"Predestination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with religion and are yet so concerned; so much that you can scarce take up a local paper and turn to the correspondence column but you will find some heated controversy raging over Free Will and Predestination, the Validity of Holy Orders, Original Sin, Redemption of the many ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Women, the Here the very women and Shop-keepers, and the middle- shopkeepers were able to judge witted People ... less of predestination, and determine busie, and more humble and what laws were fit to lowly in their own eyes, and be obeyed or abolished. to think that they are neither called, nor are fit to meddle with, and judge of the most hidden and mysterious points in Divinity, and Government ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... Apostles, and the Epistle to the Romans; but, oh! stop, they have found it at last? Reader, what do you suppose that they have found? What were they in search of? Why some text of Scripture which seem to support their own peculiar notions on the subject of Baptism, Election, Predestination, the Final Perseverance of the saints, &c. The zeal of such persons to propagate their opinions is not more remarkable than the confident, dogmatic manner in which they express them. It is remarkable that professors of religion who are most ignorant and depraved, those who have embraced ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... soul of man, about matter and form, body and spirit, and space and eternal essences, and incorporeal substances, and the rest of those profound speculations. You are a master of the controversies that have arisen about nature and grace, about predestination and freewill, and all the other abstruse questions that have made so much noise in the schools, and done so much hurt in the world. You are going on, as fast as the infirmities you have contracted will permit, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... gentle, and good, and virtuous, and honourable. And yet, as we look more closely into the pages of history, do we not find that fatality distils her poison from the victim's own wavering feebleness, his own trivial duplicity, blindness, unreason, and vanity? And if it be true that some kind of predestination governs every circumstance of life, it appears to be no less true that such predestination exists in our character only; and to modify character must surely be easy to the man of unfettered will, for is it not constantly changing in the lives ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... far greater difficulty when we endeavour to realize how all the future may also be comprehended in that consciousness. If we could believe in the Mohammedan doctrine of kismet, or the Calvinistic theory of predestination, the conception would be easy enough, but knowing as we do that both these are grotesque distortions of the truth, we must look round ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... may be possible such good as a man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... of the innocent, and especially of infants, consistent with the goodness of God. Section III. The sufferings of Christ consistent with the divine goodness. Section IV. The eternity of future punishment consistent with the goodness of God. Section V. The true doctrine of election and predestination consistent with the goodness of God. Section VI. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... about it," she resumed, "was that while Sally Ann was talkin', not one of us felt like laughin'. We set there as solemn as if parson was preachin' to us on 'lection and predestination. But whenever I think about it now, I laugh fit to kill. And I've thought many a time that Sally Ann's plain talk to them men done more good than all the sermons us women had had preached to us about bein' 'shame-faced' and 'submittin'' ourselves to our husbands, for every one o' them ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... as well as that of a large number of clergymen, who yearly held "protracted meetings" in the place. Sitting up until midnight listening to the discussions of those reverend gentlemen upon baptism, original sin, predestination, and other doctrinal points, her thought was early turned to religious questions. She read the Bible through before she was nine years old, and became a church member at the early age of eleven, her parents, in accordance with their habits, not attempting to influence her mind for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... influence would no doubt be distant and indirect, for a Brahman would not come into contact with Moslim doctors, though it is said that Madhva could speak Persian.[601] But some Moslim ideas such as the absolute separation of God from the world and the predestination of souls to eternal happiness and misery may have entered Brahman minds. Still, nearly all Madhva's views (with the possible exception of eternal punishment) have Indian analogies. The Yoga teaches that there are innumerable souls distinct from ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... to sermons full of the hopelessness of predestination; she frankly said she did not believe that Adam was her federal head and representative, and that she, therefore, was born in sin. "I'm a sinner," she said, smiling; "we're all miserable sinners, you know, Mr. Ward, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few spectators ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... that coalition of interests which makes the happiness of a country is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflection have enabled to comprehend it. This doctrine is in itself pernicious as well as false; its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination or over-ruling principle which cannot be resisted. He that admits it is prepared to comply with every desire that caprice or opportunity shall excite, and to flatter himself that he submits only to the lawful ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... listening keenly to every chance word or sentence he could hear, whether it concerned himself or not. He had peculiar theories, and one of them was, as he would tell you, that if you overheard a remark apparently not intended for you, you were to make yourself quite easy, as it was "a point of predestination" that you should at that particular moment, consciously or unconsciously, play the eavesdropper. The reason of it would, he always averred, be explained to you later on in your career. The well-known saying "listeners never hear any good of themselves" was, he declared, a most ridiculous aphorism. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... upon the cross, and was raised from the dead" (p. 205). Charles the Bald bade Erigena and Ratramn (or Bertramn) draw up the true doctrine of the Church, and the long controversy began which is continued even in the present day. The second great dispute arose on the question of predestination and divine grace. Godeschalcus, an eminent Saxon monk, returning from Rome in A.D. 847, resided for a space in Verona, where he spoke much on predestination, affirming that God had, from all eternity, predestined some to heaven and others to hell. He was condemned at a council held in Mayence, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... that the heathen were now as God had made them, and therefore just as they should be. To establish this theory he used garbled arguments of predestination. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... know. I had my classical quotations very ready.' Besides, the easy allusiveness of Boswell to books and to matters beyond the scope of general readers, his interest in all things going forward in the Johnsonian circle, his shewing himself in some metaphysical points—predestination, for example—fully a match for Johnson, and his own words in the Journal—'he had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge'—all conspire to shew that, if he had no more learning than what he could not help, James Boswell ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... ushered into the world for combining ancient prejudices with modern time-serving, it is by a Member of the University. Thus we get at a stated supply of the annual Defences of the Sinking Fund, Thoughts on the Evils of Education, Treatises on Predestination, and Eulogies on Mr. Malthus, all from the same source, and through the same vent. If they came from any other quarter nobody would look at them; but they have an Imprimatur from dulness and authority: we know that there is no offence in them; and they are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... would make a confession of faith this communion, but he had not come before the session at all. She knew he had doubts concerning close communion, and she had heard him say that certain complications of predestination and free will did not appear reasonable to him. Marg'et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have thought of criticising the Creator for making the sky blue instead of green ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... relation of Foxe the martyrologist, destroyed himself in these years in religious desperation; he was found in his study hanging by his girdle, before an open Bible, with his dead arm and finger stretched pitifully towards a passage on predestination.