"Atheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg—a name that seems rampant with republicanism—and very soon he got himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel character called "A Defense of Atheism." ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... (it may be only a headache or toothache), I will plunge into a dark pessimism, always the shadow and the end of materialism. Modern Germany was, as you know, the hearth of individualism, and consequently also of pride, materialism, atheism and pessimism. The worship of strong personalities (to-day: Kaiser William and Hindenburg) holds the whole of Germany in unity during this war, which is not the case either in France or in Great Britain or Russia, where the common ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from atheism: a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Superlative Judgements" and run madly after Scot, Hobbes, and Osborne. It was, in truth, a danger to religion that he was trying to ward off. One of the fundamentals of religion was at stake. The denial of witchcraft was a phase of prevalent atheism. Those that give up the belief in witches, give up that in the Devil, then that in the immortality of the soul.[18] The question at issue was the reality of ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... are those who deny the existence of God; this is called speculative Atheism. Professing to believe in God, and yet acting contrary to this belief, is called practical Atheism. Absurd and irrational as Atheism is, it has had its votaries and martyrs. In the seventeenth century, Spinosa was its noted defender. Lucilio Venini, a native ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... which that religion is now supposed to hold to the general history of Indian piety. It was customary, till recently, to regard Buddha as a great reformer, and his religion as a great revolt against that which it found prevailing in India. He is credited with having preached atheism as a reaction against the burdensome worship of too many gods, with having instituted a great social movement consisting in the abolition of caste, with having openly denied the authority of the Vedas, till then unchallenged, and with having rebuked the pride of Brahmanism by making his order of ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... environment is insistent. Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and "materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Anything to escape from realities—that was his maxim. He puzzled his contemporaries. But we can now locate him with absolute certainty. He personifies the Revolt from Reason. SURTOUT, MON AMI, POINT DE ZELE. He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity—a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation. He was always wavering between the two in an attitude of suburban defiance, reconciling what is irreconcilable by extracting funny analogies all ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Law,' 'Evolution,' or 'Development.' While I desire that the basis of Regina's education shall be sufficiently broad, liberal, and comprehensive, I intend to be careful what doctrines are propounded; for unfortunately all who sympathize with the atheism of Comte, have not his noble frankness, and fail to print as he did on ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and learned that a candidate for Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria's surprise vanished when she found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence to the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure—owing to ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... ousting doctrine. Do you not think that the truest, the most poignant doctrine, speaks, utters itself through the arts. Music has its religion and its atheism, painting its holiness and its sin. A statue, in its white and marble stillness, may suggest to us dreams in which the angels walk, or visions that I will not characterise in the presence of an ordained priest. Even architecture may incline us to worship, and a few ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the supplication that he might be preserved from atheism, impiety and profaneness; that he might be loyal to his prince; that he might be gracious to those below him; that he might refrain from calumny and detraction; that he might be sincere in friendship, just in his dealings, grateful to his benefactors, patient in ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... himself of the charges brought against him by the deputy Louvet. 6. Report in the assembly of disturbances in the department of Mayence and Loire. Three hundred millions of assignats issued with new emblems. A discourse upon Atheism pronounced by Dupont, and applauded by the convention. The Princess de Rohan-Rochefort is sent to prison for having written to the ex-minister Bertrand. 7. The battle of Gemappe—the Austrians are defeated by superior numbers, and an immense artillery. Dumourier after ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... Amiens reliefs, signifying "Rebellion," is that of a man snapping his fingers at his bishop! Another known as "Atheism" is variously interpreted. A man is seen stepping out of his shoes at the church porch. Ruskin explains this as meaning that the infidel is shown in contradistinction to the faithful who is supposed to have "his feet shod with the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... meaning to the word 'substance.' If the analogy be correct, the true inference would be that both doctrines are meaningless aggregations of words, and therefore not capable of being in any true sense either 'believed' or 'disbelieved.' So again the view of the external world suggests to Newman 'atheism, pantheism, or polytheism.' Almighty benevolence has created a world of intelligent beings, most of whom are doomed to eternal tortures, and having become incarnate in order to save us, has altogether failed in His purpose. The inference is, says Fitzjames, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... meal's victuals in their lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full, they begin to make trouble between our people and their hands. There's where the strikes come from, and the unions and the secret societies. They come here and break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung! Let 'em go back if they don't like it over here. They want to ruin ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... utterance of opinion, and regard it as the religion of a man who died in his thirtieth year, and whose habits of thinking were such, that his opinions must have been in a state of constant change. Coleridge says in a letter: "His (Shelley's) discussions, tending towards atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared me; for me it would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true image—the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... often been tempted already, to fancy that reason is the enemy, and not the twin sister of faith; to oppose revelation to science, as if God's two messages could contradict each other; to widen the Manichaean distinction between secular and spiritual matters, so pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man; to fancy that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His teaching, His providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to pretend that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by denying to them any practical or real influence ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... knowing him to be such and having apprehended him with the booty about him? O Bharata, I hope, thy ministers are never won over by bribes, nor do they wrongly decide the disputes that arise between the rich and the poor. Dost thou keep thyself free from the fourteen vices of kings, viz., atheism, untruthfulness, anger, incautiousness, procrastination, non-visit to the wise, idleness, restlessness of mind, taking counsels with only one man, consultation with persons unacquainted with the science of profit, abandonment ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... of it makes one difficulty; the substitution of paradox for incident makes another. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the first edition of the "Weltraetsel," my translation into German of Romanes' "Thoughts on Religion" should have appeared. From this book it was evident that Haeckel and his associates could no longer count this man among their number since he—a life-long seeker after truth—had abandoned atheism for theism, and died a believing Christian. Troeltsch and the "Reichsbote" asked whether Haeckel had purposely concealed this fact, and Schmidt now explains that Haeckel first became acquainted with the "Thoughts on Religion" through him towards ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... Encyclopaedia, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophical enemies. To any one who turns over the pages of these redoubtable volumes now, it seems surprising that their doctrine should have stirred such portentous alarm. There is no atheism, no overt attack on any of the cardinal mysteries of the faith, no direct denunciation even of the notorious abuses of the Church. Yet we feel that the atmosphere of the book may well have been displeasing to authorities who had not yet learnt to encounter the modern spirit on equal terms. The ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Centuncularis),' 'Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... disclosed extraordinarily little: and yet as I reached my bedroom that night I told myself that here, behind a mask of good manners, was one of those perniciously modern young men who have run through all beliefs by the age of twenty, and settled down to a polite but weary atheism. ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... power would undertake to change, which designed to exalt itself above God. God gave the Sabbath as a memorial of himself, a weekly reminder to the sons of men, of his work in creating the heavens and the earth, a great barrier against atheism and idolatry. It is the signature and seal of the law. This the papacy has torn from its place, and erected in its stead, on its own authority, an institution designed ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic. If this is atheism, call three, instead of two of the trio, atheists, and it will probably ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... last forty years we have entered upon a new era of religion and philosophy; we hear no more of the old belief that the study of scientific facts leads to atheism or irreligion; we begin to see that Religion and Science must go hand in hand towards elucidating the Riddle of the Universe, and such a change enables us even to aspire to show, as I now propose to do, that it is possible, by examining certain phenomena ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... no wonder that kills; but that which is but a vapour, and a vapour not forced but breathed, should kill, that our nurse should overlay us, and air that nourishes us should destroy us, but that it is a half atheism to murmur against Nature, who is God's immediate commissioner, who would not think himself miserable to be put into the hands of Nature, who does not only set him up for a mark for others to shoot ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... courageously, but as I think mistakenly, calls herself an atheist, and who has for years advocated woman suffrage as the only antidote to the rule of the clergy. On the other hand, an able speaker in a Boston convention soon after advocated the same thing as the best way of defeating atheism, and securing the positive assertion of religion by the community. Both cannot be correct: neither is entitled to speak for woman. That being the case, would it not be better to keep clear of this dangerous ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... romance over the transaction, but this was the plain matter of fact. Then Anaxagoras had been driven out of Athens for his revolutionary notions; and Diogenes had been accused, like the Christians, of atheism. The case had been the same in more recent times. There had been that madman, Apollonius, roaming about the world; Apuleius, too, their neighbour, fifty years before, a man of respectable station, a gentleman, but a follower ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... suspicions of Cromwell, who, in his opinion, "gaped after the government by a single person." In consequence he was banished from London in 1654, and on Oliver's death was returned to parliament December 30,1658, as burgess for Reading. An attempt to exclude him on charges of atheism ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... of which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which ordinary ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... more attentively what I doubt not was in my thoughts long before, viz. the concatenation of argument by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea; and I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other. And I hold this still: I am a Catholic ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hundreds and thousands of the classes of whom we are speaking. From the cradle to the grave, might not their influence in the direction of Religious Belief be summarised in one sentence, "Atheism made easy." Let my readers imagine theirs to have been a similar lot. Is it not possible that, under such circumstances, they might have entertained some serious doubts as to the existence of a benevolent God who would ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed Bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition Slyme was heard to say that Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free Love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, because human nature ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... more praise than any other attempt at reconciling philosophy and theology, tries to show that here, at least, the two doctrines are in harmony. He has probably produced, in men of powerful intellects, more atheism than he has cured; for he tries to demonstrate explicitly what is tacitly assumed by most theologians—the injustice of God. The doctrine may be horrible, but he says that facts prove it to be true. His whole logic ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... even seem that in some cases the finest openings and invitations for what is best in man must operate inversely, and elicit only what is worst in him. Every profoundest truth, when uttered with fresh power in history, polarizes men, accumulating atheism at one pole, while collecting faith and resolve at the other. As the sun bleaches some surfaces into whiteness, but tans and blackens others, so the sweet shining of Truth illumines some countenances with belief, but some it darkens into a scowl of hate and denial. The American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... music in St. Joseph's was allowed by connoisseurs, who knew their Elgar as well as their Goss, their Perosi as well as their Bach, and their Wesley, to be remarkable. Critical persons, mostly men, who sat on the fence between Orthodoxy and Atheism, thought highly of Mr. Harding's sermons, and even sometimes came down on his side. And, of all signs surely the most promising for a West End clergyman's success, smart people flocked to him to be married, and Arum lilies were perpetually being carried in and out of ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and no repair shop? A time-card and a train, and nobody to run it? A star lit, and nobody to pour oil in to keep the wick burning? A garden, and no gardener? Flowers, and no florist? Conditions, and no conditioner?" He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh at such absurd atheism. ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... invective on the Bishop of Rochester[96] or on Cochleus?[97] They attack you personally and provoke you with insults, while my Diatribe[98] was a courteous disputation. And what has all this to do with the subject—all this facetious abuse, these slanderous lies, charging me with atheism, Epicureanism, scepticism in articles of the Christian profession, blasphemy, and what not—besides many other points on which I[99] am silent? I take these charges the less hardly, because in all this there is nothing to ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... for refuting Atheism." Probably Mr. Sinclair got the story, or had it put off on him rather, through one Campbell, a student of philosophy in Glasgow, the son of Gilbert Campbell, a weaver of Glenluce, in Galloway; the scene in our own time, of a mysterious murder. Campbell had refused alms to ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... between the feudal system of society as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levelling principle of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably at work in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Popery or with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or with hypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, but all acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to be trying that experiment with the British Constitution ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... birth, an event which is said to have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar. Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... of atheisme, and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves as if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of y^e Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practises of y^e madd Bachanalians." The charge of atheism in this case seems based on the fact that Morton used the Book of Common Prayer, but as for the rest, there is no question that this band of silken merry-makers imported many of the carnival customs ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... the result,—only nescience. Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism agree in one belief, namely, that of a problem to be solved. An unknown God is the highest result of theology and of philosophy. "If religion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be their deepest, widest, and most certain ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... university of importance not under some form of denominational control, and for this reason had, perhaps, more than the usual share of extreme liberalism, or atheism, as it was at that time considered amongst the students; and one of my classmates, a man a couple of years older than myself, and of far more than the average intellectual power, made an active propaganda of the most advanced opinions. He also introduced Philip James Bailey's ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... against modern Christianity, was not generally known. The orthodox were apt to content themselves with shuddering at the mention of his name; very few troubled themselves to think or inquire how this man had been driven into atheism. Had they done so they might, perhaps, have treated him more considerately, at any rate they must have learned that the much-disliked prophet of atheism was the most disinterested of men, one who had the courage of his opinions, a man ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... you have lent importance to that which was absurd, interest to that which was forbidding, light to that which was the essence of darkness. For atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Canada—the Church—shrank in horror from the blood-stained banner of regicide France; and zealous always for the monarchy, the Catholic hierarchy indignantly spurned the overtures of a republic whose most cherished principle was atheism—which had abandoned the worship of God for the cult of Reason. "For God and the King" had been the priestly motto from time immemorial, and the new Republic repudiated obligation not to one only but to both. Accordingly, the vast influence ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... wishing the Temporal Power to be erected into an article of faith, ended by ardently desiring some kind of tacitly accepted modus vivendi with the Italian kingdom, such as that which Cavour proposed. Cardinal Manning was sorry to see the Italians being driven to atheism and socialism, and so he had the courage to change his mind. In 1861 he was in the opposite camp, but there was not wanting then a section of learned and patriotic ecclesiastics who desired peace. It was ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... theology of that nation stood not upon such dreams, which the poets indeed superstitiously observed; and truly, since they had not the light of Christ, did much better in it than the philosophers, who, shaking off superstition, brought in atheism. ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... are a generation of men as unknown to them, as the people of Tartary, or the Terra Australia, are to us. And therefore as we draw giants and anthropophagi in those vacancies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better; so those wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of extravagancies amongst us, for want of understanding what we are. Oftentimes it so falls out, that they have a particular pique to some one amongst us, and then they immediately interest heaven in their quarrel; as it is an usual trick in courts, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... little pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism; he projected sending it round broadcast as an invitation or challenge to discussion. This small pamphlet—it is scarcely more than a flysheet—hardly amounts to saying that Atheism is irrefragably true, and Theism therefore false; but it propounds that the existence of a God cannot be proved by reason, nor yet by testimony; that a direct revelation made to an individual would alone be adequate ground for convincing that individual; and that the ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... and events in Nature were not designed to be so, if logically carried out, is doubtless tantamount to atheism. Yet most people believe that some were designed and others were not, although they fall into a hopeless maze whenever they undertake to define their position. So we should not like to stigmatize as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the time of the Revolution, indeed, the importation of