"Polemical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... therefore, loudly pronounced him a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical writer has ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all memory of his transgressions, and have shared with Addison the glory of showing that the most brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But, in any case, prudence should have restrained him from encountering Collier. The nonjuror was a man thoroughly fitted by nature, education, and habit, for polemical dispute. Congreve's mind, though a mind of no common fertility and vigour, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art of polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest effulgence, and setting them neatly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the savage vein, a mere railing against the universe, altogether too furious to be anything like poetry; I know that well enough. I have long since made up my mind to stick to prose; it is the true medium for a polemical egotist. I want to find some new form of satire; I feel capabilities that way which shall by no means rust unused. It has pleased Heaven to give me a splenetic disposition, and some day or other ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... sentiment well. His speaking is modelled after a good style; but it is inferior to his writing. In the pulpit he expresses himself easily, often fervently, never rantingly. The pulpit of the Parish Church will stand for ever before he upsets it, and he will never approach that altitude of polemical phrenitis which will induce him to smash any part of it. His pulpit language is invariably well chosen; some of his subjects may be rather commonplace or inappropriate, but the words thrown into their exposition are up to the mark. He seldom falters; he has never above one, "and now, finally, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... production at least," replied his nephew; and began to recite simply, but with feeling, the lines now so well known, but which had then obtained no celebrity, the fame of the author resting upon the basis rather of his polemical and political publications, than on the poetry doomed in after days to support the eternal ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... grammar school, he was sent to the university of St. Andrews, to study under Mr. John Mair, (a man of considerable learning at that time), and had the degree of master of arts conferred upon him, while very young. He excelled in philosophy and polemical divinity, and was admitted into church orders before the usual time appointed by the canons. Then laying aside all unnecessary branches of learning, he betook himself to the reading of the antients, particularly Angustine's and Jerome's ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... mind was anything but polemical; he cared not to spend time even over those authors whose attacks on the outposts of science, or whose elaborate reconcilements of old and new, might have afforded him some support. On the other hand, he altogether lacked that ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... England or in Scotland, either Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom and speculative power than Rutherford does in his Christ Dying, unless it is his still greater contemporary, Thomas Goodwin. And it is with corresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford's polemical works, and even the polemical parts of his heavenly Letters. There is a remarkable passage in one of his controversial books that reminds us of some of Shakespeare's own tributes to England: 'I judge that in England ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... political writers. In England, in particular, the names and works of Bernhardi and of Treitschke have become more familiar than they appear to have been in Germany prior to the war. This method of selecting for polemical purposes certain tendencies of sentiment and theory, and ignoring all others, is one which could be applied, with damaging results, to any country in the world. Mr. Angell has shown in his "Prussianism in England" how ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... think more probable, he was a bitter satirist made bitter by the earnestness of his conviction, and ridiculing the gods only as a reductio ad absurdum of their pretensions, the fact is indubitable, that he ridiculed them in a polemical spirit, and not to excite the vulgar laughter of the vulgar crowd. But we, who do not believe in those gods, need no such warfare. To us they are beautiful images associated only with high thoughts, until the burlesque writer, in his beggary ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... and a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... afterward in a Latin translation,[1] it shows that the leading features of his doctrine on this subject were already fixed. With it should be read the chapter in the Large Catechism (1519), and the treatise Von der Wiedertaufe (1538).[2] The treatment is not polemical, but objective and practical. The Anabaptist controversy was still in the future. No objections against Infant Baptism or problems that it suggested were pressing for attention. Nothing more is attempted than to explain in a very plain and practical way ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel and a fiercely polemical husk—they both are full of the contrast between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place, Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall ...
— Progress and History • Various
... work, which the author never acknowledged, and have affected to triumph in any advantages, which, they imagined, they had obtained over it: A practice very contrary to all rules of candour and fair-dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices which a bigotted zeal thinks itself authorized to employ. Henceforth, the Author desires, that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... translation of AEsop's fables by Marie de France was called Ysopet, and Cato's moral maxims had the title Catonet, or Parvus Cato. Modern Fr. pamphlet, borrowed back from English, has always the sense of polemical writing. In Eng. libel, lit. "little book," we see a similar restriction of meaning. A three-quarter portrait of fixed ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, that snarling dog ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... raised them above the arts and passions of religious warfare. Yet, instead of assuming such honorable pride, the orthodox theologians were tempted, by the assurance of impunity, to compose fictions, which must be stigmatized with the epithets of fraud and forgery. They ascribed their own polemical works to the most venerable names of Christian antiquity; the characters of Athanasius and Augustin were awkwardly personated by Vigilius and his disciples; [113] and the famous creed, which so ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Neither the polemical Erasmus nor the witty humorist had been lost in the erudite divine and the disillusioned reformer. The paper-warrior we would further gladly have dispensed with, but not the humorist, for many treasures of literature. But the two are linked ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... interpretation, the authority of tradition has been, first of all, appealed to. It is true that modern Jewish interpreters differ from it; but this has been the result of polemical considerations alone. It can be satisfactorily proved that the Messianic interpretation was the prevailing one among the older Jews. 1 Mac. xiv. 41—"Also that the Jews and priests resolved that Simon should be commander and high priest for ever, until a credible ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... chorus of a notable hunting song, which had been pressed into the service of some polemical poet, the followers of the Abbot of Unreason were turning every moment more tumultuous, and getting beyond the management even of that reverend prelate himself, when a knight in full armour, followed by two or three men-at-arms, entered the church, and in a stern voice commanded ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... thoughtful New Essays concerning the Human Understanding Leibnitz develops his theory of knowledge in the form of a polemical commentary to Locke's chief work.