[105] ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Fathers (notably Augustine) advanced the question to the Theological stage, by connecting it with the great doctrines of Original Sin and Predestination; in which stage it shared all the speculative difficulties attaching to these doctrines. The Theological world, however, has always been divided between Free-will and Necessity; and probably the weightiest ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Mahomet (your chief) began To mix them in the Alchoran: Denounc'd and pray'd, with fierce devotion, And bended elbows on the cushion; Stole from the beggars all your tones, 1105 And gifted mortifying groans; Had Lights where better eyes were blind, As pigs are said to see the wind Fill'd Bedlam with predestination, And Knights-bridge with illumination: 1110 Made children, with your tones, to run for't, As bad as bloody-bones, or LUNSFORD: While women, great with child, miscarry'd, For being to malignants marry'd Transform'd ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... doctrine of Free-Will consists simply of an attempt to identify it with the notion of Chance in physics. The notion of Chance, he says, is the same with that of Free-Will; the doctrine of Necessary Connection with the dogma of Predestination. This statement has certainly an imposing air. But consider it. To assert the identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,—that where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... religion.(342) His philosophy of revealed religion is contained in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.(343) This work was called forth by the disputes of the age, and had the political object of defending liberty of thought as necessary to the safety both of the state and of religion. The question of predestination had rent the Dutch church shortly before this time; and when the victory remained with the Calvinistic party, the opinions of the liberal Remonstrants were treated as crimes. Spinoza proposed in this ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... have chapels and churches of their own, molehills would become mountains, and the congregations would go from arguing into fighting. With Parliament to help her, therefore, she established a Liturgy, in which those who wished to find the Mass could hear the Mass, while those who wanted predestination and justification by faith could find it in the Articles. Both could meet under a common roof, and use a common service, if they would only be reasonable. If they would not be reasonable, the Catholics ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... forthwith puzzling their brains as to HOW he died for them; how Christ's blood washes away their sins; how it is applied, and to whom; puzzling their brains with theories of the atonement, and with predestination, and satisfaction, and forensic justification, and particular redemption, and long words which (four out of five of them) are not in the Bible, but are spun out of men's own minds, as spiders' webs are from spiders—and, like them, mostly fit to ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... the party, he borrowed for the occasion, as well as his pistol. The three proceeded on their way—La Salle, the friar, and the Indian. "All the way," writes the friar, "he spoke to me of nothing but matters of piety, grace, and predestination; enlarging on the debt he owed to God, who had saved him from so many perils during more than twenty years of travel in America. Suddenly, I saw him overwhelmed with a profound sadness, for which he himself could not account. He was so much moved ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... is with the Ministry. He meets a friend at White's, and they adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern, where the drawer brings them a bottle of New French and a neat's tongue, over which they discuss the doctrine of predestination so hotly that two mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their lifted voices for a cry for fish. His friend has business in the city, and so our poet strolls off to the Park, and takes a turn in the Mall with his hat in his ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... son, and great the pains taken over the latter's education. The schoolmaster laid stress upon authors such as Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fulgentius. By these means the boy not only learnt Latin, but he also tackled questions of Predestination and Grace, glosses upon St. Paul, hymns and methods of frustrating the Arian. Above all, he was exercised in the Divine Library, as they called the Bible, taught by St. Jerome. Hugh was of course the favourite of the master, who whipt him ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... knowing whether an absolute predestination (fatalism, regulating the universe in advance in all its details) exists or not, is a question of pure metaphysics, the solution of which is quite beyond human comprehension, and need not occupy us here. We must simply depend on the scientific postulate ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... you shall have decided on your departure, perform the journey as rapidly as possible, and bring here, into my house, in the Rue de Babylone (what predestination! that I should dwell in the street of BABYLON,—a name which must at least accord with the ear of an Oriental),—you will bring hither, I say, this dear prince, who is so happy as to have been born in a country ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and Predestination—the two dogmas which have, more than any others, agitated the public mind—are discussed at length. Of course he accepts the latter theory, but under a different name. Free Will, he contends, inevitably leads to aristocracy, and Predestination ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sparkling with mockery. He savored with an intimate pleasure her certainty that he would follow the train of her thought; and he decided to try to get another rise out of the round-eyed little clergyman. "Oh, if it weren't the Negro problem, Mr. Bayweather, it would be free-will or predestination, or capital and labor. Mr. Welles suffers from a duty-complex, inflamed to a morbid degree by a life-long compliance to a ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to it; and bless You and your Posterity, and keep Thee as a good Christian. And have God always before your eyes;—and don't believe that damnable PARTICULAR tenet [Predestination]; and be obedient and faithful: so shall it, here in Time and there in Eternity, go well with thee;—and whoever wishes that from the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... we cannot fight against," I said passionately. "The doctrine of predestination is the devil's own doctrine. It is the doctrine set up by the sinner to excuse his sin; it is the coward's doctrine. Understand me, Margot, I love you, but I am not a weak fool. There must be an end of this folly. Perhaps you are playing ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... If a boy is well stuffed with good things and then won't listen to advice, you might as well stop wasting your breath on him, because there is something radically wrong with him. Probably his grandfather had dyspepsia. And a dyspeptic ancestor is worse for a boy than predestination, in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... combination of even a simple form of clairvoyance and an active subconscious mind will often produce very wonderful results—although not of course the more complex phenomena of full clairvoyance and prevision. Some persons have claimed that even this form of prevision implies something like fate or predestination, but this is not fully true, for we must remember the fact that in some cases it is possible to so act in accordance with a clairvoyant warning of this kind that the impending calamity may be escaped. But, on the other hand, we must also remember that every event is the result of certain ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... through