French political ideas was accompanied by an importation of French theological ideas, and such men as Franklin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, was regarded as downright atheism. Even in New England this influence made itself felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism to the softness of Unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in the vague temporizing of Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the strict sense, declined in ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... were heaped every possible and most contradictory accusation—of skepticism and pantheism, of deism and atheism, of superstition and enthusiasm, of irony and passion, of sensuality and ideality, of generosity and avarice. These went to form his portrait, presenting every contrast and every antagonism, which God Himself, the Father and Creator of all things, but also ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and glory of the material globe. And why may not this ultimately be the case also in relation to the moral universe? Why should every attempt to clear up its difficulties, and blow away the objections of atheism to its order and beauty, be supposed to originate in presumption and to terminate in impiety? Are we so much the less interested in knowing the ways of God in regard to the constitution and government of the moral world than of the material, that he should ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Max Muller to imply the denial of gods (Sans. deva), on the analogy of Atheism, the denial of God. Max Muller used it particularly in connexion with the Vedanta philosophy for the correlative of ignorance or nescience (Gifford lectures, 1892, c. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... manifested in your writings, induces me to send you a translated Copy of the Accusation and defence of M. Wolf, the most celebrated Philosopher of our days; who, for having carried light into the darkest places of Metaphysics, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism. Such is the destiny of great men; their superior genius exposes them to the poisoned arrows of calumny and envy. I am about getting a Translation made of the Treatise on God, the Soul, and the World,"—Translation done by an Excellency Suhm, as has been hinted,—"from the pen of the same ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... be exaggerated) that this deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring common ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... her self-greatest part, That she did make her god; and 'twas less naught To leave gods in profession and in thought, Than in her love and life; for therein lies Most of her duties and their dignities; And, rail the brain-bald world at what it will, That's the grand atheism that reigns in it still. Yet singularity she would use no more, For she was singular too much before; But she would please the world with fair pretext; Love would not leave her conscience perplext: Great men ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an atheist, but he was full of sympathy with the underlying ethical principles of all the great religions. Always tolerant of the religious opinions of others, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed committing the Socialist movement to atheism as part of its programme.[54] In short, he was a man of fine spiritual instincts, splendidly religious ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... very frank in their criticisms of each other. "I did not like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings," said the Mistress. "It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... intellectual realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush the little man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers had appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict Shivers of idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than atheism, something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed because he was unable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... touches of the thumb, and the absence of these extra refinements leaves it the most spontaneous and vigorously bold of all Duerer's paintings. The concentrated energy of the sitter's features demanded such a treatment; he seems to burn with the inconsiderate atheism of a Marlowe. Young, and less surprised than indignant to be alone awake in a sleepy and bigoted world, he seems convinced of a mission to chastise, even to scandalise his easy-going neighbours. Let ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the "Oxford University and City Herald". It was not, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... now, in spite of our atheism and our apathism, amid all the overwhelming world-influences of this great 'living Present'—the ghost of the dead Past will come rushing back upon us with its solemn voices and its infinite wailings of pity: but soft and faint it comes; for the wild jarrings ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... long; but the reason is, that it is the characteristic of immorality to tie down man in the chains of the senses, and this shews that it has nothing in common with the spiritual nature of poetry. For the same reason, a poem based upon atheism, although it might attract attention for a time, would meet with no permanent response in the human breast; religion being Truth, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... useless—others as pernicious and irreconcileable with political freedom; and a discourse* was printed, under the sanction of the Assembly, to prove, that the only feasible republic must be supported by pure atheism. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... philosophical men, and either put them down by force, or closely watched them, this will not seem extraordinary in little despotic states. We have accounts of some philosophical associations at home, which were joined by Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh, but which soon got the odium of atheism attached to them; and the establishment of the French Academy occasioned some umbrage, for a year elapsed before the parliament of Paris would register their patent, which was at length accorded by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... have described it as "a doctrine of sordid materialism and of atheism," they have denounced it as "the gospel of everlasting bellyful,"[1] and as "the coming slavery."