[1] According to Descartes some ideas (the pure concepts) are innate, according to Locke none, according to Leibnitz all. Or: according to Descartes some ideas (sensuous perceptions) come from without, according to Locke all do so, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of the highest pretensions. It is no wonder, then, that common readers should be mistaken in their book-worship. To such persons, for all their blind reverence, Dante must in reality be a wild beast—a fine animal, it is true, but still a wild beast—and our own Milton a polemical pedant arguing by the light of poetry. To such readers, the spectacle of Ugolino devouring the head of Ruggieri, and wiping his jaws with the hair that he might tell his story, cannot fail to give a feeling of horror and disgust, which even the glorious wings of Dante's angels—the most ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... illustration from the Papyri, and other approximately contemporary sources. It must be noted, however, that the writer himself specifies that his investigations "have been, in part, arranged on a plan which is polemical {110a}." This avowal must, to some extent, affect our full acceptance of all the results arrived at in this striking ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... had given rise. Catholicism, it was thought, if it were to hold the field as a world-wide religion, must be remodelled so as to bring it better into line with the conclusions of modern philosophy. Less attention should be paid to dogma and to polemical discussions, and more to the ethical and natural principles contained ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... tell you once you must not come if I did tell you so. I knew better at the time, and did steadily believe, as far as I was concerned, that no polemical mud, however much was thrown, could by any possibility stick to me; for I was purely an observer; had not the smallest personal or partial interest; and merely spoke to the question as a historian; and I knew whoever could see me must see that. But, at the moment, the little pamphlet made much ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... time. Had he chosen—and we heard at that time that he was considering whether he should choose—to enter political life, it would certainly have made him a great power, possibly a leader, in that sphere. Next, what constantly appears in his writings, even those of the most polemical kind—a singular candour in recognising truths which might seen to militate against his own position, and a power of understanding and respecting his adversaries' opinions, if only they were strongly and conscientiously held. I remember his saying on ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... I had confidence in our cause, both in itself, and in its polemical force, but also, on the other hand, I despised every rival system of doctrine and its arguments too. As to the high Church and the low Church, I thought that the one had not much more of a logical basis than the other; while I had a thorough contempt for the controversial ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... romantic tales of Ctesias were united by Rollin and his emulators with other statements of perhaps still more doubtful value. The book of Daniel was freely drawn upon, and yet it is certain that it was not written until the year which saw the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. The book of Daniel is polemical, not historical; the Babylon in which its scene is laid is a Babylon of the imagination; the writer chose it as the best framework for his lessons to the Israelites, and for the menaces he wished to pour out upon their enemies.[57] Better ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... philosophic, were the two champions of the right side; different in character, their oratorical powers were much on a par. Maury represented the clergy, of which body he was a member; Cazales, the noblesse, to whom he belonged. The one, Maury, early trained to struggles of polemical theology, had sharpened and polished in the pulpit the eloquence he was to bring into the tribune. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the people, he only belonged to the ancien regime by his garb, and defended religion and the monarchy as two texts, imposed upon him as themes for discourses. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... hold him captive in the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and prose is polemical. Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic of war between good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the thought of the time was the King James ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... mountains on foot; and after having made arrangements to that effect, I commenced sauntering along the road. Near Mountpleasant, I stopped to dine at the house of a Dutchman by descent. After dinner, the party adjourned, as is customary, to the bar-room, when divers political and polemical topics were canvassed with the usual national warmth. An account of his late Majesty's death was inserted in a Philadelphia paper, and happened to be noticed by one of the politicians present, when the landlord asked me how we elected our king in England. I replied that he was not elected, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... Presbyterianism. There is, however, an important difference. Presbyterianism has an ecclesiastical organisation and a written creed, and its doctrines have long since become clearly defined by means of public discussion, polemical literature, and general assemblies. The Molokanye, on the contrary, have had no means of developing their fundamental principles and forming their vague religious beliefs into a clearly defined logical ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... thought had long ago been thought and expressed by others; their opinions had long ere now been formulated elsewhere. Their aesthetic principles were borrowed; their critical method was borrowed; the polemical tactics they employed were borrowed in every particular, great and small. Their very frame of mind was borrowed. Borrowing, borrowing, here, there, and everywhere! The single original thing about them was that they invariably made a wrong and ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... anthropology, and its dictum is: "Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty." The thesis of the second is that Masonry is founded upon Egyptian eschatology, which may be true; but unfortunately the book is too polemical. Both books partake of the poetry, if not the confusion, of the subject; but not for a world of dust would one clip their wings of fancy and suggestion. Indeed, their union of scholarship and poetry is unique. When the pains of erudition fail to track a fact to its lair, they ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... writings from whose main principles we do not dissent, there is hardly one which is not better fitted to sustain his character as a thinker than this last, in which the fatal charms of the goddess Necessity seem to have betrayed her champion into an unusual excess of polemical zeal, coupled, it must be added, with an unusual deficiency ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... study of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which this semi-theological tractate necessitated, had much to do with the clarification of the author's style. At all events, from this time forth, Nash drops, except in polemical passages where his design is provocative, that irritating harshness in volubility which had hitherto marked his manner of writing. Here, for example, is a passage from "Christ's Tears" which is not ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... it, or even sanctioned its being dedicated to him, if he were now living, I cannot, of course, say. I never heard him speak of the late Mr. Darwin in any but terms of warm respect, and am by no means sure that he would have been well pleased at an attempt to connect him with a book so polemical as the present. On the other hand, a promise made and received as mine was, cannot be set aside lightly. The understanding was that my next book was to be dedicated to Mr. Tylor; I have written the best I could, and indeed ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... were left in quiet possession of the cutter. The first few hours of this peaceable intercourse had been spent by the worthy messmates, in the little cabin of the vessel, over a can of grog; the savory relish of which was much increased by a characteristic disquisition on polemical subjects, which our readers have great reason to regret it is not our present humor to record. When, however, the winds invited the near approach to the hostile