Grant's lines. Had he met alone a squadron of cavalry in the field, he would, probably, have taken his stand against a pine, and aimed his musket as coolly as if a squirrel were the mark. With his sunny temper, and his gloomy gospel of predestination, his heart could swell with hope even while he fought single-handed in the face of big battalions. What concerned him, after all, was not so much the chance of an ultimate victory for the cause, as the determination ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... as deeply as you may. Some people think otherwise; that they can get the peace of God by understanding. If they could but understand more, their minds would be at rest. So they weary themselves with reading, and thinking, and arguing, perhaps trying to understand predestination, election, assurance; perhaps trying to understand which is the true Church. What do they get thereby? Certainly not the peace of God. They certainly do not set their minds at rest. They cannot. Books cannot give a live soul rest. Understanding cannot. Nothing can give you ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... greatness to which they had not been born Advancing age diminished his tendency to other carnal pleasures All his disciples and converts are to be punished with death All reading of the scriptures (forbidden) Altercation between Luther and Erasmus, upon predestination An hereditary papacy, a perpetual pope-emperor Announced his approaching marriage with the Virgin Mary As ready as papists, with age, fagot, and excommunication Attacking the authority of the pope Bold reformer had ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... love of justice, by the prayers of St. Gregory; and that Riphaeus, for the same reason, had been gifted with a prophetic knowledge of the Redemption; and then it ended with a rapture on the hidden mysteries of Predestination, and on the joy of ignorance itself when submitting to the divine will. The two blessed spirits, meanwhile, whom the bird mentioned, like the fingers of sweet lutenist to sweet singer, when they quiver to his warble as it goes, manifested the delight they experienced ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... poetry outside of the drama, Browning's is the least abstract and the most concrete. Poetry is not condemned because it arouses thought, but only when it is abstract in method. Browning often deals with profound ideas, but always by concrete illustrations. For example, he discusses the doctrine of predestination by giving us the individual figure of Johannes-Agricola in meditation: the royalist point of view in the seventeenth century by cavaliers singing three songs: the damnation of indecision by two Laodicaean lovers in The Statue and the Bust. When Browning is interested in any doctrine, idea, or system ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... generally supposed that Napoleon was a believer in the doctrine of predestination. The following conversation with Las Cases clearly decides that point. "Pray," said he, "am I not thought to be given to a belief in predestination?"—"Yes, Sire; at least by many people."—"Well, well! let them ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Controversy with the Donatists,—their peculiarities Tracts: Unity of the Church and Religious Toleration Contest with the Pelagians: Pelagius and Celestius Principles of Pelagianism Doctrines of Augustine: Grace; Predestination; Sovereignty of God; Servitude of the Will Results of the Pelagian controversy Other writings of Augustine: "The City of God;" Soliloquies; Sermons Death and character Eulogists of Augustine His posthumous ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... governor and bear-leader, was just putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s anchor rattled overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would have made one plunge with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on being roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... outline form the scripture references the teachings about each. Power, sin and unrighteousness, righteousness, justification, faith and belief, atonement, redemption, adoption, propitiation, election, predestination. ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... short one to confound mortality, that durst question God, or ask him what he was. In- deed, he only is; all others have and shall be; but, in eternity, there is no distinction of tenses; and therefore that terrible term, predestination, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to ex- plain, is in respect to God no prescious determination of our estates to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... of connection in man, and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... It was the fashion in the Philosophic party to represent the whole matter as a miserable squabble. Yet, apart from the importance of the original controversy, which touched the mighty but insoluble questions of predestination and free-will, the quarrel had a true interest for patriotic Frenchmen. The Roman Church was contending for the absolute and unlimited control of religious matters; the Parliament for the supremacy of law ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... also, joint Burggraves after their Father's death, seemed to have reconciled themselves without difficulty. The elder of them was already Sigismund's Brother-in-law; married to Sigismund's and Wenzel's sister,—by such predestination as we saw. Burggraf Johann III. was the name of this one: a stout fighter and manager for many years; much liked, and looked to, by Sigismund. As indeed were both the Brothers, for that matter; always, together or in succession, a kind of right-hand to Sigismund. Friedrich the younger ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... assistance, but at length some advantages gained over the Portuguese afforded a proper opportunity, and accordingly a fleet was fitted out, with which Jeinal sailed for Pase. In order to form a judgment of the transactions of this kingdom it must be understood that the people, having an idea of predestination, always conceived present possession to constitute right, however that possession might have been acquired; but yet they made no scruple of deposing and murdering their sovereigns, and justified their acts by this argument; that the fate of concerns so important as the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs, etc. Emerson: ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in predestination (or "fore-ordering," as Aunt Ruth used to call it), and some do not. I never knew what I believed about events and their happening, but it was certainly true I learned to know that my efforts to hurry or retard anything were in one sense entirely futile—that is, when I did not work in unison ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... serious-looking gentleman, with a glass of something before him. With him, as I sipped my brandy and water, I got into discourse. The discourse soon took a religious turn, and terminated in a dispute. He told me he believed in divine predestination; I told him I did not, but that I believed in divine prescience. He asked me whether I hoped to be saved; I told him I did, and asked him whether he hoped to be saved. He told me he did not, and as he said so, he tapped with a silver ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... have made the world from matter. He maintains that "the hands of Destiny ever deal, in fixed and equal parts their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and weal" to all that breathe our upper air. The problem of predestination he holds in scorn. The unequality of life exists and "that settles it" for him. He accepts one bowl with scant delight but he says "who drains the score must ne'er expect to rue the headache in the morn." Disputing about creeds is "mumbling ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... doctrine there were in the church two main parties, known as the Auld Lichts and the New Lichts. The former were high Calvinists, emphasizing the doctrines of election, predestination, original sin, and eternal punishment. The latter comprised many of the younger clergy who had been touched by the rationalistic tendencies of the century, and who were blamed for various heresies—notably Arminianism and Socinianism. Whatever their ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... there fell a-talking with a certain Pelagian about Adam an' Eve, an' because the fellow turn'd stubborn, put a knife into his waistband, an' had to run away to sea: a middling drinker only, but after a quart or so to hear him tackle Predestination! So there