[2] They have stated that Socialism means to abolish religion, that it "would try to put laziness, thriftlessness, and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift, and ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... irremediable state of contempt, from which no virtue could exalt them. The Brahmins looked upon my Brahmin with ineffable horror. They called me the most wicked of vices; they saw no distinction between Justice and Atheism. I uprooted their society—that was sufficient crime. But the worst was, that the Pariahs themselves regarded me with suspicion; they thought it unnatural in a Brahmin to care for a Pariah! And one called me 'Madness,' another, 'Ambition,' and a third, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hell, Hell-fire, Damnation in Hell, it is such an inconceivable punishment, that were it but throughly believed, it would nip this sin, with others, in the head. But here is the mischief, those that give up themselves to these things, do so harden themselves in Unbelief and Atheism about the things, the punishments that God hath threatned to inflict upon the committers of them, that at last they arrive to, almost, an absolute and firm belief that there is no Judgment to come hereafter: Else they would not, ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... of the books to be pure and bracing, almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," such fine severity is conspicuously absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all most need just now, that when he has—not halting mere infidels, like Voltaire and Rousseau—but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their exemplary influence with his readers, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... can do this, is one of the unexplained mysteries of life. Christian philosophers refuse to admit that an atheist can exist in the flesh. They claim that his denial is fathered by his desire and wish, that at most he only doubts, and while professing atheism, he is simply ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... otherwise; but have not a little reason for thinking that the same physiological ends might have been differently achieved. The one doctrine limits the possibilities of creation; the other denies the implied limit. Which, then, is most open to the charge of covert Atheism? ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... generation—surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals—since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the same passionate ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... about three quarters of an hour, brooding over the singular and mournful lot to which I was doomed, my mind passing over the whole scale or circle of belief and unbelief, from faith in the overruling providence of God, to the blackest atheism, I again took up my journey toward St. Michael's, more weary and sad than in the morning when I left Thomas Auld's for the home of Mr. Covey. I was bare-footed and bare-headed, and in{177} my shirt sleeves. The way was through bogs and briers, and I tore my feet often during the journey. I was full ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... eminence may be led away by an ambiguity of language, is afforded by this very case. I refer to the famous argument by which Bishop Berkeley flattered himself that he had forever put an end to "skepticism, atheism, and irreligion." It is briefly as follows: I thought of a thing yesterday; I ceased to think of it; I think of it again to-day. I had, therefore, in my mind yesterday an idea of the object; I have also an idea of it to-day; this idea is evidently not another, but the very same idea. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see anybody standing up? Well, there you are! Now I guess the folks in this man's town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you'll quit listening to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy atheism; and all of you 'll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his everlasting mercy ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848 with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the worship of Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not only ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the vines already attacked by the oidium, and to hear the harrowing accounts of the misery caused by an enemy more redoubtable still. Arbois, though so charming to look at, is far from being a little Eden. It is eminently a Catholic place; atheism and immorality abound; bigotry among the women, scepticism among the men, a looseness in domestic morality among all classes characterize the population, whilst we need no information on the subject of dissipation generally. ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... led astray" being by both friends mistaken for hers. That in his scepticism he proceeded any farther than Lord Byron, or ever suffered his doubting, but still ingenuous, mind to persuade itself into the "incredible creed" of atheism, is, I find (notwithstanding an assertion in a letter of the noble poet to this effect), disproved by the testimony of those among his relations and friends, who are the most ready to admit and, of course, lament his other heresies;—nor should I have felt that I had any ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... assailants of slavery at the North seem to me, some of them, almost insane, and others, even ministers of the Gospel, shall I say it? more than unchristian;—there is a sort of blind, wild, French Jacobinical atheism in their feeling and behavior; while as to the rest, good people, they are misled by what Mr. Webster, in one of his speeches in the Senate, called "the constant rub-a-dub of the press,"—"no drum-head," he says, "in the longest day's march, having been more incessantly beaten than the feeling ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... viz., of the relations between God and Nature insinuated by such philosophers as Hume. This acute, though most low-minded of speculators, in his inquiry concerning the Human Understanding, introduces, as is well known, Epicurus, that is, a teacher of atheism, delivering an harangue to the Athenian people, not indeed in defence, but in extenuation of that opinion. His object is to show that, whereas the atheistic view is nothing else than the repudiation ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... from sudden dangers, is not only a just call to repentance, but a caution against falling into the like danger; but such who are utterly careless of themselves after, show a lethargy of the worst nature, which seems to me to be a kind of practical atheism or at least, a living in a contempt of Heaven, when he receives good at the hand of his Maker, but is unconcerned from whence it comes, or to thank the bountiful hand that gave it; neither, when he receives evil, does it alter his manner of life, ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... internally to Heaven; for, though a wise and strong-minded man, he was neither wiser nor more strong-minded than those of his age and education, with whom, to disbelieve witchcraft or spectres, was held an undeniable proof of atheism. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... processes and moral characteristics of man. In this controversy the two parties at times were curiously mingled. Orthodox clergymen used arguments which justified a strong suspicion of their orthodoxy; and avowed freethinkers bitterly disclaimed the imputation of atheism and wrote in terms that might be easily ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... What mortal sins are opposed to Faith? A. Atheism, which is a denial of all revealed truths, and heresy, which is a denial of some revealed truths, and superstition, which is a misuse of religion, ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... man cannot be a Republican if he does not believe in God. Robespierre knew this, who, as we all remember, had the bust of the philosopher Helvetius removed from the Hall of the Jacobins, because he had taught Frenchmen the lessons of slavery by preaching atheism.... I hope, at least, citoyen Brotteaux, that, as soon as the Republic has established the worship of Reason, you will not refuse your adhesion ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... Junkerism and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels. Chateaubriand in his "Genie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des hommes," he wrote, "ne presente de poesie que jugee du haut