shores already mentioned, the prudent ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight. He wrote a polemical tract on Roman Forgeries, which had some success; a treatise on Christian Ethicks, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was utterly neglected; an exquisite work, Centuries of Meditations, never published; and certain poems, which also he left in manuscript. And there ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he circulated in those classes of English society whose favor he chiefly courted. One of his friends, the truly kind and accomplished Sir William Trumbull, served him in that way, and perhaps in another eventually even more important. The library of Pope's father was composed exclusively of polemical divinity, a proof, by the way, that he was not a blind convert to the Roman Catholic faith; or, if he was so originally, had reviewed the grounds of it, and adhered to it after strenuous study. In this dearth of books at his own home, and until he was able ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... fathers believed it before him,—and a practical observer of its moral precepts. He read and studied the New Testament, because it contained a compendium of all his every-day duties as a rational and accountable being, and as a member of society, not because it was a magazine of polemical divinity and abstruse doctrines. The evening of such a man's life is calm and tranquil; his death is indeed the death ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... opened a correspondence with Baxter, and wrote a treatise for his benefit, in which, through a hundred pages of polemical Latin, he proved that the Church of Rome was founded on a rock. This he sent to Baxter, and challenged him to overthrow his reasons. Baxter sent an answer for which Rale expresses great scorn as to both manner ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... credit the scriptures; nor does it appear the least inconsistent—for there it says, "God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise."—Therefore, the wonder that children should be able to understand that, which is the foundation of all polemical divinity, vanishes, when we try it by the touchstone of scripture, which is the criterion by which we ought to judge.—When they are thus instructed in the rudiments of virtue, they are seldom known to apostatize; so that for a native to become dissolute and abandoned, is ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... unsettled questions takes up every gauntlet thrown down to him, polemical writing will absorb much of his energy. Having a power of work which unfortunately does not suffice for executing with anything like due rapidity the task I have undertaken, I have made it a policy to avoid controversy as much as possible, even at the cost of being ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... this time, become so polemical, that every time he opened his mouth out flew a paradox, which he maintained with all the enthusiasm of altercation; but all his paradoxes favoured strong of a partiality for his own country. He undertook to prove that poverty was a blessing to a nation; that oatmeal was preferable to wheat-flour; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... pulpit-thumping orator. The first half of his letter is a prelude in the form of a sermon upon Faith, all very trite and obvious; and the notion of this excommunicated friar holding forth to the Pope's Holiness in polemical platitudes delivered with all the authority of inspired discoveries of his own is one more proof that at the root of fanaticism in all ages and upon all questions, lies an utter lack of a sense of fitness ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... whole kingdom; and to the whole kingdom it spoke.... No one who will take the trouble to glance at Swift's contributions to 'The Examiner' will be surprised at their effect. They are masterpieces of polemical skill. Every sentence—every word—comes home. Their logic, adapted to the meanest capacity, smites like a hammer. Their statements, often a tissue of mere sophistry and assumption, appear so plausible, that it ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... attainment, of which too I did not neglect to inform him; for it was one of which I was not a little proud. Much of my time, during my residence at Oxford, had been devoted to the study of polemical divinity, or the art of abuse, extracted from the scriptures, the fathers, and the different doctors of different faiths. The points that had most attracted my attention were the disputes concerning ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... sort, an occasional call upon or from some distant neighbor of a rank approaching her own; for the rest, embroidery in the newest patterns and most elegant style, some few books, chiefly religious and polemical works—and what can be drearier than Roman Catholic polemics, unless, indeed, Protestant ones eclipse them?—a large house, vast estates, servants who never raised their voices beyond a certain tone; the envy of all the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... up St. Michael's rectory and explained first, and smoked companionably with the Major in the library afterward. Further along, there was a one-sided discussion polemical, it being meat and drink to Major Caspar to ensnare a young theologian to his discomfiture in the unaxiomatic field of religion. Ardea was in and out of the library frequently while the discussion was ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Julie had been saying the lightest but the wisest things; she had been touching incidents and personalities known only to the initiated with a restrained gayety which often broke down into a charming shyness, which was ready to be scared away in a moment by a tone—too serious or too polemical—which jarred with the general key of the conversation, which never imposed itself, and was like the ripple on a summer sea. But the summer sea has its depths, and this modest gayety was the mark of an intimate and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of poets had nothing in common beyond their personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations, and by the number of volumes given to the world." Theory-ridden Zola's polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of some of the scathing criticism of scholars which appears in the first of the "Thoughts out of Season"—the polemical pamphlet (written in 1873) against David Strauss and his school. He reproaches his former colleagues with being sterile and shows them that their sterility is the result of their not believing in anything. "He who had to create, had ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and ascribed it with great testimony of respect to "his much-honoured friend, John Dryden, Esquire."[3] Mr. Blount, living in close habits with Dryden, must have known perfectly well how to understand his polemical poem; and, had he supposed it was written under a deep belief of the truth of the English creed, can it be thought he would have inscribed to the author a tract against all revelation?[4] The inference is, therefore, sufficiently plain, that the dedicator knew that ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... obtain a due recognition of the Lord's Day, and all who consider themselves to be good Catholics now shut their shops, and others, who find that there is now very little trade going on upon Sunday, shut their shops also because it is of no use having them open. It is only the polemical infidels who continue to keep their factories in full work and their places of merchandise open ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... more fully conduced to that lofty purpose than his famous "Polemical Essay on the Twin Doctrines of Christian Imperfection and a Death Purgatory"; than which few clearer, more convincing, or more able vindications of Scriptural holiness have ever been written. Can aught be plainer than the definition of ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... the same chances of success as attended the unfortunate cat which ventured without claws among panthers. Measure such men by their moral worth and by the good they do, and do not require of the hard-shell Methodist preacher and tough polemical grappler with Satan in his most bristly and thick-skinned Western incarnations that he display too much delicacy. Those who will read his book may gather from it, beyond the interesting personal and political narrative of which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... myself in a polemical relation to Aristotle, for I by no means contest the Unity of Action properly understood: I only claim a greater latitude with respect to place and time for many species of the drama, nay, hold it essential ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... various points on which we have already dwelt. Spite of all the ghastly sufferings the War is bringing in its train, nay, in a sense, because of them, it has linked together the Empire in the closest bonds, allayed political and polemical strife, evoked a wealth of heroism, self-sacrifice, prayer, and benevolence, and braced up the moral fibre of ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's—whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and expansion, by its own motion—that they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... been much reproached with his letter to Crellius. Grotius had written against Socinus, and Crellius, to vindicate his master, answered Grotius with a politeness and good-breeding seldom found in a polemical divine. Grotius thought it his duty to reply to him, and the measures he kept with this adversary were looked on by his enemies as a betraying of the truth. Here follows the letter, which has been so much talked of. "I was so far from being offended, most learned ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... Heloise, declares tout honnete homme doit avouer les livres qu'il public; which in plain language means that every honorable man ought to sign his articles, and that no one is honorable who does not do so. How much truer this is of polemical writing, which is the general character of reviews! Riemer was quite right in the opinion he gives in his Reminiscences of Goethe:[1] An overt enemy, he says, an enemy who meets you face to face, is an honorable man, who will treat you fairly, and with ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... absolute, as he does in "Spring in New Hampshire" and "The Harlem Dancer." Mr. McKay gives evidence that he has passed beyond the danger which threatens many of the new Negro poets—the danger of allowing the purely polemical phases of the race problem to choke their sense ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... day Wolff wrote a polemical dissertation in the Figaro and carried away his colleagues. The volume was a brilliant success, thanks to Boule de Suif. Despite the novelty, the honesty of effort, on the part of all, no mention was made ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he had reason to suppose he would be no longer liable to such mutations of fortune. The piety of Mr. Solsgrace was sincere; and if he had many of the uncharitable prejudices against other sects, which polemical controversy had generated, and the Civil War brought to a head, he had also that deep sense of duty, by which enthusiasm is so often dignified, and held his very life little, if called upon to lay it ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... absolutely no rational knowledge either of the arguments by which their faith is defended, or of those by which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate with the utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce, hate, pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they have been taught, assume, as a matter beyond the faintest possibility of doubt, that the opinions they ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... no friend of polemical writing, and I believe the less we see of it in your friendly periodical, the better it is; but still I must protest against such copying of partially-written judgments, when good information can be got. I say not ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... importance, and a necessity of the times, that he should write a book against the Christians, whose opinions were, he knew, making such progress as raised the suspicion that they would prevail over all others, and in a short time become universal. This polemical treatise ran to fifteen books, and "exhibited considerable acquaintance with both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures."[14487] It is now lost, but its general character is well known from the works of Eusebius, Jerome, and others. The style was caustic and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... science and astrology, such as the reform of the calendar, attracted his attention. His other works consisted of theological essays, ascetic or exegetic, questions of ecclesiastical discipline and reform, and of various polemical writings called forth for the most part ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... its manifold immeasurable imaginations, Cain is only a polemical controversy, the doctrines of which might have been better discussed in the pulpit of a college chapel. As a poem it is greatly unequal; many passages consist of mere metaphysical disquisition, but there are ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... brilliant, that he discloses points of view which give it fresh interest to those who most cordially disagree with him. The brilliancy of his journalistic powers is not confined, however, to his leaders. The Standaard has another and more purely polemical feature, its 'Driestars'—short paragraphs, separated in the column by three asterisks, whence their name. These 'Driestars' are the pride and the wonder of the Dutch Press, on account of their trenchant, clever, courageous ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... and unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of benevolence, which, fiercely as he led the bayonets on at Chippewa or Fort Erie, I take to be of quite as genuine a stamp as what actuates any or all the polemical philanthropists of the age. He had slain men with his own hand, for aught I know,—certainly, they had fallen, like blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Billick had made a point of studying the Strassburg heresiarch carefully. The Carmelite now skilfully exposed the weakness of Bucer's arguments, together with his frequent misinterpretation of Scripture and the Fathers, Billick showing himself to be an experienced polemical writer; but the taste and tone of his book are repugnant to modern ideas, and betray the same acrimony which characterises the writings of Luther against Erasmus, and vice versa. Accusations of hatred, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... make it unsuccessful. It was his duty to set malicious criticism right. He did so in Aftenbladet[10] in an article which not only answered a bit of ephemeral criticism but which remains to this day an almost perfect example of Bjornson's polemical prose—fresh, vigorous, genuinely eloquent, with a marvelous fusing ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... Connecticut are strictly virtuous and to be compared to the prude rather than the European polite lady. They are not permitted to read plays; cannot converse about whist, quadrille or operas; but will freely talk upon the subjects of history, geography, and mathematics. They are great casuists and polemical divines; and I have known not a few of them so well schooled in Greek and Latin as often to put to the blush learned gentlemen." And yet Hannah Adams, writing in her Memoir in 1832, had this to say of educational ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... soon converted to Social Democracy. Berlin was covered with a network of societies, which became the places of worship of the new faith. Handbills, pamphlets, newspapers, partly polemical, partly literary, in which the mob made their statements and professed their faith stoutly; these, although written very badly, yet by their monotony, their angry reproaches, their invocations, reminded one ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... obligations, we owe the discovery of a striking passage excised in the piratical edition which gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play; and which, it must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... polemical expression beamed from Father Beret's eyes, and a very expert physiogomist might have suspected duplicity from certain lines about the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... particular things taught, would be the principia, or beginning of the whole process, and so far would be entitled by preference to the name of principles. But such a mode of approach is merely an accident, and contingent upon our being engaged in a polemical discussion of Protestantism in relation to Popery. That, however, is a pure matter of choice; Protestantism may be discussed, 'as though Rome were not, in relation to its own absolute merits; and this treatment is the logical treatment, applying itself to what ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... to write or speak against no other one in this world. Each man in it has enough to do, to watch and keep guard over himself. Each of us is sick enough in this great Lazaretto: and journalism and polemical writing constantly remind us of a scene once witnessed in a little hospital; where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached each other with their disorders and infirmities: how one, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... controversy. The true line was not to denounce and abuse wholesale, not to attack with any argument, good or bad, not to deny or ignore what was solid in the Roman ground, and good and elevated in the Roman system, but admitting all that fairly ought to be admitted, to bring into prominence, not for mere polemical denunciation, but for grave and reasonable and judicial condemnation, all that was extravagant and arrogant in Roman assumptions, and all that was base, corrupt, and unchristian in the popular religion, which, with all its claims to infallibility and authority, Rome not ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... proof that they have never reached any serious persuasion with regard to these remote and sublime subjects. Even those who are the most impatient of contradiction in other controversies, are mild and moderate in comparison of polemical divines; and wherever a man's knowledge and experience give him a perfect assurance in his own opinion, he regards with contempt, rather than anger, the opposition and mistakes of others. But while men zealously maintain what they neither clearly comprehend ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... history of the Jews; and there is too much truth in the observation. He never got out of the fetters of his ecclesiastical education; the Jews were the centre round which he supposed all other nations revolved. His mind was polemical, not philosophic; a great theologian, he was but an indifferent historian. In one particular, indeed, his observations are admirable, and, at times, in the highest degree impressive. He never loses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... periods, critics are perhaps most apt to show their defects of temper, and Scott often commented on the acerbity of spirit which such studies seem to induce. "Antiquaries," he said, "are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and which are least valuable if the truth could be ascertained; and which therefore we would gladly have seen handled with more diffidence and better temper in proportion to their ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Both were translated into Pehlevi in the reign of Chosroes, and from that watershed floated off into the literatures of all the great creeds. In Christianity alone, characteristically enough, one of them, the Barlaam book, was surcharged with dogma, and turned to polemical uses, with the curious result that Buddha became one of the champions of the Church. To divest the Barlaam-Buddha of this character, and see him in his original form, we must take a further journey and seek him in his home ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the appeal to his reason from the lure to his interests—here a text, and there a dowry!—here Protestantism, there Jemima!—Own, my friend, that the soberest casuist would see double under the inebriating effects produced by so mixing his polemical liquors. Appeal, my good Mr. Dale, from Philip drunken to Philip sober!—from Riccabocca intoxicated with the assurance of your excellent lady, that he is about to be "the happiest of men," to Riccabocca accustomed to his happiness, and carrying it off with the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments—on India, or America, on Ireland or on France—which made up his political ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Satiro-mastix. 'Mastic' is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive 'mastic,' i.e. the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare's conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman's Homer would fail to suggest. The controversial ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Polemical divinity about this time was putting the country half mad, and I, ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays, between sermons, at funerals, &c., used a few years afterwards to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion, that ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Fuller says, "George was the more plausible preacher, Robert the greater scholar; George the abler statesman, Robert the deeper divine. Gravity did frown in George, and smile in Robert." As one might infer from so strong an opponent of Laud, amid the large number of his published works most are polemical and Anti-Romish. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... to enter on the thorny thicket of Jacob Behmen's polemical and apologetical works. I shall not even load your mind with their unhappy titles. His five apologies occupy in bulk somewhere about a tenth part of his five quarto volumes. And full as his apologies and defences are of autobiographic material, as well as of valuable expansions and explanations ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... centuries, is of an extent with which that of no other Slavic language can be compared. It is true, however, that most of these productions bear decidedly the stamp of the period in which they were written. Dictated by the polemical spirit of the age, and for the most part directed by one protestant party against another, there is very little to be found in them to gratify the Christian, or from which the theological student of the present day could derive ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... adoptive and temporary subjection to another sovereign, they must naturally have been led to reflect upon the relative rights and duties of allegiance and subjection. They had resided in a city, the seat of a university, where the polemical and political controversies of the time were pursued with uncommon fervor. In this period they had witnessed the deadly struggle between the two parties, into which the people of the United Provinces, after their separation ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... Uncles Sandy and James were as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry, and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other Seceders engaged as masons at the work—more of the polemical and less of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the labourer; and they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful usefulness, but—as they were stronger in their language than their more self-denying and more consistent co-religionists—of the positive ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggiosity of Correggio. You never know what he ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Poland manifested at that time a tendency similar to the one which had prevailed during the Quadrennial Diet.[1] Scores of pamphlets and magazine articles discussed with polemical ardor the Jewish problem, the burning question of the day. The old Jew-baiter Stashitz, a member of the Warsaw Government who served on the Commission of Public Instruction and Religious Denominations, resumed his attacks on Judaism. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... style is singularly animated and impassioned, and it is not without justice that a prominent Parisian critic (Eugene Pelletan) calls him the most direct inheritor of that light-armed yet potent style of polemical writing, of which the famous Camille Desmoulins was so great ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Protestants who had never swerved from the truth through the darkest ages, and could therefore be adopted with acclamation into the general Reformed communion. The Reformation, indeed; had penetrated into their valleys, rendering them more polemical for their faith, and more fierce against the Church of Rome, than they had been before. They had experienced persecutions through their whole history, and especially after the Reformation; but, on the whole, the two last Dukes of Savoy, and also Christine, daughter ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... living; and consequently his old friend was not now so dear to him as when in old days he would come down to that farm-house, almost as penniless as the curate himself. Then they would walk together for hours along the rock-bound shore, listening to the waves, discussing deep polemical mysteries, sometimes with hot fury, then again with tender, loving charity, but always with a mutual acknowledgement of each other's truth. Now they lived comparatively near together, but no opportunities arose for such discussions. At ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... intellect, now awakened from the sleep of the Sybarite, to fall back into its lazy and effeminate repose. She had no right to doom a human soul to rot away in its clay. Perhaps, too, she hoped, as all polemical enthusiasts do, that Godolphin, once aroused, would soon become her convert. Be that as it may, she delayed, on various pretences, their departure from London. She went secretly the next day to one of the proprietors of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Crabb Robinson ('Diary', vol. ii. p. 192), "he catches the sunny side of everything, and, excepting that he has a few polemical antipathies, finds ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... hardly have engaged the attention of working naturalists as it has done. We have no idea even of opening the question as to what work the Darwinian theory has incited, and in what way the work done has reacted upon the theory; and least of all do we like to meddle with the polemical literature of the subject, already so voluminous that the German bibliographers and booksellers make a separate class of it. But two or three treatises before us, of a minor or incidental sort, suggest a remark or two ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop Hughes himself and of his contemporaries—these and other causes have made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a different spirit from what wisdom dictated ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the subject-matter of his studies, of the antiquary, and the artist, the man of science, the historian, the herald, and the genealogist, in short, Notes relating to all subjects but such as are, in popular discourse, termed either political or polemical, should meet in our columns in such juxta-position, as to give fair play to any natural attraction or repulsion between them, and so that if there are any hooks and eyes among them, they may ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... The comparative scarcity of polemical athletes and the relative plenty of the Miss Susie Goldrick kind of teachers, apparently called into being the Berean Lesson Leaf system, with its Bible cut up into lady-bites of ten or twelve verses, its Golden Topics, Golden Texts, its ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... a religion which is based on deductions and metaphysical distinctions as imperative as a religion based on simple declarations? Has it not appealed to the head, when it should have appealed to the heart and conscience; and thus has not religion often been cold and dry and polemical, when it should have been warm, fervent, and simple? Such seem to have been some of the effects of the Trinitarian controversy between Athanasius and Arius, and their respective followers even to our own times. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... also such a number of contradictory reports, supported all of them by equal authority, that it became absolutely impossible to fix a preference among them. A few volumes, therefore, must contain all the polemical writings of pagan priests: And their whole theology must consist more of traditional stories and superstitious practices than of philosophical ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... that with Froude also must have a sincere allusion in these pages, for I have derived much pleasure from my association with Sir Henry Howorth, a ripe old lawyer of Portuguese extraction, who has rendered valuable political service by his polemical letters to the Times, on which I can pass a most favourable opinion. His histories of the Mongols, the Mammoth, and the Flood are possibly more permanent, but they are not of such contemporary note. At any rate, I respect them from a distance, whilst I admire the political ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... six Illyrian words and two pedantic little books he improvised "La Guzla" in two weeks. And further: "From that day on I was disgusted with local color, seeing how easy it was to fabricate it." Of course, this statement should in the first place be regarded as polemical and as a sly hit perhaps at Victor Hugo. For Mrime's literary output is a triumph for the cause of local color. What he meant, and illustrates in his work, is that local color and remoteness in time and place are secondary to treatment ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... rebellion of the Netherlands. Through this organ one restless spirit spoke to millions. Besides the lampoons, which for the most part were composed with all the low scurrility and brutality which was the distinguishing character of most of the Protestant polemical writings of the time, works were occasionally published which defended religious liberty in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... managed his mother tongue better, if indeed he ever managed it so well. The little tract is written with singular spirit and rapidity of style. It is clear, trenchant, and direct to a fault. It is indeed far less critical than polemical, and shows no trace of lofty calm, either moral or intellectual. We are not repelled much by his eagerness to refute and maltreat his opponent. That was not alien from the usages of the time, and Warburton at least had no right to complain of such ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... the first great instance of the abuse of publicity to such ends. The polemical writings which a hundred years earlier Poggio and his opponents interchanged, are just as infamous in their tone and purpose, but they were not composed for the press, but for a sort of private circulation. Aretino made all his profit out of a complete publicity, and in a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Republica Jesuitica'), with the noble disregard of consequences so noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters this to a million dollars, his object being to prove that the Jesuits exacted exorbitant taxation from the neophytes. *6* The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the small bee called 'Opemus', according ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from the polemical literature which attended the career of the German romanticismus and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... God, is bent to pursue that which to me is most desirable, viz., holiness. But I need stronger faith to enter in by the blood of Jesus. Union with Him is sweet. This makes one thirst for more. Many temptations assault me, but the reading of Fletcher's Polemical Essay on Christian Perfection has been of advantage to me. I am learning the method of bringing to God those evils and besetments, which seem to be the main hindrances to my progress. I have much cause of humiliation ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... of which we have an imitation, or perhaps nearly a translation, in Ovid's poem of the same name. On the part of Apollonius there is a passage in the third book of the Argonautica (11. 927-947) which is of a polemical nature and stands out from the context, and the well-known savage epigram upon Callimachus.[1] Various combinations have been attempted by scholars, notably by Couat, in his Poesie Alexandrine, to give a connected account of the quarrel, but we have not data ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... was but for a favored few. Mr. Hale believed that the greater the sinfulness of the individual soul the greater the need and the greater the title to be taken into the fellowship and the brotherhood of the Saviour of souls. So, without polemical discussion, or any heat of controversy, he set the example which has been so widely followed. This meant a great deal more than the abolition of a ceremonial or the change of a rubric. It was an assertion of the great doctrine, never till of late perfectly comprehended anywhere, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... immediately comforting terrified sinners with the full consolation of the Gospel, they proved them "according to the marks of the state of grace." Graebner: "While Diaconus in Grosshennersdorf, Muhlenberg had already published a polemical tract against Dr. Balthasar Mentzer, who had attacked Pietism, and had pictured the time before the rise of Pietism as a time of darkness, in which God had 'set up a true light here and there, until at last the faithful servants of the Lord, the sainted ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... times," observed the president, "when a doctor of divinity and an under-graduate set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there be no encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... health, and all the other solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... 'Minna von Barnhelm,' he had to take part in the quarrel between the Saxons and the Prussians, because he found nothing better. It was owing to the rottenness of his time that he always took, and was forced to take, a polemical position. In his 'Emilia Galotti,' he shows his pique against the princes; in 'Nathan,' against the priests." But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to amuse a provincial court by masquerades ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Egyptian worshippers of leeks,'[48] Nonconformists were 'fanatics,' Quakers were 'blasphemers.'[49] From the peaceful researches, on which he built a lasting name, in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian antiquities, he returned each time with renewed zest to polemical disputes, and found relaxation in the strife of words. It was no promising omen for the future of the nonjuring party, that the Court of St. Germains should have appointed him and Wagstaffe first bishops ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... outlook, only improvement in methods. Philosophical activity can never have doubt as its aim, as that would form, as we have shown, a psychological contradiction. The true essence of Pyrrhonism was passivity, but passivity can never lead to progress. Much of the polemical work of Pyrrhonism prepared the way for scientific progress by providing a vast store of scientific data, but progress was to the Pyrrhonists impossible. They sounded their own scientific death-knell by declaring the impossibility ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... Footnote 8: The polemical treatise of Erasmus on this same subject appeared earlier; besides, Erasmus was not actually ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... new star in Danish literature ascended at this time. Heinrich Hertz published his "Letters from the Dead" anonymously: it was a mode of driving all the unclean things out of the temple. The deceased Baggesen sent polemical letters from Paradise, which resembled in the highest degree the style of that author. They contained a sort of apotheosis of Heiberg, and in part attacks upon Oehlenschl ger and Hauch. The old story about my orthographical errors was again revived; my name and my school-days in Slagelse ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... as invisible needle-points, in her Majesty's hand. [Letter undated (datable "Lutzelburg, March, 1708,") is to be found entire, with all its adjuncts, in Erman, pp. 246-255. It was subsequently translated by Toland, and published here, as an excellent Polemical Piece,—entirely forgotten in our time ( A Letter against Popery by Sophia Charlotte, the late Queen of Prussia: Being, &c. &c. London, 1712). But the finest Duel of all was probably that between Beausobre and Toland himself (reported by Beausobre, in something of a crowing manner, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... before the policy of the Government is practically tested, that the views of thoughtful men holding different opinions should be clearly set forth, not in the shape of polemical speeches, but in measured articles which specially appeal to those who have not hitherto joined the fighting ranks of either side, and who are sure to intervene with great force at the next election, when the Irish question is again ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... solemn moments. In other words, the Odes and the Book, together with Confucius' "Springs and Autumns," with its censorious hints for rulers, and all the other local Annals and Histories, were under anathema, But more detestable even than these were the new philosophical treatises of a polemical kind, which girded at monarchs through their subtle choice of words and anecdotes, or which recalled the good old times of the feudal emperors and their not very obsequious vassals. His self-laudatory inscriptions upon stone, scattered about as he travelled from ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... come and go, how in the endless change of human things it alone remains unchanged, ever with the same spirit, can we then wonder if many look up to it as the Rock unmoved amid the roaring billows of centuries?" And he adds in a note, "This is not a polemical statement, but the verdict ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... much as you can, in mixed companies, argumentative, polemical conversations; which, though they should not, yet certainly do, indispose for a time the contending parties toward each other; and, if the controversy grows warm and noisy, endeavor to put an end to it by some genteel levity or joke. I quieted such a conversation-hubbub ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... race, who too often confounded the practical benefits of civilization with the abstract benefits of the Church, and their instruction had been simple and coercive. There had been no necessity for argument or controversy; the worthy priest's skill in polemical warfare and disputation had never been brought into play; the Comandante and Alcalde were as punctiliously orthodox as himself, and the small traders and artisans were hopelessly docile and submissive. The march of science, which had been stopped by the local ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... writing his gospel John had not a polemical, but a general end in view. It was not his immediate aim to refute the errors and heresies of his day; but, as he tells us, to show that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, in order that men, through faith in his name, may have eternal life. Yet, like every wise and practical writer, he must have ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... in the Caroline period was Jeremy Taylor, whose works are only represented by "The Great Exemplar of Sanctity" (London, 1667), "Ductor Dubitantium" (London, 1696), which is still the chief English treatise on casuistry, and "A Collection of Polemical and Moral Discourses" (London, 1657). The Library contains two editions of the works (1683 and 1716) of Isaac Barrow, whom Charles II. described as "the best scholar in England." Other eminent writers of this ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... abstract and intricate theories and doctrines of Socialism. To that excellent practice, no doubt, much of Lenine's skill as a lucid expositor and successful propagandist is due. He has written a number of important works, most of them being of a polemical nature and dealing with party disputations upon questions of theory and tactics. The work by which he was best known in Socialist circles prior to his sensational rise to the Premiership is a treatise on The Development of Capitalism in Russia. This work ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... are still made to the spiritualistic hypothesis. To my mind there is only one that is serious; I will speak of it in conclusion. Many of the others are raised by persons who have a merely superficial acquaintance with the problem; their arguments are more polemical ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... of his elder half-brother (born 12th November 1817), Mirza Husayn 'Ali, entitled Baha' u'llah ("the Splendour of God"), who thus gradually became the most conspicuous and most influential member of the sect, though in the Iqan, one of the most important polemical works of the Babis, composed in 1858-1859, he still implicitly recognized the supremacy of Subh-i-Ezel. In 1863, however, Baha declared himself to be "He whom God shall manifest" (Man Yuz-hiruhu'llah, with prophecies ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and patriot is almost thrown into the shade by the noble magnanimity and Christian heroism of the man in the hour of defeat and death. Without wishing, in any degree, to revive a controversy long maintained by writers of opposite political and polemical opinions, it may fairly be stated that Scottish history does not present us with a tragedy of parallel interest. That the execution of Montrose was the natural, nay, the inevitable, consequence of his capture, ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success. He was the heart and brain of the Republic's whole resistance,—he supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers,—and, though tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... copiously employed in Holy Scripture and in ancient writings, and furnishes a magazine of arms in all disputes and party controversies. Thus, the strange sculptures on misereres, &c. are ascribed to contests between the secular and regular clergy: and thus Dryden, in his polemical poem of The Hind and the Panther, made these two animals symbolise respectively the Church of Rome and the Church of England, while the Independents, Calvinists, Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sects are characterised ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... adopted from motives of safety, and the monk from the common custom of the convent, had prevented the possibility of their hitherto recognizing each other in the opposite parts which they had been playing in the great polemical and political drama. But now the Sub-Prior exclaimed, "Henry Wellwood!" and the preacher replied, "William Allan!"—and, stirred by the old familiar names, and never-to-be-forgotten recollections of college studies and college intimacy, their hands were for a moment ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... restored, along with his fellow-exiles, to his native land—a hope doomed to disappointment. In his capacity of pastor-bishop he wrote several treatises, such as a History of the Persecutions of the Brotherhood, an account of the Moravian Church discipline and order, and polemical tracts ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... life began like Whittington's; John Smeaton, the engineer of Eddystone Lighthouse, the first who placed civil engineering in the rank of a science; the two Reverend Milners (Joseph, and Isaac, Dean of Carlisle), great polemical giants in their day, authors of "The History of the Church of Christ;" Dr. Priestly, inventor of the pneumatic apparatus still used by chemists, and discoverer of oxygen and several other gases; David Hartley, the metaphysician ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... before. Soon afterwards, the intemperate zeal of another individual, armed to the teeth—not, however, like the martial sheriff and his forces, with arquebus and javelin, but with the still more deadly weapons of polemical theology,—was very near causing a general outbreak. A peaceful and not very numerous congregation were listening to one of their preachers in a field outside the town. Suddenly an unknown individual in plain clothes and with a pragmatical demeanor, interrupted the discourse ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all the different colors that are generally supposed to express anger. She had been attacked more openly than the others, it is true; but her attitude toward the prayer-class would go to show that she was naturally polemical. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... coral islands of the Pacific, we were so constantly employed in looking out for reefs and rocks, that we had little time for polemical discussions. Although the inhabitants of some of the islands had in those days already become partially civilised under missionary teaching, a large number were fierce and treacherous savages, and ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Tatler, Addison, speaking of polemical advertisements, says: "The inventors of Strops for Razors have written against one another this way for several years, and that with great bitterness." See also Spectator, Nos. 428, 509, and the Postman for March 23, 1703: "The so much famed strops ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... an advocate of religious freedom, charged the Baptists (particular though they were) with reviving old Calvinistic doctrines and spreading Antinomianism and other errors in Birmingham; with the guileless innocence peculiar to polemical scribes, past and present. Mr. Dissenting minister Bowen tried to do his friends in the Bull Ring a good turn by issuing his papers as from "A Consistent Churchman." In 1763 the chapel was enlarged, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Child and Neal. In fiction, they have Cooper, Paulding, Bird, Kennedy, Thomas, Ingraham, and many others. They have, notwithstanding the mosquitoes, produced some very good poets: Bryant, Halleck, Sigourney, Drake, etcetera; and have they not, with a host of polemical writers, Dr Channing, one of their greatest men, and from his moral courage in pointing out their errors, the best friend to his country that America has ever produced! Indeed, to these names we might fairly add their legal writers—Chancellor Kent and Judge Story, as well as Webster, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... quotes from Heracleitus in Book IX, are not only obscure enough in themselves, but are also rendered all the more obscure by the polemical treatment they are subjected to by the patristic writer. Heracleitus makes the ALL inclusive of all Being and Non-Being, all pairs of opposites, "differentiation and non-differentiation, the generable and ingenerable, mortal and immortal, the ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... I replied, "for the present: I am unwilling to engage in polemical strife with you, the very first evening on which I have seen you for so long a time. I would much rather hear a chapter of your past travels and adventures, which you know your few and brief letters—but I will not reproach you—left ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists have found in his Germania an armoury of ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... of the family, from which Frank R. Stockton was descended. On the female side he was descended from the Gardiners, also of New Jersey. His was a family with literary proclivities. His father was widely known for his religious writings, mostly of a polemical character, which had a powerful influence in the denomination to which he belonged. His half-brother (much older than Frank) was a preacher of great eloquence, famous a generation ago as ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodge than to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had any occasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers and their associates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work—an academic if not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse; but in the Alarum against Usurers, which resembles and even preceded Greene's similar work, he took to the satirical-story-form. Indeed, the connection between Lodge and Greene was so close, and the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare's accent ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... this very interpretation of the church, that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostasy; and I hold it for one of the greatest mistakes of our polemical divines, in their controversies with the Romanists, that they trace all the corruptions of the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... proportion.' Mommsen, Grote, Droysen, fall short of the ideal, because they drugged ancient history with modern politics. The Jesuit learning of the sixteenth century was sham learning, because it was tainted with the interested motives of Church patriotism. To search antiquity with polemical objects in view, is destructive of 'that equilibrium of the reason, the imagination, and the taste, that even temper of philosophical calm, that singleness of purpose,' which were all required for Pattison's ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... absolute intoxication. It has, however, been objected to it, that it seems an exhaustion of the author's mind—that its purposeless, planless shape betrays a lack of constructive power—that it becomes almost polemical in its religious aspect, and gives up to party what was meant for mankind—that it betrays a tendency toward obscure, mystical raptures and allegorizings, scarcely consistent with healthy manhood of mind, and which seems growing, as is testified by the "Angel World"—that there is a great gulf ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of those mystifications which make the French polemical literature of the eighteenth century the despair of bibliographers, Diderot cites as his authority a Life of Saunderson, by Dr. Inchlif. He sets forth the title with great circumstantiality, but no such book exists or ever did exist. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley |
