"Irreligious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me, I daresay, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now. He sees not as man sees, but far clearer: judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. I did wrong: I would have sullied ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Rock Park—or, if it were to be a late affair, before—we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined. This was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious, but we had not before been accustomed to express our religious feelings in just that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my father would open the Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a prayer-book containing thirty or forty well-considered ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... upon his religious opinions (or, rather, irreligious), on his return voyage from England, as related to the errors and mistakes of his life. He had much time, during those three long, wearisome months, to study himself, past and present. Evidently he came to possess a more correct knowledge of himself ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... Macdonald gang, Macdonald Bhain, who was a regular attendant and stanch supporter of the church, and indeed had been spoken of for an elder. But from the church Macdonald Dubh held aloof. He belonged distinctly to the "careless," though he could not be called irreligious. He had all the reverence for "the Word of God, and the Sabbath day, and the church" that characterized his people. All these held a high place in his esteem; and though he would not presume to "take the books," not being a member of ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... great men "in great crises of human history" were events so striking "that men would be liable to term them providential in a pre-scientific age." On this Mr. Spencer remarks that "in common with the ancient Greek Mr. Gladstone regards as irreligious any explanation of Nature which dispenses with immediate Divine superintendence." And as an instance of the partnership "between the ideas of natural causation and of providential interference," he instances a case where a prince "gained popularity ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the Count de Moustier but one hour ago. But I did not speak to him of the Almighty, because he is an atheist. Yet if we were prudent and merciful it was because we are religious. When men are irreligious, the Lord forsakes them; and if bloodshed and bankruptcy follow it is ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... system of rules he is obliged to go by logic, and follow the exact deduction of conclusion from conclusion, and must be sure that the whole system is coherent and one. You hear of even immoral or irreligious books being written by men of decent character; there is a late writer who says that David Hume's sceptical works are not at all the picture of the man. A priest might write a treatise which was really lax on the subject of lying, which might come under the condemnation of the Holy See, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... review, not only several systems of avowed Atheism, but also various theories, not necessarily atheistic, which have been applied to the support and defence of Atheism, and which have a tendency, as thus applied, to induce an irreligious frame of mind. ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... concerning whose antecedents I knew absolutely nothing. I have been almost culpably rash and blind,—but I could not look into your beautiful, sad eyes, and doubt that you were worthy of the love that sprang up unbidden in my heart. I knew that you were irreligious, but I believed I could win you back to Christ; and when I tell you that, after living thirty-eight years, you are the only woman I ever met whom I wished to call my wife, you can in some degree realize my confidence in the innate purity of your character. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... particular Manner the Priests Office: This I have known done in so audible a manner, that sometimes their Voices have been as loud as his. As little as you would think it, this is frequently done by People seemingly devout. This irreligious Inadvertency is a Thing extremely offensive: But I do not recommend it as a Thing I give you Liberty to ridicule, but hope it may be amended ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in question is a moral evil, which a man can scrutinise, and where that moral evil has its origin within ourselves, let us not imagine that we can clear our consciences by this general, not to say irreligious, way of putting aside the question." Pitt concluded by urging on the house the influence which their decision would produce in other countries, and that the divine blessing was to be expected on their own, by exertions in such a righteous cause. His speech was rapturously applauded, but he failed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... excommunication,[xxxi] in consequence of Edwy's refusal to put away Elgiva, immediately after the coronation; since which the guilty pair had never communicated at the altar, or even attended mass. Their lives had been practically irreligious, nay idolatrous, for they had been gods to ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... 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 drawn blinds, the irreligious man has the heart to criticise the hasty speculations and abject fear of those who stand without in the presence of the surrounding darkness. In other words, religion is perpetually on the exposed side of civilization, sensitive to the blasts that blow from the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... soul, and spirit) is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." (vol. ii. p. 372) Mr. Darwin adds: "He who denounces these views (as irreligious) is bound to explain why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its essence. It is the entanglement of religion in dogma that still keeps the world superficially irreligious. Now, though no religion can escape the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more easily and light-heartedly than any other. That religion is art; for art is a religion. It is an expression ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... know that which Infinite Mercy has concealed. There is but little probability that the curiosity of mankind in this respect will ever be wholly eradicated. Death and ill fortune are continual bugbears to the weak-minded, the irreligious, and the ignorant; and while such exist in the world, divines will preach upon its impiety and philosophers discourse upon its absurdity in vain. Still it is evident that these follies have greatly diminished. Soothsayers and prophets have lost ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to the voice of wisdom, with the retributive horrors of repeated revolutions; and yet neither in philosophy, in religion, nor in politics, has Mr Carlyle any distinct dogma, creed, or constitution to promulgate. The age is irreligious, he exclaims, and the vague feeling of the impenetrable mystery which encompasses us, is all the theology we can gather from him; civil society, with its laws and government, is in a false and perilous position, and for all relief and reformation, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... not an irreligious man, really; I am rather a religious man; and this is not an irreligious, but rather ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... the mind of Europe: it is the belief or want of belief, the religious or