des idees monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... obstinate fellow with black hair and brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her father in her), and nobody was greatly surprised, when the war broke out, to have him at first lukewarm, and then avowedly a Confederate. Of course he might as well have professed atheism or free love in this locality—he might better have blown his brains out—which he practically did, anyway. Public sentiment forced him out of the state and over Mason and Dixon's line, and he entered the rebel army ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had dropped in the harness and younger men were taking up the relay race. They were men, he feared, who were not to be altogether trusted; men beguiled by dangerous novelties of trend. With worldliness of thought pressing always forward; with atheism increasing, they were compromising and, it seemed to him, giving way cravenly, step ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... to their tongue. During the contest, we had constantly refreshed our zeal by fervent declarations of contempt for the frog-eating, spindle shanked mounseers, and persuaded ourselves that their whole literature consisted in atheism and murder, and though we now know that frogs are by no means the common food of the peasantry—costing about a guinea a dish—and that it is possible for a Frenchman to be a strapping fellow of six feet high, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... which to insert the baseness with which he abused the delicacy and weakness of females. Fathers of families * * * *. Every man was intimidated. Every feeling man wept, because all were the victims of the caprice of this insolent upstart, who made an ostentation of atheism and ferocity." ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... competition, but everything gentlemanly and independent about it. I had strong doubts touching my theology, and used to discuss them with my uncle; but he said,—and said rightly, I now think,—'You young fellows in college fancy that it's a mighty fine, bold thing to effect radicalism and atheism, and the Lord knows what all; but it won't stick to you when you get older. Experience will soften your heart, and you'll find after awhile that belief and doubt are not matters of the pure reason, but of the will. It is a question of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... town ribaldry, and by removing their character as far as possible from cowardice and effeminacy, even if that should make people get very near to audacity and foolhardiness. And some even make superstition a plea for atheism, and stupidity a plea for knavery, perverting their nature, like a stick bent double, from inability to set it straight. But the basest disowning of flattery is to be disagreeable without any purpose in view, and it shows ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... terms that are the most obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, formal, and precise: For which reason (as hypocrisy in one age is generally succeeded by atheism in another) conversation is in a great measure relapsed into the first extreme; so that at present several of our men of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in France, make use of the most coarse uncivilized ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... deep, beneath a sea of blood; he saw the best of kings expire upon a scaffold, the victim not less of other men's crimes than of his own weakness; he saw that vice was hailed, as if it were virtue, wickedness uplifted, as if it were morality atheism, proclaimed aloud, as if it were religion; that the 'Goddess of Reason' (or rather a vile strumpet) was recognized as the only Deity, and honored with hecatombs of human victims; the people decimated ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... irresistible attraction for his mind. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds his tragedies are sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorseful death, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home to us. He makes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. It was Voltaire who gave the tone, and even Voltaire was not radical enough for many of these iconoclasts. "He is a bigot and a deist," exclaimed a feminine disciple of d'Holbach's atheism. The gay, witty, pleasure-loving abbe, who derided piety, defied morality, was the pet of the salon, and figured in the worst scandals, was a fair representative of the fashionable clergy who had no attribute of priesthood but the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... it very much to heart; he told me—he's a client of mine, a stupid idiot, who never reasoned a thing out in his life—he told me that 'not to believe in eternal damnation was to take a short cut to atheism.' He also confided to me that 'a church which could permit such a falling from the faith was in a diseased condition.' I don't believe that opinion has reached Ward, however. It would take more ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... to the block without any substantial proof of guilt, as yet disclosed—without even an authentic exhibition of motives, in decent regard to the opinions of mankind; when I find the doctrines of atheism openly advanced in the convention, and heard with loud applauses; when I see the sword of fanaticism extended to force a political creed upon citizens who were invited to submit to the arms of France as the harbingers of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... confounded, he usually believes in the existence of matter apart from its soul. But there is little he won't believe in, if it comes to that; and I have a feeling of thankfulness that Buddhism, Theosophy, and above all Atheism, which chases its tail and proves that nothing can be proved, have not yet been given the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... missionaries was in the practical and everyday duties of the Christian life, in the great problem of getting men and women to put away the superstitions and narrowness and sins springing from polytheism or practical atheism, and getting them started in ways of godliness. The training schools for evangelists were designed to raise up practical workers rather than speculative theologians. Missionaries considered it their duty (and they were beyond question right) to teach religion rather than ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... peaks, bald and grey, under light and tempest, with the silent host of rocky boulders, swept, we know not by what convulsions, from their native seat, stand up as the first rank in the choir of the Maker's worship; and infidelity and atheism are hushed and abashed ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... was a Man went into one of these thinking Engines, but he came wiser out than he was before; and I am persuaded, it would be a more effectual Cure to our Deism, Atheism, Scepticism, and all other Scisms, than ever the Italian's Engine, for Curing the Gout by cutting ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... more horrifying than the thought of French soldiers freezing in their blood on the Borodino, or of Inquisitional tortures. It is one of those thoughts which ought not to be thought—a thought to be suppressed, for it leads to atheism, or even something worse than mere denial of a God. Thank Heaven that the present generation of the poor has been relieved at least of one argument in favour of the creed that the world is