be times after all when I sets'n apart, and says, 'Drunk, you'm no good, but half-drunk, you'm priceless.' Now there's a man—" He dropp'd his mop, and, leading us aft, pointed with admiring ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... be a puzzle to many, how beings should be born into the world whose organization is such that they unavoidably, even in a civilized country, become malefactors. Does God, it may be asked, make criminals? Does he fashion certain beings with a predestination to evil? He does not do so; and yet the criminal type of brain, as it is called, comes into existence in accordance with laws which the Deity has established. It is not, however, as the result of the first ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... and a Canon of Winchester. He was a man of great musical talent, and some of his chants are still in use. The only other fact recollected of him was, that being told that he used hard words in his sermons, he asked a labourer if he knew what was meant by Predestination, and was answered, "Yes, sir, some'at about the innards of a pig." He generally resided there. Mr. Marsh remained curate of Hursley and was presented to the living of Baddesley. All this time Otterbourne had only one Sunday service, alternately matins or evensong, and the church bell was ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... our own, always remains continual and revocable at will; that, for a few only, it is or becomes plenary and lasting, that no one amongst us can be sure of obtaining it, and that its award, determined beforehand on high, forever remains for us a State secret. Hence the prolonged controversies on Predestination, Free-will and Original Sin, and the profound investigations on man before, during and after the Fall. Hence, also, the accepted solutions, not very conclusive and, if one pleases, contradictory, but practical, average and well calculated for maintaining ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... life, differ extremely by the age and constitution of their bodies and difference of employment—as he that lives on shore against him that goes to sea, or a young man against an old man, or a shopkeeper against a soldier, are unequal. I do not pretend to determine the controverted point of predestination, the foreknowledge and decrees of Providence. Perhaps, if a man be decreed to be killed in the trenches, the same foreknowledge ordered him to list himself a soldier, that it might come to pass, and the like ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... near Oxford, together with his fellowship. He continued in his college, till he was qualified, by his years of residence, for the degree of bachelor of divinity, which he attempted to take in 1641, but was denied his grace [57], for disputing concerning predestination, contrary to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... this Democracy, so-called, all the really good people are in the business of forcing others to their own way of thinking. I must tell you also of a branch of the Presbyterian church which separated from the old church on the question of predestination and infant damnation. Of Baptists, Methodists, and others there are numerous sects, which in England would be frowned upon as various forms of ludicrous non-conformism. De Tocqueville's book, for which my thanks to you, dear grandmama, will preserve ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Predestination and free will are both taught. "Everything is in the hands of heaven, except the fear of heaven." "All things are ordained of God, but men's actions are their own." When men wish to sin they are enjoined to go to a place where they are unknown, and to clothe themselves in black so as not ...
— Hebrew Literature
... bleached out a little under old Doc Hoover's preaching. And in the church down Main Street they taught that a lot of us were predestined to be damned, and a few of us to be saved; and naturally we all had our favorite selections for the first bunch. I used to accept the doctrine of predestination for a couple of weeks every year, just before the Main Street church held its Sunday-school picnic, and there are a few old rascals in the Stock Yards that make me lean toward it sometimes now; but, in the main, I believe that most ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew—and knew that the rest knew—that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute, that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns, had mingled effects upon impressionable girls. For the proportion of masculine ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... circumstances. Severe cold benumbs his faculties of mind as well as body, and the nature of his ordinary food is such that unless the supply is regular and sufficient his strength fails him; and again, his belief in predestination is strong, and often a trivial reverse will induce him to abandon himself to his fate. But in these days the Hindoo soldier need not fear that his noble and gallant qualities will not be understood or appreciated. Every good soldier will honor the Hindoo for his patient ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... give any sort of an opinion whatever upon the Shorter Catechism was, in his father's eyes, nothing short of impious. But, as the young man was of that class that rush in where angels fear to tread, he had given his views on predestination without any hesitancy and had gone off to the field leaving his father in a very bad humour. Wee Andra himself was particularly happy, for he took an unfilial delight in troubling his paternal relative. At heart he was respectful and dutiful and if ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... on his part than anything foretold to Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... its logical implications. For if God is infinite, then He is all; and if He is all, what becomes of human individuality, or how are human initiative and responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett, in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if somewhat tentative, are well ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... introduce the question concerning the secret predestination of God, because we are not considering what might or might not happen, but what the nature of man truly was. Adam, therefore, might have stood if he chose, since it was only by his own will that he fell; but it was because his will was pliable in either ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... better worth while to operate upon a ray of Sirius. But 'tis exceeding hard to obtain this ray pure, because of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose rays mingle with it. Flamel esteemed it more simple to operate upon terrestrial fire. Flamel! there's predestination in the name! Flamma! yes, fire. All lies there. The diamond is contained in the carbon, gold is in the fire. But how to extract it? Magistri affirms that there are certain feminine names, which possess a charm so ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Prophet, and that the latter committed nothing to writing, but taught by word of mouth. Besides, it is clear that Mohammedanism is an offshoot of Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Like these, it teaches the Unity of the Whole, the divine Presence in all creatures and things (Ubiquity), Predestination, which is only one form of Karma, and Resurrection, which ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... What a study is this! To attain a dim reflection of it, is the ambition of angels—higher they can not soar. "To be conformed to the image of His Son!"—it is the end of God in the predestination of His Church from all eternity. "We shall be like Him!"—it is the ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... of this month, Knox had returned to Edinburgh. His work on Predestination was published this ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... friendly, social rows, were books of all sorts, sizes, and bindings, the titles of which I had read so often that I knew them by heart. There were Bell's Sermons, Bonnett's Inquiries, Bogue's Essays, Toplady on Predestination, Boston's Fourfold State, Law's Serious Call, and other works of that kind. These I looked over wistfully, day after day, without even a hope of getting something interesting out of them. The thought that father could read and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... ensue during the time. Contrary to regulations, I granted the request. Now the question naturally arises, had he gone on his regular duties would the circumstances have been different? The soldier is generally a believer in the doctrine of predestination in the abstract, and it is well he is so, for otherwise many soldiers would run away from battle. But as it is, he consoles himself with the theories of the old doggerel quartet, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... and gave us his reasons for being so. He passed some scathing comments on the contumacy and narrow-mindedness of the sect who had the misfortune to be his opponents; and after that he proceeded to say a few words about Free Will and Predestination. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... acquainted," he replied, "with the Scripture doctrine of Predestination, and, in thinking over it, in connection with the destinies of man, it must have struck you that, however much it may interfere with our fixed notions of the goodness of Deity, it is thoroughly in accordance with the actual condition of our race. As far as we can know of ourselves and the things ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... he looked at me. He whispered something about predestination. Then Billy lifted his horn and made ready to give a little soft grunt, to see if the moose wouldn't move along a bit, just to oblige us. But as Billy drew in his breath, one of those fool flies that are always blundering around a man's face flew straight down his throat. Instead of a call he burst ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... admonition to England; an application to the Scots nobility, &c.; a letter to Mary the queen-regent, a history of the reformation; a treatise on predestination, the first and second blast of the trumpet; a sermon preached August 1565, on account of which he was for some time prohibited from preaching. He left also sundry manuscripts, sermons, tracts, &c. which ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... to have occasion to cruelly punish all those who in walking should hurt each other; but who would reward splendidly the small number of those to whom the sight was spared, for having the skill to avoid an encounter with their comrades. Such are the ideas which the dogma of gratuitous predestination ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Frederic, he brought on himself the bitter enmity of those calling themselves "Gnesio-Lutherans," or "Genuine Lutherans." Melanchthon abolished congregational hymn-singing, and published his true views, hitherto dissembled, on predestination and the sacrament. He was attacked by Flacius the historian, and by many others. The dispute was taken up by still others and went to such lengths that for a minor heresy a pastor, Funck, was executed by his ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... fuses makes the most sensation in his day; he who crystallizes has a longer and wider power. Calvinism, in its essential features, never will cease from the earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it. The predestination of a sovereign will is written over all things. The old Greek tragedians read it, and expressed it. So did Mahomet, Napoleon, Cromwell. Why? They found it so by their own experience; they tried the forces of nature enough to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Whenever this happened, was it not his duty to endeavor to repair the damage? Were not penances imposed on him in the confessional for every default? Luther is said to have been led into still deeper gloom by his study of the doctrine of predestination. True, but even this study did not lead Luther off into fatalism. It terrified him, because he studied that profound doctrine without a true perception of divine grace and the meaning of the Redeemer's work. However, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... assumed in accordance with the race dogma that some European races are born to rule and others to obey, it was inevitable that they should draw the further inference that they of all races were the dominant race. It is true that the belief of the Calvinist in religious predestination may lead to a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic conclusion. The believer in predestination may assume that he is predestined to eternal damnation as easily as he assumes that he is predestined to eternal salvation. But the pseudo-scientific mind and the materialistic mind ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... was no such thing as contagion from the sick people to the sound; and so strongly did this whimsey prevail among people, that they run altogether promiscuously, sick and well. Not the Mohammedans, who, prepossessed with the principle of predestination, value[311] nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will, could be more obstinate than the people of London. They that were perfectly sound, and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into the city, made nothing ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... speaks in the course of the Sacred Narrative but when he breaks silence at the scene of the Last Supper to ask the Lord a question as to predestination; and Christ replies beside the mark, or rather does not answer him at all. He was also the author of a Canonical Epistle, in which he seems to have been inspired by the Second Epistle of Saint Peter; and, according to Saint Augustine, it was he who introduced the dogma of the Resurrection ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... these difficulties, and of many more too, of which I should gradually understand more and more after I was a Christian. Or again, it appears to me even now, Christian as I am, judging as a plain man, that predestination contradicts free-will; and no explanation can make them both reasonable. Yet, by the grace of God, I believe all these doctrines and many more, not because I understand them, for I do not; but because I believe that they are part of the Revelation of God. It is just so, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... philosopher that he seems hardly to be conscious of the difficulties of his own theory. Both in Paradise Lost and in the Treatise of Christian Doctrine he enlarges with much dogmatism and some arrogance on the difference between foreknowledge and foreordination. He rejects predestination decisively, but he not only does not answer, he does not even so much as mention, the difficulty that arises in attempting to distinguish between what is foreordained by Omniscience and what is foreknown by Omnipotence. Pope compared some of the speeches ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... scoffingly to a friend in his own country, to this purpose; "That the common people of England were wiser than the wisest of his nation; for here the very women and shop-keepers were able to judge of Predestination, and to determine what laws were fit to be made concerning Church-government; and then, what were fit to be obeyed or abolished. That they were more able—or at least thought so—to raise and determine perplexed Cases of Conscience, ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... of this Lake at an hour when there was no one at the Bois? Vaudrey believed neither in superstitions nor in predestination. Nevertheless, he considered the meeting extraordinary, but there is in this fantastic life a reality that brings in our path the being about whom one has just been thinking. He had frequently observed this fact. He had already descended from ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... obvious to all save the most frivolous that these things were meant to be so. As the Aryan saying has it, looking forward there are a dozen ways, looking backward on the way each man has traveled, there is but one. Crude tragedy carries with it its own conviction of predestination. It would be absurd to suggest that Togral Beg killed thirteen million people by accident or by an extraordinary succession of chances. Admit there is such an element as chance, and between it ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... confession of their faith, and received baptism as an outward and visible sign of a spiritual change. Yet during those long years without a church I was not without religion. I knew naught of "justification," of "predestination," of "transubstantiation." I only knew I must obey the will of God. Here was the Bible; it was the word of God. There was Christ, beautiful, tender, adorable, and he said: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... exclamations, and her great-great-great-grandmother looked at her with horror. "You have been brought up as one of the heathen," said she. Then she produced a small book, and Letitia was bidden to seat herself upon a stool and learn the doctrine of predestination before breakfast. ...
— The Green Door • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... mind of Rawleigh perceived how much men are formed and changed by education; but, were this principle admitted to its extent, the stars would lose their influence! In pleading for the free agency of man, he would escape from the pernicious tendency of predestination, or the astral influence, which yet he allows. To extricate himself from the dilemma, he invents an analogical reasoning of a royal power of dispensing with the laws in extreme cases; so that, though he does not deny "the binding of the stars," he declares they ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment. The titles of his sermons are significant: Men Naturally God's Enemies, Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost, The Final Judgment, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these discourses, "has a heart ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... charlatanery to set them off, he had been nothing. He might, keeping within the rigid line of his duty and professed calling, have preached on for ever; he might have divided the old-fashioned doctrines of election, grace, reprobation, predestination, into his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth heads, and his lastly have been looked for as a "consummation devoutly to be wished;" he might have defied the devil and all his works, and by the help of a loud voice ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the German ambassador had been dismissed, and the American ambassador recalled from Berlin. To older men these events were subjects to think and converse about; but to boys like Claude they were life and death, predestination. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... should not live together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination reigns nowhere more strongly than in clothes, and it would have been inconceivable that either Miss Martin's body or her mind should have assimilated the harmonious fluid adaptability of the draperies that framed and surrounded Lady Gore as she ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... means and estates and endowments and appanages, withal he had no seed, or son or daughter, and therefore he sued Almighty Allah that he might be blessed with even a girl-child to inherit his good and keep it together. Suddenly he heard a Voice bespeak him in dreamery saying, "Ho Such-an-one, Predestination overcometh Prudence and resignation to the trials sent by Allah is foremost and fairest." Hearing this he arose without stay or delay and casually[FN498] slept with his wife who, by decree of the Decreer and by allowance of Allah Almighty, conceived ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Reformation was also one of earnest discussion between the adherents of the old faith and the followers of Luther. The questions discussed in those days, both in apostolic and post-apostolic times, were eminently practical; but they were not a whit more so than the questions of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election. These touch every man to the very centre of his being when he awakes from the sleep of indifference, and wishes to know the truth about the salvation of his soul. It has been our object, in the present volume, to dispel ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... intercommunication between all churches holding the main doctrines of the Reformation. P. Bayle recounts the title-pages of no fewer than thirty-two books of which Amyraut was the author. These show that he took part in all the great controversies on predestination and Arminianism which then so agitated and harassed all Europe. Substantially he held fast the Calvinism of his preceptor Cameron; but, like Richard Baxter in England, by his breadth and charity he exposed himself to all manner of misconstruction. In 1634 he published his Traite de la ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Willie," an elder of Mauchline, and an austere and hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the fiercest of all his lampoons. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," he lays a burning hand on the terrible doctrine of predestination: this is a satire, daring, personal, and profane. Willie claims praise in the singular, acknowledges folly in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his sins! in a similar strain of undevout satire, he congratulates Goudie, of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Religion. These ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... often attempted to show that Gordon was an extreme Calvinist, there is no evidence that he ever stated his views on the subject in any stronger language than that used in Article XVII. of the Prayer-Book of the Church of England, which says:—"Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... relates, that most of Bussapa's family have fallen victims to tigers. But the firm belief of the "tiger-slayer" in predestination, makes him blind ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... that the bulk of mankind should seemingly be "children of the devil," born of the flesh, and incapable of salvation. The difficulty exists, but it has been exaggerated. St. John does not touch either the metaphysical problem of the origin of evil, or predestination in the Calvinistic sense. The vivid contrasts of light and shade in his picture express his judgment on the tragic fate of the Jewish people, The Gospel is not a polemical treatise, but it bears traces of recent conflicts. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... transmigration seems to have no bearing whatever beyond a numbing of the will.[117] For in theory, the Hindu's fate is just. In strict logic no doubt the same numbing effect might be alleged about the Christian doctrine of predestination. Even when misfortune has overtaken an educated Hindu, I think I am justified in saying that the more frequent thought with him is now in keeping with the new theistic belief; the misfortune is referred to the will of God. As already said, it is a commonplace of the unfortunate student who has failed, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... mean time the writings of those good authors, who, by all past ages, have been recognized as masters of literature and style, are struck out of their hands, and they (the schoolmasters) substitute their own comments; disputing in a circle of children about Anti-Christ and the doctrine of predestination."[21] ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade education—that is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency is often sadly lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts—not ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... in predestination as if he had been, like me, a Calvinist, for nineteen years. I do not know how he learnt the affair of the Duc du Maine; he has always kept it a great secret. But what appears the most singular to me is that he does not hate his brother-in-law, who has ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... which was often crowded in my youth, is almost deserted now. This generation is too light and frivolous for such a heroic creed: the sons of the old members are not men enough to stand up under the moral weight of Calvinism and predestination. Absurd as the doctrine seems to us, it went with or begot something in those men and women of an earlier time—a moral fibre and depth of character—to which the later generations are strangers. Of course those men were nearer the stump than we are and ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... involveth risk of death, and I know not if thy valour can make the attainment thereto possible to thee." Rejoined Zayn al-Asnam, "Know, O Mubarak, that opulence is gained only by blood; nor cometh aught upon mankind save by determination and predestination of the Creator (be He glorified and magnified!); so look to thine own stoutness of heart and take thou no thought of me." Thereupon Mubarak forthright bade his slaves get them ready for wayfare; so they obeyed his bidding in all things and mounted horse and travelled by light ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... other single work of Browning's can rival this in scope and power. It would seem as if he had, at the moment, almost a prescience of the incalculable value of this crumpled and dilapidated volume; as if he intuitively recognized what he afterward referred to as "the predestination." On his way homeward ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "O Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... was that everybody was placed in life to fulfil a divine purpose and invested with the power to fulfil it. "No, no, it's not fatalism," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Not predestination. It's just exactly like a chess problem or an acrostic. The Creator sets it. He knows the solution, the answer. You've got to work it out. It's all keyed for you just as the final move in chess or the final discovery in an acrostic is keyed ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... creation, or the relation of things in such an order. And we have seen, that things singly are good, and together very good, in Thy Word, in Thy Only-Begotten, both heaven and earth, the Head and the body of the Church, in Thy predestination before all times, without morning and evening. But when Thou begannest to execute in time the things predestinated, to the end Thou mightest reveal hidden things, and rectify our disorders; for our sins hung over us, and we had sunk into the dark deep; and Thy good Spirit was borne over ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... strangers in old London, nor inconsiderable among the inhabitants of the Row. Their press had done its part in the work of the times. They had printed the 'Book of Sports' and the 'Westminster Confession;' broadside ballads concerning Robin Hood and Maid Marian; and heavy folios on Free-will and Predestination. Christopher and Hubert had increased in substance also to a degree never dreamed of in their German home. The dealers in books began to talk of them as somewhat notable men; but cares and causes of division had come with property and importance. In some respects, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... the contrary, there is no such predestination to a sharply defined place in the social organism. However much men may differ in the quality of their intellects, the intensity of their passions, and the delicacy of their sensations, it cannot be said that one is fitted by his organization ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... before—and this is the reason of their surprise at my appearance. The children, of course, are equally astonished, but are too frightened to reflect steadily on an European. Both the women and men say it is maktoub, ("predestination") which has brought me amongst them, and they are right. These poor people are very civil to me. In my quality of tabeeb they consult me. The prevailing disease is sore eyes. Two children were brought to me, a girl with a dropsy of a year's standing, and a boy with only one ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... less than three days old (for a special nourishment is capable of transforming these into royal nymphs, such being the grand democratic principle of the hive, and a counterpoise to the prerogatives of maternal predestination), and then, her loss once known, after two or three hours, perhaps, for the city is vast; work will cease in almost every direction. The young will no longer be cared for; part of the inhabitants will wander in every direction, seeking their mother, in quest ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 1757.... "Sensible as heart can be to the tender interest you deign to take in what concerns me. Dear Sister, fear nothing on my score: men are always in the hand of what we call Fate" ("Predestination, GNADENWAHL,"—Pardon us, Papa!—"CE QU'ON NOMME LE DESTIN); accidents will befall people, walking on the streets, sitting in their room, lying in their bed; and there are many who escape the perils ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... up his mind as to freewill and predestination, but in spite of this doubt expressly states his desire to find ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... will. And what precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct. Man is only what he becomes—profound truth; but he becomes only what he is, truth still more profound. What am I? Terrible question! Problem of predestination, of birth, of liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I heard this evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul tormented and appealing and finally seizing ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after death,—of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation, and matters, in fact, which never can be known ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... if I had been a doctor or a captain, I should have had a cobweb and predestination in the place of them. Your soldiers of the religion on the one side, and of the good old faith on the other, would not have left unto me safe and sound even that good old ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... quelqne part la consistance et l'uniformite que nous voyons prendre aux connaissances humaines, aux arts les plus futiles, aux metiers les plus meprises? Ces mots d'esprit, d'immaterialite, de creation, de predestination, de grace; cette foule de distinctions subtiles dont la theologie s'est parteut remplie dans quelques pays, ces inventions si ingenieuses, imaginees par des penseurs qui se sont succedes depuis taut de siecles, n'ont fait, helas! qu'embrouiller ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... common doctrine of hell as a physical locality, and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam, birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the lineage of Adam as a dark ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... predestination, compare Childe Harold, Canto I. stanza lxxxiii. line 9, Poetical Works, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... returned to England with his church and formed the first Baptist church worshipping on English soil. The church met in Newgate Street, London, and was the origin of the "General" Baptist denomination. Helwys and his followers were Arminians, repudiating with heat the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. They thus differed from other Independents. "They also differed on the power of the magistrate in matters of belief and conscience. It was, in short, from their little dingy meeting house ... that there flashed out, first in England, the absolute doctrine of Religious Liberty" (Prof. Masson). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... detail the formation of his creed of conduct in the dawn on Lake Champlain, and showed her that according to its tenets he was permitted a kind of action that in other men might be reprehensible. He came to the story of Evie last of all, and allowed her to see how dominating a part Fate, or Predestination ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... remained intact; and he was joyful. He struck a light to look at his watch: the watch had stopped;—that was a bad sign. He could not forget it. Why had his watch stopped? A chilling thought as to whether predestination did not govern the world, allayed all tumult in his mind. He dressed carefully, and soon heard a great City bell, with horrid gulfs between the strokes, tell him that the hour was eleven toward ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... infant baptism. He therefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists and was immersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Wesleyan, and though she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sources. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ are acknowledged as prophets. The deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity are repudiated. The miracles of Jesus are acknowledged. Mohammed does not claim for himself miraculous power. Predestination is taught, but this became a conspicuous tenet of Moslems after the death of the founder. The immortality of the soul is admitted, the pains of hell are threatened to the wicked and to "infidels;" and a sensual paradise ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the strongest kind upon predestination which Miller heard there brought the subject of theology upon us and it would not down. Mr. Miller's people were strong Methodists, and Tom had known little of dogmas. This doctrine of predestination, including infant damnation—some born to glory and others to the opposite—appalled ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... another remarkable fact, and of more personal moment than the scintillation of the stars, by finding I had put my head in an ant's nest. I started to my feet, affirming that I had never been so unwary before. But I am a believer in predestination, and know that this accident could no more fail of occurrence, than that from my cradle, in harmony of order, it should fail being traced, link by link, to the instant at which it came upon me. See, now, its consequences. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the Gens-d'Armes, being found a pious and intelligent man, has his orders not to return at once from Custrin; but to stay there, and deal with the Prince, on that horrible Predestination topic and his other unexampled backslidings which have ended so. Muller stayed accordingly, for a couple of weeks, intensely busy on the Predestination topic, and generally in assuaging, and mutually mollifying, paternal Majesty and afflicted Son. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... bias charged by him upon us: as, therefore, he doth must uncharitably and untruly judge us to be biassed with adventitious engagements, so doth he judge of them. Neither can he assoil them while he condemneth us; for the articles concerning predestination, the death of Christ, grace, free will, and perseverance, were determined before the Synod of Dort by most (if not by all) of those reformed churches who sent commissioners thither, as much as presbyterial government was determined in the church of Scotland before ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... and generally throughout the Mahommedan dominions, the people are strikingly attached to charms, to which, and nature, they leave the cure of almost every disorder; and this is the most strongly impressed upon them from their belief in predestination, which, according to their creed, stipulates the evil a man is to suffer, as well as the length of time it is ordained he should live upon the land of his forefathers; consequently they imagine that any interference from secondary means would ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... on the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed,—with Pre Des Bosses on Transubstantiation, and with Samuel Clarke on Time and Space,—with Remond de Montmort on Plato, and with Franke on Popular Education,— with the Queen of Prussia (his pupil) on Free-will and Predestination, and with the Electress Sophia, her mother, (in her eighty-fourth year,) on English Politics,—with the cabinet of Peter the Great on the Slavonic and Oriental Languages, and with that of the German Emperor on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... famous among the writings of St. Fulgentius, is that entitled, On the Two-fold Predestination, to Monimus, in answer to certain difficulties proposed to him by a friend of that name. In the first book he shows, that though God foresees sin, he predestinates no one to evil, but only to good, or to grace ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... real world of man's experience, there is Free Will. They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a conflict between motives that have different moral values constantly arises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is so puzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know that in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as new sprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In the abstract world ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... this as if it was settled, but it is not more than it was, excepting that from Captain Fitz-Roy wishing me so much to go, and from his kindness, I feel a predestination I shall start. I spent a very pleasant evening with him yesterday. He must be more than twenty-three years old; he is of a slight figure, and a dark but handsome edition of Mr. Kynaston, and, according to my notions, pre-eminently ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... slow to furnish, from the motives which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism, instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they say to our most cherished powers, There is no ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... reply Robin's mind was running on previous conversations which he had had with his friend on predestination. ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Christianity. The whole strength of the intellects which had long been engaged in the conflict for national and religious liberty, was now directed to metaphysical theology, and wasted upon interminable disputes about predestination and grace. Barneveldt enrolled himself among the partisans of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... work in his day but of late he has devoted himself, especially in the "Mesnevi," to a rapprochement between Al-Islam and Christianity which both would reject (see supra, vol. vii. p. 135). The Calvinistic predestination as shown in the term "vessel of wrath," is but a feeble reflection of Moslem fatalism. On this subject I shall have more to say ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... night. He lay the rest of the dark hours in one of the ruins, and when he arose in the morning, he said, "None is in fault! I, for one, sought my own good, and he is no fool who seeketh good for himself; and the druggist's wife also sought good for herself; but Predestination overcometh Precaution and for me there remaineth no tarrying in this town." So he went forth from the place. "Nor" (continued the Wazir), "is this story, strange though it be, stranger than that of the King and his Son ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... entertained, Lady Fermanagh," he answered. "Miss Rostrevor and I have been discussing predestination. I have been telling her it was foretold by the King of the Gypsies that in this, my thirty-fifth year, I should meet my ideal, the woman predestined to be my wife. I have met her. ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Theist? Has Sir G. G. Stokes never read St. Paul? Has he never heard of John Calvin and Martin Luther? Has he never read the Thirty-nine Articles of his own Church? All those authorities teach predestination; which, indeed, logically follows the doctrine of an all-wise and all-powerful God. Yet here is Sir G. G. Stokes, a Church of England man, objecting to the "materialistic hypothesis" on the ground that ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... perfect, and pitiless as Predestination itself. Around Pompey's Amphitheatre stores of hemp caught fire, and ropes used in circuses, arenas, and every kind of machine at the games, and with them the adjoining buildings containing barrels of pitch with which ropes were smeared. In a few ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... work upon predestination, he maintained that "material fire is no part of the torments of the damned;"[239] a very singular notion in those times of frightful superstition, when the minds of men were harrowed into despair by descriptions of hell's torments—and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... but at length his patience wore out; he cut her short in all her futile attempts at spiritualization, and mocked at her wire-drawn degrees of faith, hope, and repentance. He also dared to doubt of the great standard doctrine of absolute predestination, which put the crown on the lady's Christian resentment. She declared her helpmate to be a limb of Antichrist, and one with whom no regenerated person could associate. She therefore bespoke a separate establishment, and, before the expiry of the first six months, the arrangements ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... two dogmas which have, more than any others, agitated the public mind—are discussed at length. Of course he accepts the latter theory, but under a different name. Free Will, he contends, inevitably leads to aristocracy, and Predestination to democracy; and the British and Scottish churches are cited as examples of the effect of the two doctrines on ecclesiastical organizations. The former is an ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Lord to His churches." A reply to this book was published in a volume by the Rev. Jonathan Scott, of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which contains copious extracts from it. Alline misrepresented all the leading doctrines of Christianity, assailing predestination and election, maintaining the freedom of man's will and upholding the final perseverance of the saints, emphasizing strongly conversion, and that the soul is at the same moment completely sanctified, while sin remains in the body; denying the resurrection of the body, and though sometimes practising ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... behind him, at his death, a treatise, posthumously published in 1640, entitled, "Augustinus," in which he professed to set forth the true opinions of St. Augustine on those century-long disputed questions of Grace, Free-Will, and Predestination. Taking ground against the Molinists, he contended for the doctrine of Predestination antecedent and absolute, a gift purely gratuitous, of God's free grace, independent of any virtue or merit in the recipient soul. This doctrine, set forth in five propositions, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various |