irreligious views, the grasping ambition, the headlong desire of an impossible or unholy happiness, the reckless sway of unbridled passions, which try to spread themselves among all nations, and bring them all up, or rather down, to the level ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... their occupants crushed in the fall. The want of veneration, too, made him dead at heart to the electric delight of admiring what is admirable; it dried up a thousand pure sources of enjoyment; it withered a thousand vivid pleasures. He was not irreligious, though a member of no sect; but his religion could not be that of one who knows how to venerate. He believed in God and heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... have gone on to show that the sentiment itself, largely the accident of untoward circumstances, is alien to the character and temperament of the Irish people. In short, I have urged that the policy of revenge is un-Christian and unintelligent, and, that, as the Irish people are neither irreligious nor stupid, it is un-Irish. I well remember taking up this position in conversation with some very advanced Irish-Americans in the Far West and the reply which one of them made. "Wal," said my half-persuaded friend, "mebbe ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... Court was in general extremely irreligious; nor could it be expected to be otherwise, being composed chiefly of those who had assisted in the annihilation of all religious worship in France, and of men who, having passed their lives in camps, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... cannot but think that the greatness of a kingdom, and its change into prosperity, often become the occasion of mischief and of transgression to men; for when Rehoboam saw that his kingdom was so much increased, he went out of the right way unto unrighteous and irreligious practices, and he despised the worship of God, till the people themselves imitated his wicked actions: for so it usually happens, that the manners of subjects are corrupted at the same time with those of their governors, which subjects then lay aside their own sober way of living, as a reproof ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... girls saw them, of course, running about the place like rabbits. But we never took any notice of them, I need hardly say. But I am told that nowadays country society is quite honeycombed with them. I think it most irreligious. And then the eldest son has quarrelled with his father, and it is said that when they meet at the club Lord Brancaster always hides himself behind the money article in The Times. However, I believe that is quite a common ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent in European art to a certain point. But the old conservative perfection of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... answer;—if the vices of the adult generation were traceable in a great degree to the want of early Christian training—as who could doubt?—was it not manifest that the only check to the transmission of its irreligious spirit, was the careful education of the young? Yes; let the ignorant be taught, and little by little God's work would be done. Success might at first be small, but it would be certain. Each mind enlightened, would be a heart ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... Dr. Chalmers, not long before his death, spoke with disapprobation of Abolitionists in the United States, "for undertaking," as he said, "to decide, without sufficient evidence, upon the irreligious character of ministers and church-members. They, forsooth, undertake to exclude men from the Lord's table, who are in good and regular standing in the church of Christ, because they happen to hold slaves! They pretend to decide who, and who are not Christians!" It is marvellous ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... spiritual independence. It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I was far in advance of him, of which my master was aware, and which was one of the causes of Hines' excessive hatred of me, and of his great desire to "put me down and make me know my place," as he termed it. He was very irreligious, and entirely wanting in every attribute of a Christian. He was also what in the South is termed a "bully"—that is, he was free to use his pistols on the slightest occasion, when among his equals, but when in the presence ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... way to get rid of this irreligious crew. The chiefs agreed to be satisfied with five thousand golden florins. This sum was paid, and the knights companions, laden with plunder and absolved from their sins, set out in the highest spirits, singing the praises ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... them as the people do in hymns. And you praise and glorify all the time you're doing it. Of course, I'm not religious myself and I can't say I think it's pleasant—but I do KNOW! Every body beautiful and perfect indeed! That's not religion—it's being irreligious. Good gracious, think of the cripples and ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... be held at our selection. It was the first occasion, in fact, that the Gospel had come to disturb the contentedly irreligious mind of our neighbourhood. Service was to open at 3 p.m.; at break-of-day we had ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... superior reason, strength of faith and spiritual discernment to unveil the divine mysteries and aid in dispelling doubt. Ex-President Seelye, of Amherst, once said: "We should no more think of appointing to a post of instruction here an irreligious man than we should an immoral man, or one ignorant of the topics he would have to teach." It is certainly no narrow bigotry that leads the Christian public to demand that the colleges select professors loyal to the truth and the Christian Church. United with their scientific culture and professional ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... marry persons of your own faith and religious convictions, unless one is willing to adopt those of the other. Difference of faith is apt to divide families, and to produce great trouble in after life. A pious woman should beware of marrying an irreligious man. {171} ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy's world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... disposed to be otherwise, on Parliamentary sayings and doings. I can say nothing from myself, as I have not read one single speech, except that I cannot bear the humiliating exclusion of any kind of useful knowledge from a University out of false consideration for religious or irreligious scruples. [84] Surely young men had better be taught boldly to face the fact that men differ than be dealt with in this ridiculously ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... courts of justice. I find lies in politics and lies in religion, lies in the pulpit, 'nail't wi' Scripture,' lies in the counting room railed with false entries, religious lies, told by Deacon Longface, for the advancement of what the Deacon calls 'the gospel,' and irreligious lies told by Bill Snooks, and clenched with an oath, lies in good books, and lies in bad ones, lies written, and printed in the newspapers, and lies whispered in the ear, and any number of lies sent by telegraph! And then, there's the walking lies, going about on two legs, saying ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... rights want, not the ballot so much as the dissolution of the marriage tie. They propose to form a tie for the term of five, six or seven years. Mark the men or women who are the most strenuous advocates of woman suffrage. They are irreligious and immoral. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... mind turns away from one part of the environment it will only do so under some temptation to correspond with another. This temptation, at bottom, can only come from one source—the love of self. The irreligious man's correspondences are concentrated upon himself. He worships himself. Self-gratification rather than self-denial; independence rather than submission—these are the rules of life. And this is at once the poorest and the commonest form of idolatry. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... well-educated boy and anxious to make the best of any opportunities which came his way. He told us that there was an interesting cathedral in the town and proposed that we should all go and see it after lunch. Thompson is not an irreligious man. Nor am I. We both go to church regularly, though not to excess, but we do not either of us care for spending week day afternoons in a cathedral. Thompson still hankered after a Turkish bath. I had a plan for getting a bedroom somewhere and going to sleep. We sent the boy off to the ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... proud woman. And because she would lose the friendship of all proud women and clean thinking men if she condoned what you intend to do. It's horrible to see you turned from a simple, stupid, but honourable boy, into a hard, selfish, irreligious man—and all the result of being rich. I should never have thought it could have made such a dreadful difference so quickly. But I have not changed, Raymond. And I tell you this: if you don't marry Sabina; if you don't see that only so can you hold up your head as an honest man ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... made love to him, thrown herself at him, pursued him with her love, refused to let him go ... and all the other things she had done—changing for his sake from her decent ways ... breaking the Sabbath, taking off her neck-band. She had been getting irreligious and immodest, and now she was unhappy, and it served ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... It involved no speculation or argument. Its essence was personal and emotional, and not intellectual. The true analogy of religion, in short, is that of simple affection and trust. Subtilty may, in itself, be good or evil. It may be applied for a religious no less than for an irreligious purpose, as implied in the text. But it is something entirely different from the "simplicity that is ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... American shore, with one hundred and five pounds in her purse of clear gain on the voyage, a conviction arises that she could not guess wrongly. She might have tossed up, having coins in her pocket, heads or tails? but this kind of sortilege was then coming to be thought irreligious in Christendom, as a Jewish and a Heathen mode of questioning the dark future. She simply guessed, therefore; and very soon a thing happened which, though adding nothing to strengthen her guess as a true one, did much to sweeten ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the learning of religious truth, or the moral obligations that it teaches. The child taught and trained for this world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, if riches can thus be acquired; ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... an accident. And it is ten times more so when to the schoolboy you add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of stunted schoolboy. You said just now that things might be done by religious mania. Have you ever heard of irreligious mania? I assure you it exists very violently, especially in men who like showing up magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the temptation of showing up a much more ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... this. Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head? Not a trifle, I'll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then, it is the influence of fashion. And what is the influence of fashion but the influence ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Mohammed, whose vicars the caliphs are, beheld with indignation from his abode in the seventh heaven the irreligious conduct of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... eternal persistence through life of the obligation to service is what is taught us here, as being inherent in the very relation between the Lord and Owner of us all and us His slaves. Moralists and irreligious teachers say grand things about the eternal sweep of the great law of duty. The Christian thought is the higher one, 'Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand upon me,' and wherever I am I am under obligation to serve Thee, and no past record of work absolves me from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... same time. Mr M'Lean said, he had a confutation of Bayle, by Leibnitz. JOHNSON. 'A confutation of Bayle, sir! What part of Bayle do you mean? The greatest part of his writings is not confutable: it is historical and critical.' Mr M'Lean said, 'the irreligious part'; and proceeded to talk of Leibnitz's controversy with Clarke, calling Leibnitz a great man. JOHNSON. 'Why, sir, Leibnitz persisted in affirming that Newton called space sensorium numinis, notwithstanding he was corrected, and desired to observe that ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Religion, press'd how just it was, How honourable, how glorious to entrap A common enemy, who had destroy'd Such numbers of our Nation: and the Priest Was not behind, but ever at my ear, Preaching how meritorious with the gods It would be to ensnare an irreligious 860 Dishonourer of Dagon: what had I To oppose against such powerful arguments? Only my love of thee held long debate; And combated in silence all these reasons With hard contest: at length that grounded maxim So rife and celebrated in the mouths Of wisest men; that to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... often very odd things in the eyes of irreligious people. Do you count yourself among the latter class, ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... silently and quietly, in a manner that would have become the most orderly of Christian congregations accustomed to all the impressive decorum of civilised church privileges. Poor people! They are said to have what a very irreligious young English clergyman once informed me I had—a 'turn for religion.' They seem to me to have a 'turn' for instinctive good manners too; and certainly their mode of withdrawing from my room after our prayers bespoke either a strong feeling of their ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... countries he settled as a bookseller in London, and it was in his house and at his table that The Rights of Man was written. "This table," says an article on Rickman in the Wonderful Museum, "is prized by him very highly at this time; and no doubt will be deemed a rich relic by some of our irreligious connoisseurs." It was shown at the Tom Paine exhibition a few years ago. Rickman escaped prosecution, but he once ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... instinct which has been given to some dogs, and which enables them, for their master's protection, to detect persons harbouring evil intentions towards them; but when you meet with a boy or man careless in his conversation, a swearer, or expressing irreligious or immoral opinions, however courteous and agreeable he may otherwise be, do not associate with him a moment longer than you can help, or he will rob you of what is of far more value than ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... celebrated History of Dogma, and around these he framed his reply. "To act as if faith in eternal life and in the living Christ was the simplest thing in the world, or a dogma to which one has to submit, is irreligious. . . It is Christian to pray that God would give the Spirit to make us strong to overcome the feelings and the doubts of nature. . . Where this faith, obtained in this way, exists, it has always been supported ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Their father could not refrain from joining in the fun, but the mother was quiet and pensive, and got rather huffed when her husband chided her in his good-humoured way with being indifferent to the happy surroundings. Poor woman, she was troubled about Jimmy's prayer, and thought it irreligious to be joyous in the midst of ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... there must also always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, and for no ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... is always a characteristic time. Even irreligious people, who have no principles to send them to sleep, or to cause them to take a weekly walk, or to induce them to write an unnecessary letter to New Zealand—why are unnecessary letters to New Zealand invariably ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Mountain" were several neighborhoods of irreligious settlers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Our itinerant ministers had occasionally passed; over the foothills and given off a message or two among these neglected inhabitants, but in the main they were destitute of Gospel truth and the means of grace. Elizabeth had not been more ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... historical aspect. In what sorts of periods, in what conditions of general thought and belief, are the alleged abnormal phenomena most current? Every one will answer: In ages and lands of ignorance and superstitions; or, again: In periods of religious, or, so to say, of irreligious crisis. As Mr. Lecky insists, belief in all such matters, from fairies to the miracles of the Gospel, declines as rationalism or enlightenment advances. Yet it is not as Mr. Lecky says, before reason that they vanish, not before learned argument and examination, but just before a kind ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Natural law we do not propose at present to inquire. It is certain, at least, that the whole is not covered. And nothing more lends confidence to the method than this. For one thing, room is still left for mystery. Had no place remained for mystery it had proved itself both unscientific and irreligious. A Science without mystery is unknown; a Religion without mystery is absurd. This is no attempt to reduce Religion to a question of mathematics, or demonstrate God in biological formulae. The elimination of mystery from the universe is the elimination of Religion. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... followed, vices entertained, if they be profane, irreligious, lascivious, riotous, epicures, factious, covetous, ambitious, illiterate, so will the commons most part be, idle, unthrifts, prone to lust, drunkards, and therefore poor and needy ([Greek: hae penia stasin empoiei kai kakourgian], for poverty begets sedition ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles when ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Being composed of Jews, Turks, Mohammedans, Mormons, and infidels, as well as of believers in Christianity, they endeavor to establish such forms as will be acceptable to their mongrel and motley membership. Hence their prayers and other forms of worship are such as may be consistently used by the irreligious and by infidels, and only by them. We do not say that no Christian prayers are offered up in Masonic lodges. No doubt some godly men, as chaplains, offer up extempore prayers in the name of Christ; but such prayers are not Masonic. They are not authorized ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... some of the phenomena. His point of view is that of an ardent believer in the verity of witchcraft, and his narrative of the Tedworth affair finds place in a treatise designed to discomfit those irreligious persons who maintained the opposite.[B] It is therefore evident that his account of the case is to be regarded as a piece of special pleading, and as such must be received with ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... religion, but the matter was not one to render her apple-cheeks a whit less round or her smile less placid. The mode in which Peter earned their bread and butter interfered more with her daily comfort and digestion. Dealing in second-hand books, half of which were dramatic works, was a business not only irreligious, but ungenteel. She never passed under the swinging sign over the door without feeling that her cross was indeed heavy, and the old parlor, which had been turned into a shop, she left to the occupancy of her husband ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... dreaming," replied the philosopher, laughing. "But I have a question to propose. Have you ever observed the strange nature of our people? Pacific, they love warlike spectacles; democratic, they adore emperors, kings, and princes; irreligious, they ruin themselves in the pomps of the ritual; the nature of our women is gentle, but they have deliriums of delight when a princess brandishes a lance. Do you know the cause of all ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... even to Parker before handing him over to the Tormentor. What were his positions? He was a coarse-fibred, essentially irreligious fellow, the accredited author of the reply to the question "What is the best body of Divinity?" "That which would help a man to keep a Coach and six horses," but he is a lucid and vigorous writer, knowing very well that he had to steer his ship through a narrow and dangerous channel, avoiding Hobbism ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... be well understood when he was told that the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper that his proof- reader—a young lady—had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... away with contempt for its virtue of comfort; and I laughed, I think, in a disagreeable way, so that the old man, unused to manifestations as harsh and irreligious ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... a mixture of pious demureness and querulous selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband. This sinful man requires of her—of her, a soul devoted to religion— that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds himself within its thrall, and shall sacrifice God to him. She ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... classes throughout France. They, no doubt, indicate clearly enough the state of general opinion at this time. But what then? Their great compeers, the giants of thought, foreshadow what it will be. The profligate novels, licentious drama, and irreligious opinions of the middle class now in France, are the result of the infidelity and wickedness which produced the Revolution. The opinions of the great men who have succeeded the school of the Encyclopedie, who have been taught by the suffering it produced, will form the character of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... for shrewdness had belonged to an irreligious man, it would have been of questionable character; but as he was a zealous member of the church, he was protected from assaults upon his integrity. If there were suspicions, they were kept close, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... necessarily its intervals of repose, these intervals in man are greatly influenced by the immoral character of the conduct which may have preceded them. He appears to be at peace, indeed, but it is an irreligious, malignant peace; a savage sardonic smile, destitute of all charity or dignity; a love of confusion, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... situation, which, though not so lucrative as that of poormaster, in the course of time, by proper management, promised to come to something. In a certain school house in his vicinity, where the faithful were too poor, too irreligious, or too pernicious to hire a preacher, our official held forth every Sunday, and several evenings on the week days, at prayer meetings, protracted meetings, and other roaring exercises. And to do him credit, his nasal accent and piercing shrill voice made him a capital substitute for the hired ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... their judgment, but it is exceedingly difficult to pass judgment upon an individual soldier. He seems to be a different man under different circumstances. In the temptations at the base camp, he would perhaps appear to be utterly irreligious and profane. He can hardly be recognized as the same man as he prays in the hour of battle, or as he lies wounded, chastened, and sobered, in the hospital. Which ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... my situation on two months' notice. As my new engagement did not commence for three months or more, I had the happiness of spending some time in the bosom of my family. As usual, the influences to which I was subject there were all calculated to abate my faith in irreligious principles, and to dispose me to look with less disfavor and prejudice on Christianity. In August I started again for Philadelphia. I left my family with sadness and tears, and I proceeded on my journey with a ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... me as will make the prisons open their doors and the thrones of tyrants tremble.' That's what he said, your Holiness. The movement will come soon, too, I am sure it will, and then your Holiness will see that, instead of being irreligious men, the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... woman! She's hopelessly irreligious; that's the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything: there's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl's faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her with ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... injure the efficiency of the Church at Amoy. Besides the objection—which the heathen will thus, as readily as the irreligious in this country, be able to urge against Christianity—furnished by the increase of Denominations, it will deprive the churches of the benefit of the united wisdom and strength of the whole of them for self-cultivation and for Christian enterprise, and ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage
... his dying breath had designated his son Richard as his successor in the office of the Protectorate. Richard was exactly the opposite of his father,—timid, irresolute, and irreligious. The control of affairs that had taxed to the utmost the genius and resources of the father was altogether too great an undertaking for the incapacity and inexperience of the son. No one was quicker to realize this than Richard himself, and after a rule of a few months, yielding to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... must necessarily play. To say that he was indifferent to religious matters was as ridiculous as to make a like charge against Barneveld. Both were religious men. It would have been almost impossible to find an irreligious character in that country, certainly not among its highest-placed and leading minds. Maurice had strong intellectual powers. He was a regular attendant on divine worship, and was accustomed to hear daily religious ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sufficient unto myself," the Sage answered with a sarcastic smile. "But now I think of it, has your attention never been drawn to the character of our people? Peaceful, yet fond of warlike shows and bloody fights; democratic, yet adoring emperors, kings, and princes; irreligious, yet impoverishing itself by costly religious pageants. Our women have gentle natures yet go wild with joy when a princess flourishes a lance. Do you know to what it is ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... pulpit, and schoolmasters will find their efforts useless, unless the upper orders set a good example. I entreat my young friends to recollect that they belong to the educated classes, whose behaviour is sure to be imitated by those below them. If their conduct is unchristian, irreligious, or immoral, they will not only have their own sins to answer for at the day of judgment, but the sins of those whom they by their example have led astray. The dreadful excesses committed by the lower orders during the French Revolution ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Signior Caraccioli, who was as ambitious as he was irreligious, had, by this Time, made a perfect Deist of Misson, and thereby convinc'd him, that all Religion was no other than human Policy, and shew'd him that the Law of Moses was no more than what were necessary, as well for the Preservation as the Governing of the People; for ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... deduced all the families of the earth from one primitive pair, and made them all morally responsible for the sin committed by that pair. It rejected the doctrine that man can modify his own organism as absolutely irreligious, the physician being little better than an atheist, but it affirmed that cures may be effected by the intercession of saints, at the shrines of holy men, and by relics. It altogether repudiated the improvement of man's physical state; to increase his power or comfort was to attempt to attain ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... only been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been "more fool than knave." A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet is a monster. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... two lines of the faithful, often stopping to place his hand on some child's head, to say some kind words to its mother, and to offer his ring to be kissed. One day, when he was surrounded by a crowd of prostrate and respectful people, he saw a man whose worn face bore traces of irreligious passion, who was moving away as if to escape the apostolic benediction. The Holy Father approached him, and said gently, "Do not run away; an old man's blessing has never done any one any harm." This remark spread through ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the stairs with the rocking chair, she thought, "Nothing could be more suiterble. We are both about the same age; I am most respecterbly connected—in fact, I regard myself as somewhat his superior in this respect; he is painfully undeveloped and irreligious and thus is in sore need of female influence; he is lonely and down-hearted, and in woman's voice there is a spell to banish care; worst of all, things are going to waste. I must delib'rately face the great duty with which Providence has brought me face ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... the talk of the town, and as all were agreed that it could not be explained on natural grounds, it was deemed to be the effect of some sorcery exercised by me. These three men were thoroughly religious and virtuous citizens; I was nothing if not irreligious, and Venice did not contain a greater libertine. Virtue, it was said, may have compassion on vice, but cannot become ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the wine and jests were circulating fast, though he was only a poet in the vulgar tongue. There were even learned personages who maintained that Aristotle, wisest of men (unless, indeed, Plato were wiser?) was a thoroughly irreligious philosopher; and a liberal scholar must entertain all speculations. But the negatives might, after all, prove false; nay, seemed manifestly false, as the circling hours swept past him, and turned round with graver faces. For had ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... sacred music was in order. Even De Forrest and Addie joined in this with considerable zest. It was the proper, and about the only thing that could be done on a Sabbath evening. The most irreligious feel better for the occasional indulgence of a little religious sentimentality. When the aesthetic element is supreme, and thorny self-denial absent, devotion is quite attractive to average humanity. Moreover the dwarfed spiritual nature of the most materialistic often craves its natural ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... having to work for his daily bread, or pay his debts for him without money; and a meaning which, in the second place, people themselves do not believe; for religious professors in general now are just as keen about money as irreligious ones, and even more so; so that covetousness and cunning, ambition and greediness to rise in life, seem now-a-days to go hand in hand with a high religious profession; and those who fancy themselves the children of light have become just as wise in their generation ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... converted into a sofa, by spreading a piece of woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this yard there was a well. Aunt Dide's bedroom was on the left side of the passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Newmills, without any form of law, civil or military (he not being guilty of anything which they themselves accounted a crime); for his lewd and impious life, led in adultery and uncleanness from his youth, with a contempt for marriage, which is an ordinance of God; for all his atheistical and irreligious conversation, and lastly, for his unjust usurping and retaining of the estate of that worthy gentleman, William Mure of Caldwell, and his other injurious deeds in ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... long ago testified, that "if they are sceptical, it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or church formularies for a life of devotion." Now to call such a state of mind irreligious or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind (1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine, really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on scientific experiment ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... dealing with the manners and customs of those people who patronize no sort of religious establishment on the Sunday. I have seen pretty well all the typical phases of religious London and London irreligious; but these would rather be characterized as non-religious than as irreligious folks. They do not belong to any of the varied forms of faith; in fact faith is from their life a thing apart. It is in this negative way that ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... days." {105a} Like hundreds of other men, Borrow had, in youth, been led to somewhat hasty and ill-considered conclusions; but this in itself does not seem to be sufficiently strong reason why he should not change his views. Many young men pass through an aggressively irreligious phase without suffering much harm. Harriet Martineau was rather too precipitate in assuming that what a man believes, or disbelieves, at twenty, he holds to at thirty; such a view negatives the reformer. Perhaps the chief cause ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... buried, she reminded him that it was a radical, ultra-modern idea; that the Valentine lot and monument were very beautiful; that there never had been any cremations in the family connection; and that she hoped he would not break a long-established custom and leave behind him a positively irreligious request. Various stories of Mr. Valentine's docility had crept into circulation, and it is said that on this occasion he turned his head meekly to the wall and sighed: "Very well, Emma! Do just as you ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cause. 'A very Proteus is the philosopher,' says Pomponazzo: 'seeking to penetrate the secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares; he forgets to thirst, to hunger, to sleep, to eat; he is derided of all men; he is held for a fool and irreligious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a gazing-stock to the common folk. These are the gains of the philosopher; these are his guerdon. Pomponazzo's words were prophetic. Of the five philosophers whom I mentioned, Vanini was ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... the life and career of Joseph Smith, Jr., or 'Joe Smith,' as he was universally named, and the Smith family, they were popularly regarded as an illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless, irreligious race of people—the first named, the chief subject of this biography, being unanimously voted the laziest and most worthless of the generation. From the age of twelve to twenty years he is distinctly ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... assassination," as Mr C. K. Sharp observes, "were strongly recommended in Naphthali, Jus Populi Vindicatum, and afterwards in The Hind let Loose, which books were in almost as much esteem with the Presbyterians as their Bibles." Sir George Mackenzie states, "These irreligious and heterodox books, called Naphthali and Jus Populi, had made the killing of all dissenters from Presbytery seem not only lawful, but a duty among many of that profession: and in a postscript to Jus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... unwilling to advance gratis unlimited funds to Socialist town councils to be wasted as fancy may direct (see page 258). Therefore they wish to abolish "that most costly of all modern parasites, the banker."[757] Some very irreligious, if not atheistic, Anarchist-Socialists, such as Mr. Morrison Davidson, pretend to object to interest on religious grounds because, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life said, 'Lend hoping for nothing again.'"[758] ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... actually irreligious. She read her Bible occasionally, and went through a form of prayer by her bedside every night; but religion had never touched her heart. It was but an empty name to her, and she was too secure in her self-confidence and pride to ever ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... very far from saying that the English of that generation were irreligious. They held firmly those doctrines which are common to the Catholic and to the Protestant theology. But they had no fixed opinion as to the matters in dispute between the churches. They were in a situation resembling that of those Borderers whom Sir ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... American policeman was that conglomerate average one unconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and by comparison with foreign,—a heavy-footed, discourteous, half-fanatical, half-irreligious clubber whose wits are as slow as his judgment is honest. Instead of which I found the Z. P. composed almost without exception of good-hearted, well set up young Americans almost all of military training. I had anticipated, from other experiences, a constant bickering and a general striving ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... little Bech, get help from Religion!"—a remark that in those days would be regarded as wantonly irreligious! ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... have been; which in effect is the same in Nature, though different in the time, yet this was allow'd among the Jews by the Law of God; and is the constant practice of our own and other Christian Nations in the World: the which our Author by his Dogmatical Assertions doth condem as Irreligious; which is Diametrically contrary to the Rules and Precepts which God hath given the diversity of men to observe in their respective Stations, Callings, and Conditions of Life, as ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion; or with any other feeling than regret, and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... smiled as he looked towards me. "Do you know, Nikhil," he said, "I believe Sandip is not irreligious—his religion is of the obverse side of truth, like the dark moon, which is still a moon, for all that its light has gone over ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... brooded upon that he has almost become that which he contemplated, owes much to the woman who may never be his; and if he or the world understood aright, he has no cause of complaint. It is the essentially irreligious spirit of Ireland which has come to regard love as an unnecessary emotion and the mingling of the sexes as dangerous. For it is a curious thing that while we commonly regard ourselves as the most religious people in Europe, the reverse is probably true. The country which has never produced ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... and should at such visitation, or at furthest at the next visitation, proceed by sentence either of suspension or deprivation against all persons who should appear on such reports to be of scandalous life or conversation, or to have published irreligious, immoral, or seditious books, or to have been remiss in the performance of such stated duties as above. Lastly, to compel the bishops to return these reports, and their proceedings thereon at their visitations, to their metropolitans, by whom they should be annually laid before ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... isolating her as it changed. Her own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this child of earth, and the renascence, brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted, and scolded, and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... to a man of irreligious principles, makes it impossible to discharge a great part of the proper duty of a wife. To name but one instance, obedience will be rendered impracticable, by frequent injunctions inconsistent with, and contrary to, the higher obligations of morality. This is not a supposition, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... round him, nor shall we be astonished if that color is dazzling and brilliant. Five successive influences marked his earlier life. First, his education under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system; secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the fashionable abbes of the day, which showed him another side of the official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the Abbe de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ambitious subjects, and led him to write the Henriade, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... which draws after it infinite mischiefs and disorders; for as the presence of religion implies every excellence, so the contrary is involved in its absence. To the Church, therefore, and to the priests, we Italians owe this first debt, that through them we have become wicked and irreligious. And a still greater debt we owe them for what is the immediate cause of our ruin, namely, that by the Church our country is kept divided. For no country was ever united or prosperous which did not ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... at all," replied my old friend sourly, "leastwise nothin' poignant. It's that yoothful party in the black surtoot who comes pesterin' me a moment ago about the West bein', as he says, a roode an' irreligious outfit." ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... they might all with great propriety lay claim to a participation in the property he might leave behind him, as near relations to the family of the Knowells. These gentlemen violate all the moral duties of life with impunity: they are shameless, irreligious, and so insignificant, that they seem to consider themselves born for no useful purpose whatever. Indeed they are such perfect blanks in the creation, that were they transported to some other place, the community would never miss them, except ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his odd mixture of many religious and irreligious dialects, what there is of him is as good as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Constituent Assembly to arrest the progress of Vandalism—Many master-pieces of painting, sculpture, and architecture, destroyed in various parts of France —Gregoire, ex-bishop of Blois, publishes three reports, to expose the madness of irreligious barbarism, which claim particular distinction.—They saved from destruction many articles of value in the provinces—Antique monuments found in 1711, in digging among the foundation of the ancient church of Paris—Indefatigable exertions of Lenoir, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... undoubtedly have a beneficial influence, elevate the character of the slave, promote kindly feelings between him and his master, and ultimately prove profitable to both. But where Christianity, used by irreligious persons, whose very acts destroy the vitality of the means, is made the medium of enforcing superstition, and of debasing the mind of the person it degrades into submission, its application becomes nothing less than criminal. It is criminal because it brings true religion ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... street or in a room, attract no attention from the bystanders. Of more than a hundred of the guards in the gallery of the Vizier's mansion at Tepellene, not more than five or six were seen at prayers. The Albanians are not reckoned strict Mahommedans; but no Turk, however irreligious himself, ever disturbs ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... conduct to be untroubled by religious anxiety, is the very one who bows his head as a bulrush, and perhaps goes mourning all his days, fearing that he is not accepted, and that he shall be a cast-a-way; while the selfish and thoroughly irreligious man, who ought to be stung through and through by his own conscience, and feel the full energy of the law which he is continually breaking,—this man, who of all men ought to be anxious and distressed for sin, goes through a whole lifetime, perchance, without any convictions ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Mrs. M. lay in the bed apparently in a troubled sleep, she was a woman of medium size, about 50 years of age, the mother of a large family; around her bed stood her husband, four sons and a daughter, and relatives, about twelve persons in all. The husband and sons were irreligious, but awed in the ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... end of that unfortunate, all my bitterness against her went out of me, and in my heart I set myself to find excuses for her. Witty and cultured in much; in much else she had been as stupid as the dumb beast. She was irreligious as were many because what she saw of religion did not inspire respect in her, and whilst one of her lovers had been a prince of the Church another had been the son of the Pope. She was by nature sensuous, and her sensuousness stifled ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... there were special difficulties in the way of securing better ones in London. For the population and magistrates of London were prevailingly Puritan, and the great body of the Puritans, then as always, were strongly opposed to the theater as a frivolous and irreligious thing—an attitude for which the lives of the players and the character of many plays afforded, then as almost always, only too much reason. The city was very jealous of its prerogatives; so that in spite of Queen Elizabeth's strong patronage of the drama, throughout ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... fifties a non-catholic of very irreligious character, made targets of the eyes of a statue of Saint Benedict, belonging to San Carlos Mission, taking advantage of the neglected condition of the place at the time. A few days after this proceeding the man was struck blind. This incident is no legend, but within ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... directly home, and told the story of my wrongs to Master Hugh; and I am happy to say of him, irreligious as he was, his conduct was heavenly, compared with that of his brother Thomas under similar circumstances. He listened attentively to my narration of the circumstances leading to the savage outrage, and gave many proofs of his strong indignation at it. The heart of my once overkind ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... turnings round, and, above all, the penances of the followers of Buddh with those of Roman devotees. But he is not going to dwell here on this point; it is dwelt upon at tolerable length in the text, and has likewise been handled with extraordinary power by the pen of the gifted but irreligious Volney; moreover, the elite of the Roman priesthood are perfectly well aware that their system is nothing but Buddhism under a slight disguise, and the European world in general has entertained for some time past ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... child, that Monsieur Felix is not irreligious, and with a little gentleness and patience nothing would be easier than to bring ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... and recognizes the error into which the government has fallen during the last few years, in trying to deprive the curas of the civil administration, by forcing them to reduce themselves to spiritual matters, and to tolerate irreligious acts. The province of Pangasinan, for example, finds itself in this case under the orders of the worthy alcalde-mayor, Don Francisco de Lila, a volunteer of the militia of Manila and a very decided liberal: I have traveled ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... thinking, feeling, acting. A partial reason for this, of course, is that we have no common faith in the existence of an active spiritual relation between our ancestors and ourselves. If we happen to be irreligious, we do not believe in ghosts. If we are profoundly religious, we think of the dead as removed from us by judgment,—as absolutely separated from us during the period of our lives. It is true that among the peasantry of Roman Catholic countries there still exists ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... have read or heard the shallow objections of irreligious scribblers and talkers, hinting that there was no reality in conversions, and that Mission effort was but waste, oh, how my heart has yearned to plant them just one week on Tanna, with the "natural" man ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... want to seem to be irreligious," Sandy replied, "but I beg leave to state that if I owed the devil a debt of a thousand of the greatest liars on earth and he wouldn't take you and call the debt square, I'd cheat him out of it! Your fabrications ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... considering such points, and making for the demise of others even more preparation than for our own. Otherwise there is a selfishness about it by no means Christian-minded. You look at things always from such an intense and even irreligious point of view. But such things are out of my line altogether. Your Aunt Mary understands ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... with whom the name of either might be associated by scandal; as to contracts to marry, as to idle words, as to personal habits, and, in fact, as to anything whatever which happened to strike the ecclesiastical lawyer as immoral or irreligious." ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... that the doctrines of geology in general, as held by himself, had been rejected by many on similar grounds; and that he had himself been repeatedly attacked for his anti-Christian teachings. He seems not to have perceived that, just as his antagonists were wrong in condemning as irreligious, theories which he saw were not irreligious; so might he be wrong in condemning, on like grounds, the Theory of Evolution. In brief, he fell short of that highest faith which knows that all truths must harmonize; and which is, therefore, content ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... formed, and parish churches endowed with the tithes that arose within the circuit assigned. But some lands, either because they were in the hands of irreligious and careless owners, or were situate in forests and desart places, or for other now unsearchable reasons, were never united to any parish, and therefore continue to this day extraparochial; and their tithes are now by immemorial ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... was himself so fierce an unbeliever, and so bitter an enemy to the Christian religion, that he was very fond of asserting that other men believed as little as himself. It was almost always Allen who gave an irreligious turn to the conversation at Holland House when these ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... forementioned letter, the Pope highly praises the King's generous design,[49] and recommends to him the civilizing the natives, the protection of the Church, and the payment of Peter-pence. The ill success of all past endeavours to procure from a people so miserable and irreligious this revenue to the holy see was a main inducement with the Pope to be easy and liberal in his grant; for the King professed a design of securing its regular payment. However, this expedition was not undertaken until some years after, when there happened an incident to set it forward, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... errors to which human nature is liable, and provides for the public and private worship of God, the creator and governor of the universe, and for the performance of such acts of charity as are the ornament and comfort of Christian societies:—Whereas irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the Sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; this way of acting being contrary ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... small minority of the people. They have never included in their ranks either the controlling intellect or moral feeling at the North. Their fundamental principle is anti-scriptural and therefore irreligious. They assume that slaveholding is sinful. This doctrine is the life of the sect. It has no power over those who reject that principle, and therefore it has not gained ascendency over those whose faith is governed ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various |