governed by the Devil! Thank ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... said Robespierre, thinking of Rousseau. Atheism is democratic, say our present-day school teachers. Whence comes this difference of opinion? First because it was fashionable among the great lords of the eighteenth century to be libertines and free-thinkers, but among the people the belief in God was unanimous. Secondly, because the priests of ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... against him were depending, with a bill against atheism and profaneness, he was at Chatsworth, and appeared extremely disturbed at the news of it, fearing the messengers would come for him, and the earl of Devonshire would deliver him up, the two houses of Parliament commit him to the bishops, and they decree him a heretic. This terror upon his ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... was attended with circumstances too extraordinary to be referred to common causes. History records no event, not attended by direct miracle, in which God's providence is more strikingly displayed. The forces of atheism and popery had joined to overthrow a nation, the stronghold of Christian truth, and the bulwark of Protestant Europe. In this, so emphatically a holy war, no earthly arm was allowed to achieve the triumph. Human agency was put aside, and all human defences ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... might investigate without peril the views of those who held a different belief, and beheld in me, as it were, the embodiment of this opportunity, so she gave me no peace until I had explained the meaning of the words pantheism, atheism, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "The Age of Reason," were written in Europe, but they were read throughout America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which transformed them ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Pauline shows that young Browning passed through skepticism, atheism, pessimism, cynicism, and that particularly dark state when the mind reacts on itself; when enthusiasms, high hopes, and true faith seem childish; when wit and mockery take the place of zeal, this diabolical substitution ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... ages are made the same way.' BOSWELL. Johnson, in his Dictionary under Whiggism, gives only one quotation, namely, from Swift: 'I could quote passages from fifty pamphlets, wholly made up of whiggism and atheism.' See post, April 28, 1778, where he said: 'I have always said, the first Whig was the Devil;' and Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 21 and Nov. 8, 1773. To Johnson's sayings might be opposed one of Lord Chatham's in the House of Lords: 'There are some distinctions which are inherent ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... foundation," so he is "the corner stone" of the building. It is Christ who hath removed that "partition wall between Jews and Gentiles, even the ceremonies of the one, and the atheism of the other." "He is our peace, who hath made both one." The two sides of the house of God are united by this corner-stone, Jesus Christ. Thus we, who were the temples of Satan, are made the temples of God. Thus poor stranger Gentiles, who had no interest ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... are moreover fully persuaded that to form true notions of the divine nature is more acceptable to them than any sacrifice or mere external act of worship can be, you will by this means be entirely exempt from any danger of falling into superstition, an evil no less to be avoided than atheism itself. ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... failure and likely to be worse. If you have gunpowder, you should not put it under hydraulic pressure. You should not stir it up and hold matches to it to see if it is there. That is what prosecutions and imprisonments on charges of atheism and so on do. It is stirring up the powder and trying it with ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Mr. Storks and Mr. Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane"; and finally—more important than any others—Doctor Jenkinson was Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... corrupting the marchioness's religious views, to pervert her into crime. The marquis was one of those libertines so rare at that time, a period less unhappy than is generally believed, who made science dependent upon, atheism. It is remarkable that great criminals of this epoch, Sainte-Croix for instance, and Exili, the gloomy poisoner, were the first unbelievers, and that they preceded the learned of the following age both, in philosophy and in the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... England, and, as I was thoroughly imbued with Parker's ideas, we had many heated discussions on theology. There, too, I met Orestes Bronson, a remarkably well-read man, who had gone through every phase of religious experience from blank atheism to the bosom of the Catholic Church, where I believe he found repose at the end of his days. He was so arbitrary and dogmatic that most people did not like him; but I appreciated his acquaintance, as he was a liberal thinker and had a world of information which he readily imparted to those ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... citizen to maintain. Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay your rates: don't be a vulgar deist—a fellow like Toland who is poor and has no ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Pensees," the only editions of "Les Provinciales" of recent date are the miserable publications of Charpentier and the Didots. Editions of Voltaire and Rousseau are numerous, elaborate, and elegant; for atheism is pardoned much more easily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay down his life for the right of every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine's centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in The Times; and only a few understood that the persecution of ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... kill each other—or convert each other. I used to think all Christians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards them really. But I know you are sincere—and my soul is mad against you. In the same way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought atheism would leave them free for immorality—and yet in your heart you tolerated them entirely. Now you know that I am an honest man, and you are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong—why one ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... one-and-twenty he began to be regarded as a leader. He became an adept in public speaking too, and the announcement that he was to be present at a meeting was almost sure to draw a crowd. He ceased attending any place of worship, and indeed the incipient atheism of his earlier years seemed to settle into a kind of general unbelief ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... and traditions, making them clear to the comprehension of all. He was the author of an exhaustive work, entitled, Mishne Torah, the "Second Law," which was eagerly copied and extensively disseminated. He also wrote many philosophical treatises leveled against atheism, and designed to prove that God produced the world from naught, and at the age of fifty gave to the world his great work, Moreh Nebuchim ("Guide of the Perplexed"), to which Rabbi ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... preserved of this important conversation; but Mr. C. affirmed that he beat all his arguments to atoms; a result that none who knew him could doubt. He also stated that instead of his being converted to atheism, the atheist himself, after his manner, was converted; for the same day he sent Mr. C. a letter, saying his reasoning was so clear and satisfactory, that he had changed his views and was now "a theist." The next sun ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Colquhoun is equally precise in the number of beggars, prostitutes, and thieves in the City of London. Mercetinus, who wrote under Lewis XV. seems to have afforded the precedent; he assures his readers, that by an accurate calculation there were 50,000 incorrigible atheists in the City of Paris! Atheism then may have been a co-cause of the French revolution; but it should not be burthened ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... space his control becomes rarefied to an invisible vapour; he ends by becoming nothing in any part. With its ultimate principle reduced to the status of a Dieu faineant political Pantheism is transformed into political Atheism. Responsible government is perceived not to exist in Ireland. Mr Barry O'Brien in his admirable book, "Dublin Castle and the Irish People," confesses himself unable to find a better characterisation of the whole system than is contained in a well-known passage ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... enormous value in its struggle for power. Originally and properly an association for the practice and spreading of religion, the corporation had succeeded in making itself an object of worship. One great reason why atheism took root in France was the impossibility, induced by long habit, of distinguishing between religion and Catholicism, and of conceiving that the one may exist without the other. The by-laws of the church ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... your own eyes the frightful position of a girl, married to a man for whom she feels nothing more than esteem. You prate of duty, and make it your rule and measure; but surely to take necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory of atheism? To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart. You are acting a man's part, and your Louis will have ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... The truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation,—the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, to suppress it. The only ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... first, was freed from bondage to the ideas of Aristotle and the alchemists. Atomism, however, was for Boyle merely an instrument of method and not a philosophical theory of the world. A sincerely religious man,[2] he regards with disfavor both the atheism of Epicurus and his complete rejection of teleology—the world-machine points to an intelligent Creator and a purpose in creation; motion, to a divine impulse. He defends, on the other hand, the right of free inquiry ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of course, also combat the claim that Darwinism leads to atheism, and we find them, after themselves having removed the Creator by all their scientific arguments and proofs, making hysterical efforts to smuggle him in again by the back door. To this particular end, they construct ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... atheistic professors have but little power; you statesmen, who sometimes talk of your belief in God, you undermine His authority far more deeply than those professors, by the bad example of your practical atheism. You who imagine you believe in the Godhead of Christ are, in reality, prophets and priests of the false gods. You serve them, as the idolatrous Hebrew princes served them, in high places, in the ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Cicero revised the poem of Lucretius after the death of the author, and this circumstance is urged by the abettors of atheism, as a proof that the principles contained in the work had the sanction of his authority. But no inference in favour of Lucretius's doctrine can justly be drawn from this circumstance. (70) Cicero, though already sufficiently acquainted with the principles of the Epicurean sect, might ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... pastime of the same pursuit, 'which was not unamusing.' And hence bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of knowledge had revenged themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of youth, and by repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... government—of police supervision, of private espionage, of imprisonment, of exile, of political silence—has been tried, and the result is discontent and extensive conspiracy. We fear that even the confession of sensualistic atheism by Solovieff will not prevent his memory from being cherished by thousands of his countrymen. They will forget everything, save his desire to endow them with more freedom. Whatever his faults, they will consider ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... exercise the right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark. Not less evil ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... a state of perplexity, until, doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to the conviction, that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion; for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd; as most of those, whom the world has considered Atheists, have always done. These particulars are important, because they show that my father's rejection of all that is called religious belief, was not, as ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... resolution should carry him successfully through a day so agitating. For although Varney was one of the few, the very few moral monsters who contrive to lull to sleep the remorse of their own bosoms, and are drugged into moral insensibility by atheism, as men in extreme agony are lulled by opium, yet he knew that in the breast of his patron there was already awakened the fire that is never quenched, and that his lord felt, amid all the pomp and magnificence ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty—the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities—is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality—appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for twenty-five centuries, at least, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... back to France another man, after three years' absence: above all, he carried with him the then popular English way of thinking as to the supernatural, and became a somewhat cold, common-sense deist, opposed to the atheism of some and the dull bigotry of the established creed in the hands of others. God was to him conscious creator of the world, and only faintly, if at all, its ruler; he recognized the need of a deity as a starting-point for his system, though he did not feel the need of his care and presence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... amid all the shame and downfall of such hopes in France. And that still profounder loss of delight in Nature herself,—that viewing of all things "in disconnection dull and spiritless," which, as it has been well said, is the truest definition of Atheism, inasmuch as a unity in the universe is the first element in our conception of God,—this dark pathway also was not without its outlet into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God of Beauty, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers |
