligion, as some ignorant bigots insinuated, few men possessed a more devout habit of thought. A constant sense of Deity, and a veneration for Providence, dwelt upon his mind. From this source arose that propensity, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... looked upon this production as the height of irreverence and irreligion, and proposed to excommunicate the authors of it. Hence the dissenters declared themselves seceders, and took immediate steps to form ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... and infidelity were openly declared to be the effect of the new teaching. Descartes replied to Vot directly in a letter, published at Amsterdam in 1643. He was summoned before the magistrates of Utrecht to defend himself against charges of irreligion and slander. What might have happened we cannot tell; but Descartes threw himself on the protection of the French ambassador and the prince of Orange, and the city magistrates, from whom he vainly demanded satisfaction in a dignified letter,[20] were snubbed by their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... necessarily limit both space and time? and, because we see not the beginning of created things, Are we to conclude that those things which we see have always been, or been without a cause? Our author would thus, inadvertently indeed, lead himself into that gulf of irreligion and absurdity into which, he alleges, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these - and fewer women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called 'the public,' God save me from such irreligion! - that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I would ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as fully to elude all possibility of discovery and exposure. That mother who intrusts her daughter to a nunnery school, is chargeable with the high crime of openly conducting her into the chambers of pollution, and the path to irreligion, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... Byron, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... confiscated, but he had secured favourable terms by an arrangement with the Parliament. This time it was again confiscated, and he narrowly escaped death by flight to the Continent. He was a prominent member of the exiled Court; but his open irreligion, his flighty character, and his continual plotting as an adherent of Prince Rupert, alienated him from the party of Hyde. His wit and personal charms won for him many friends, but his life was one perpetual succession ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... ideas connected with the highest aims and final ends to which our faith aspires. So, then, that Michelangelo stupendous in his fame, that Michelangelo renowned for prudence, that Michelangelo whom all admire, has chosen to display to the whole world an impiety of irreligion only equalled by the perfection of his painting! Is it possible that you, who, since you are divine, do not condescend to consort with human beings, have done this in the greatest temple built to God, upon the highest altar raised ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... contagiously to other modes of conscientious obligation; at any rate, my own experience would warrant me in doubting whether any instance were ever known of a woman, in the rank of servant, regarding infidelity or irreligion as something brilliant, or interesting, or in any way as favorably distinguishing a man. Meantime, this conscientious apprehension on account of the servants applied to contingencies that were remote. But the pity on account of the poor lady herself ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... skill, industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success in life to something out of joint in the thoughts and customs of society, rather than to their own shortcomings or incapacity. In France, such persons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... of renovation and ruin, vast cycles, if you will, but evermore ending in dire catastrophies to gods and men—an everlasting succession of death and destructions—is the fearful vista which all the religions of man, and thine own irreligion, present to thy terrified vision. But thou wast created in the image of the living God, and durst not rest satisfied with any such prospect. Now I come in the name of the Lord to tell thee, that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... pleasant to turn from his irreligion to his philosophy. Here he appears as an uncertain but yet ardent disciple of the Porch. His uncertainty is shown by his inability to answer many grave doubts, as: Why is the future revealed by presages? [48] why are the oracles, once so ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... a thinker of eminence may be led away by an ambiguity of language, is afforded by this very case. I refer to the famous argument by which Bishop Berkeley flattered himself that he had forever put an end to "skepticism, atheism, and irreligion." It is briefly as follows: I thought of a thing yesterday; I ceased to think of it; I think of it again to-day. I had, therefore, in my mind yesterday an idea of the object; I have also an idea of it to-day; this idea is evidently not another, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... justification of fiction. The novelist has a high vocation, if he could only see it; he can inculcate submission to authority, hope, charity, obedience—in fact, all the higher virtues; he can become a handmaid of the Church. And now, when irreligion, and immorality, and scepticism are rampant, we must not despise ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world,"—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... both sides, mingled itself with the rage of our civil dissensions, more frantic than that, more implacable, more averse to all healing measures. The most intemperate counsels were thought the most pious, and a regard to the laws, if they opposed the suggestions of these fiery zealots, was accounted irreligion. This added new difficulties to what was before but too difficult in itself, the settling of a nation which no longer could put any confidence in its sovereign, nor lay more restraints on the royal authority without destroying the balance of the whole constitution. In those circumstances, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... be guessed that both of them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... added, upon the head of his irreligion, that to Minerva, who once offered him her advice, he replied with indignation: "Trouble not yourself about my conduct; of that I shall give a good account; you have nothing to do but reserve your favor and assistance for the other ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... odious young man spoke of his father, his coarse mention of mine, and his low boasting of his irreligion, disgusted me more ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... goodness. It is refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the end, Burns' great charity ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... The Rev. John Miller, in 1695, speaks of "the wickedness and irreligion of the inhabitants, which abounds in all parts of the province, and appears in so many shapes, constituting so many sorts of sin, that I can scarce tell which to begin withal." The reverend ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... forwardness of faith, its eagerness of acquiescence; but to this sort of reproach I expect to be able to show that none are more obnoxious than those very philosophers by whom it is most freely cast. That nothing is more unphilosophical than uncompromising irreligion, nothing more credulous than its credulity, no other beliefs more monstrous than those by which it strives to fill up the void created by its own unbelief: this is my present thesis, and this I propound, not unaware what formidable antagonists I am thereby ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community. If there is one thing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... or "ihr," fornication or adultery, i.e., irreligion, infidelity as amongst the Hebrews ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... that John Wesley prescribed at this period for madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month—a regimen which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... occupied his full attention. He would cling to it until the last snap of the thin string. This cavern of oblivion that was awaiting him, that he must enter—it was black and now more than ever his deep, simple irreligion refused to let fairy tales pacify him with the belief that beyond it was everlasting daylight. Scepticism was not only in his conscious thought but in the very tissues of ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... ignorance, and brutality of the lowest classes; the irreverence, disrespect, dishonesty, and moral blindness of the middle orders; and the apathy, heartlessness, unscrupulousness, selfishness, cupidity, and irreligion of the upper stratum of Society, are alike due to the absence of a rightly organized State, which should command the allegiance, and of a rightly constituted Church, which should absorb the devotion, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Germany. Simple-minded poets were celebrating atheism with an enthusiasm which seemed sincere; and, at the same time, men who are not simple-minded, journalists and demagogues, were laying hold of the irreligion as a lever with which to make a breach in the social edifice. In the year 1845, the attention of the Swiss authorities was drawn to certain secret societies, composed of Germans, and having for their object ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... cult of the Gods in the ancient form as is prescribed, and they (with old habit coming back to them) made response in the words and in the places where the old ritual enjoins. It was weird enough sight, that time-honoured service of adoration, forced upon these wild people after so long a period of irreligion. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... brother has thrown himself heart and soul—that is to say, as far as he has a heart to throw—into what he calls the cause of the people; and which I consider to be the cause of revolution, of confiscation, of irreligion, and abomination generally. ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... a la Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in—or disgraced by the irreligion, and contempt of things holy, found in the writings of scores of French authors whom we could name, were they worth the naming. It is undeniable that the ingenious plots of his very entertaining books turn, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... but what reasonable ground had a man of sense for astonishment— that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sincerely pious, should decline to place such a man upon an Episcopal throne? This argues, beyond a doubt, that Swift was in that state of constitutional irreligion, irreligion from a vulgar temperament, which imputes to everybody else its own plebeian feelings. People differed, he fancied, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulations. And, therefore, it seemed to him scandalous that a princess, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... the bedroom was silence; and beyond was the vast Sunday afternoon silence of the district, producing the sensation of surcease, re-creating the impressive illusion of religion even out of the brutish irreligion that was bewailed from pulpits to empty pews in all the temples of all the Five Towns. Only the smoke waving slowly through the clean-washed sky from a few high chimneys over miles of deserted manufactories made a link between ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... indignant rebuke of Kant, who, in his work on 'Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason,' had expressed opinions so utterly atheistical as to draw forth severe menaces from the reigning King of Prussia, Frederic William the Second: 'Surely, gray hairs and irreligion make a monstrous union; and the spirit of proselytism carried into the service of infidelity—a youthful zeal put forth by a tottering, decrepid old man, to withdraw from desponding and suffering human nature its most ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the soul, are converted into their corresponding virtues. Thus, Ignorance is exchanged for learning, obstinacy for docility, and precipitation for patience, rashness for prudence, lying for truth, cowardice for bravery, and avarice for generosity, tyranny for justice, irreligion for piety, deceitfulness for sincerity, hatred for affection, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... sometimes spoke of things sacred, had been obliquely touched upon by his good and anxious friend Mrs. Dunlop: he pleads guilty of folly, but not of irreligion.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... would say in her defence that outward forms matter not, and that there are good men in Scotland as well as in England; but this is an after-thought. Again, a careless person, nominally a Churchman, falls among serious-minded Dissenters, and they reclaim him from vice or irreligion; on this he joins their communion, and as time goes on, boasts perhaps of his right of private judgment. At the time itself, however, no process of inquiry took place within him at all; his heart was "opened," whether for good or for bad, whether by good influences or by good ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... conceal the effect the words had on his conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... for without this, we shall be liable, on the one hand, to the risk of imputing Atheism to many who are not justly chargeable with it—a fault which should be most carefully avoided;[3] and equally liable, on the other hand, to the danger of overlooking the wide gulf which separates Religion from Irreligion, and Theism from Atheism. There is much room for the exercise both of Christian candor and of critical discrimination, in forming our estimate of the characters of men from the opinions which they hold, when these opinions relate ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... friendly relations with the Recollets. No one ever accused him of being a bad Catholic. He was exact in the performance of his religious duties, and such trouble as he had with the ecclesiastical authorities proceeded from political aims rather than from heresy or irreligion. ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... the dream there is a sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy. That part of the poem is representative. It is the end of such a society as is drawn in The ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... It may be added, perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention, and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great earnestness, "Do not my works testify to my Christianity?" I wish that these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish the memory of an ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... radical measures, his Highness is not popular with the masses. He is accused of irreligion by the monks that he has removed from the University, and his mistress, the daughter of a noted free-thinker who was driven from Piedmont by the Inquisition, is said to have an unholy influence over him. I am told ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... discovered that in his first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to value anew; how it fared with his avowed irreligion when put to the extreme test; to what, in short, his emancipation amounted. And he, like myself, would speak for thousands. My grandchildren, for all I know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... risen like the all-destructive Being at the end of the Yuga. Then Brahman made over that sharp weapon to the blue-throated Rudra who has for the device on his banner the foremost of bulls, for enabling him to put down irreligion and sin. At this, the divine Rudra of immeasurable soul, praised by the great Rishis, took up that sword and assumed a different shape. Putting forth four arms, he became so tall that though standing on the earth he touched the very sun with his head. With eyes turned upwards ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... astonishing that the French nation, just recovering from a debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers, as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions ever flying before the arms of his Majesty the Emperor; now they were victors, led by a second Caesar or ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the rest of their professorships. One complained of disrespect; another of carelessness; a third of disobedience; a fourth of irreligion. All concurred in declaring the archduke to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Mrs. Elizabeth Carter translated the foreign critic, yet it is certain, that Johnson encouraged the work, and, perhaps, imbibed those early prejudices, which adhered to him to the end of his life. He shuddered at the idea of irreligion. Hence, we are told, in the life of Pope, "Never were penury of knowledge, and vulgarity of sentiment, so happily disguised; Pope, in the chair of wisdom, tells much that every man knows, and much that he did not know himself; and gives us comfort in the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... broke loose from that great Body of Writers who have employed their Wit and Parts in propagating Vice and Irreligion, I did not question but I should be treated as an odd kind of Fellow that had a mind to appear singular in my Way of Writing: But the general Reception I have found, convinces me that the World is not so corrupt as we are apt to imagine; and that if those Men of Parts who ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... what observation Mr. Hanway founds his confidence in the governours of the Foundling Hospital, men of whom I have not any knowledge, but whom I entreat to consider a little the minds, as well as bodies, of the children. I am inclined to believe irreligion equally pernicious with gin and tea, and, therefore, think it not unseasonable to mention, that, when, a few months ago, I wandered through the hospital, I found not a child that seemed to have heard of his creed, or the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... God; secondly, we shall treat of those vices which are manifestly contrary to religion, through showing contempt of those things that pertain to the worship of God. The former come under the head of superstition, the latter under that of irreligion. Accordingly we must consider in the first place, superstition and its parts, and afterwards irreligion and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... century this extreme penalty of the law was sometimes carried out. The police were active, their methods of investigation elaborate and thorough, yet the rigour of the law and the energy of the police signally failed to suppress irreligion and immorality in eighteenth-century France. The Revolution, by popularizing the opinions of the more enlightened men of the time, and by giving to the popular voice an authority it had never possessed before, remoulded the antiquated ecclesiastical laws in accordance with the ideas of the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... rule among women (with few exceptions) that idleness and uselessness make for selfishness and sensuality. Also for irreligion. These ultra mondaines think of God in an amiable, well-bred way—they approve of God, and they say their prayers in an amiable, well-bred way; but none of this avails to regenerate their lives or to combat ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... lost. In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards, "concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of the word "wherefore," as connected with the passage in the Psalm, "Wherefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee," for their own purposes, let these novices in Scripture and masters in irreligion know that, as before, the word "wherefore" does not imply reward of virtue or conduct in the Word, but the reason why he came down to us, and of the Spirit's anointing, which took place in him for our sakes. For he says not, "Wherefore he anointed thee in order to thy being God or ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... had nothing but scorn and contempt for the blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed committing the Socialist movement to atheism as part of its programme.[54] In short, he was a man of fine spiritual instincts, splendidly religious in his irreligion. ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way did ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... to steam and all new-fangled ways, and held ballooning to be sinful, and deplored the degeneracy of the times; which that particular member of each little club who kept the keys of the nearest church, professionally, always attributed to the prevalence of dissent and irreligion; though the major part of the company inclined to the belief that virtue went out with hair-powder, and that Old England's greatness had decayed ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... That old prophecy, however long delayed, still finds an involuntary echo in our souls. And now, in this hope of a true and brotherly society, its fulfilment seems at hand. Say it is enthusiasm, say it is a mistake, say it is irreligion, if you will, and still I reply that the time is not distant. It is in the combined order, where men are held together by inward laws only, and not by outward constraint and outward necessities, that the kingdom of God is to come down ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... should think, as nearly a freethinker as anyone could be whose mind seldom turned upon the subject. She went to church, but disliked equally those who aired either religion or irreligion. I remember once hearing her press a late well-known philosopher to write a novel instead of pursuing his attacks upon religion. The philosopher did not much like this, and dilated upon the importance of showing people the folly of much ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... structure, and tend, so far as I am able to judge of their tendency, to throw society into entire confusion and to renew, under the sanction of religion, scenes of anarchy and license that have generally hitherto been the offspring of the rankest infidelity and irreligion." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... A gymnasium was built by him in Jerusalem; reverence for Mosaic rites was discouraged. Both by his example and his active exertions, Jason, the unworthy successor of Aaron, sought to obliterate the distinction between Jew and Gentile, and bring all to one uniformity of worldliness and irreligion. In the words of the historian:[1] "The example of a person in his commanding position drew forth and gave full scope to the more lax dispositions which existed among the people, especially among the younger class, who ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... the surprise of all candid observers; that gallantry is so common as to create no remark, and to be considered as a matter of course. With us, at least, the converse of the proposition prevails: it is the man professing irreligion who would be remarked and reprehended in England; and, if the second-named vice exists, at any rate, it adopts the decency of secrecy and is not made patent and notorious to all the world. A French gentleman thinks no more of proclaiming ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... word, those who have most vigorously taken up the cause of the theological systems, have been taxed with atheism and irreligion; the most zealous partizans have been looked upon as deserters, have been contemplated as traitors; the most orthodox theologians have not been able to guarantee themselves from this reproach; they have mutually bespatered each other; prodigally lavished, with malignant reciprocity, the most ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... giving a proof of irreligion which is in bad taste," said Laura. "Only janitors talk ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... surrounding villages represent? What do they represent? Are they any thing else but the vile instruments of which the atheists and Protestants who infest Madrid make use for their perfidious conquests and the extermination of the faith? In that centre of corruption, of scandal, of irreligion and unbelief, a few malignant men, bought by foreign gold, occupy themselves in destroying in our Spain the deeds of faith. Why, what do you suppose? They allow us to say mass and you to hear it through the remnant of consideration, for shame's sake—but, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be made fun of." The comparison, however, between the sins that have been alleged against both Moliere and Mr. Shaw—sins of style, of form, of morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and so forth—is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure that the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book is intended as a biography and general ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... By slow degrees England has arisen, first to the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the race and the character of its religion, depend the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... faulty man whose exclusive authority to read prayers and preach, to christen, marry, and bury you, necessarily coexisted with the right to sell you the ground to be buried in and to take tithe in kind; on which last point, of course, there was a little grumbling, but not to the extent of irreligion—not of deeper significance than the grumbling at the rain, which was by no means accompanied with a spirit of impious defiance, but with a desire that the prayer for fine weather might ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... it shall often happen that some people will see things in a direct contrary sense to what the author and the majority of the readers understand them: to such the most innocent irony may appear irreligion."—Cambridge. ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... religious press with reference to science and scientific men, there is much to criticize and condemn. It is often snappish, petulant, ill-humored, unfair, and sometimes malicious in the extreme. Such opprobrious terms as infidelity, irreligion, rationalizing tendencies, naturalism, contempt for the Scriptures, etc., are freely used. Scientific men are called infidel pretenders, and are charged with a secret conspiracy to overthrow the faith of the Christian world. A respectable religious weekly paper in this country, in ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... of a new kind of Art: German Art. Philosophers and men of science were at the same time directed to meet round the table and found a new Religion: German Religion. How can such people appreciate art; how can they appreciate religion—nay, how can they appreciate irreligion? How does one invent a message? How does one create a Creator? Is it not the plain meaning of the Gospel that it is good news? And is it not the plain meaning of good news that it must come from outside oneself? Otherwise I could make myself happy this moment, by ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... agreeable and amiable. Her face was commanding, though somewhat spoiled at last by fat. She had much eloquence, speaking with an ease and precision that charmed and overpowered. What might she not have become, with the talents she possessed! But her pride, her violent temper, her irreligion, and her falsehood, spoiled all, and made her what ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon |
