"Religious belief" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout believers, and thus induces many ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Ryhove and De Hembyze, caused him to be denounced as "a papist at heart." Indeed the bigots of both creeds in that age of intolerance and persecution were utterly unable to understand his attitude, and could only attribute it to a lack of any sincere religious belief at all. Farnese, meanwhile, whose genius for Machiavellian statesmanship was as remarkable as those gifts for leadership in war which entitled him to rank as the first general of his time, was a man who never failed to take full advantage of the mistakes and weaknesses of his opponents. At the ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of Christianity is not included among the qualifications of school-masters; and I am credibly informed that there have been instances of candidates for schools disavowing all religious belief. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... bodies may, in the discretion of themselves and their parents, resort to it for instruction in the several branches of Science, with the assurance that no attempt will be suffered to be made to bias their religious belief; and with the satisfaction at the same time of knowing, that whenever instruction in Religion may be desired, it cannot be uncertain in what ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... her art was interesting. Her father was a rigid Calvinist, and endeavored to influence his daughter to adopt his religious belief; but her mother, who was a fervent Roman Catholic, persuaded Elizabeth to pass a year in a convent, during which time she ardently embraced the faith of her mother. She was an affectionate daughter to both her parents and devoted her earnings to her brother Louis, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic and encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from those evils on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... for in many of their graves the heads, hands and feet have been found severed from the trunks and lying at some distance from them. On the other hand, the dynastic Egyptians, either as the result of a difference in religious belief, or under the influence of invaders who had settled in their country, attached supreme importance to the preservation and integrity of the dead body, and they adopted every means known to them to prevent its dismemberment and decay. They cleansed it and embalmed it with drugs, spices ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... temporal ascendency of the House of Austria. On the other side, it was less a contest for the reformed doctrines than for national independence. Governments began to form themselves into new combinations, in which community of political interest was far more regarded than community of religious belief. Even at Rome the progress of the Catholic arms was observed with mixed feelings. The Supreme Pontiff was a sovereign prince of the second rank, and was anxious about the balance of power as well as about the propagation of truth. It was known that he dreaded ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... than that the religious belief of more than ninety-nine hundredths of mankind is determined by the geographical accident of birth. Born in Spain they are Catholics; born in England they are Protestants; born in Turkey they are Mohammedans; born in India they are Brahmanists; born in Ceylon they are Buddhists; born in the shadow ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... for national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the outline of a constitution, the most important provisions of which were that there should be guaranteed to all the right to hold meetings without first securing consent from the police; civil rights to all, irrespective of religious belief; a national parliament, whose assent should be essential to the making of all laws. These propositions were approved by the diet, which now advised the king to call together a national assembly of delegates, elected by the people, to agree with him upon a constitution. This was done; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them at intervals a clear statement of principles. Fundamentally the positions of the two men are very different. Martin is not concerned with questions of abstract scholarship, but with matters of religious belief. "But because these places concern no controversy," he says, "I say no more."[221] He does not hesitate to place the authority of the Fathers before the results of contemporary scholarship. "For were not he a wise man, that would prefer one Master Humfrey, Master Fulke, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Gillespie on the point, and think it not a good sign either of our religious belief or religious feeling that such blessings should become really a matter of reminiscence; for if we are taught to pray for one another, and if we are taught that the "prayer of the righteous availeth much," surely we ought to bless one another, and surely the blessing of those who are ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... intellectual as the house rests upon the foundation. Its mental pictures, its concepts, its beliefs, come out of it, and are marred, misshapen, untrue, just to the extent to which that is faulty. Intelligence is necessary to religious belief and religious life. And the intellectual, in its foundation laying, can not stop short at that point any more than a plant can stop growing when its roots are well developed. The process once well begun is ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... remarkable man? and whoever has once met his eyes does not easily forget him. He does indeed rule over mysterious powers, and he used them in his intercourse with the young princess. It is his work if she cleaves to the religious belief of her people, if she who is a Hellene to the last drop of blood loves Egypt, and is ready to make any sacrifice for her independence and grandeur. She is called 'the new Isis,' but Isis presides over the magic arts of the Egyptians, and Anubis ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... community; they were little disturbed by heresy; and if they had been thus infected they were too busily engaged in contending against the difficulties and dangers of a perilous position to be able to give much attention to differences in religious belief. But soon the purity of their faith was in danger of being corrupted by heretical immigrants. The Puritans were the most numerous and powerful of the fugitives from political and religious tyranny in England, and the dominant sect in North America almost as severely oppressed Anabaptists ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... pre-eminently the principle of religious belief:—the metaphysical emancipation and enlightenment of Germany, and the materialistic positivism of France, are then, as I have indicated, nowhere so practically and yet laughably illustrated as by the Gipsy. Free from all the trammels of faith, and, to the last degree, indifferent and rationalistic, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... insensibly Keen Lung entertained a more favorable opinion of the foreigners, and extended to them his protection with other privileges that had long been withheld. But this policy was attributable to practical considerations and not to religious belief. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the new institutions doing admirable work should be mentioned the University Hospital, an Episcopal institution; the Mary J. Johnston Hospital, a Methodist institution; and St. Paul's Hospital, a Catholic institution. Patients are admitted to all of them without regard to their religious belief, a policy the liberality of which must commend itself to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... year 1830 that the revelations of a celebrated chief, whose life was spared on condition of his denouncing his accomplices, laid bare the whole system. The basis of the Thuggee Society is a religious belief—the worship of Bowanee, a gloomy divinity, who is only pleased with carnage, and detests above all things the human race. Her most agreeable sacrifices are human victims, and the more of these her disciple may ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Montesquieu, natural causes alone were operative in history; but this was not all; in his eyes there was one influence which, from the earliest ages, had continually retarded the progress of humanity, and that influence was religious belief. Thus his book, though far more brilliant and far more modern than that of Bossuet, was nevertheless almost equally biased. It was history with a thesis, and the gibe of Montesquieu was justifiable. 'Voltaire,' ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... already been made to the spirits that belong to the higher phases of Mesopotamian culture,—those that have a share in the production of works of skill and art. We have seen that in accounting for these we are justified in assuming a higher phase of religious belief. The dividing line between god and spirit becomes faint, and the numerous protecting patrons of the handicrafts that flourished in Babylonia and Assyria can hardly be placed in the same category with those we have so far been considering. Still, to the popular mind the achievements of the human ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... sect among the Jews, who confined their observances and religious belief to the precepts of Moses, while the Rabbinists followed all the wild fancies of the Talmud. An excellent account of these sects is to be found in the Lettres Juives, or Jewish Spy, by the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... kings, to punish the traitors of important trusts. He arose to point out the true sources of national prosperity, to head off the troops of a renovated Romanism, to promote liberty of conscience in all matters of religious belief. He was raised up as a champion of Protestantism when kings were returning to Rome, and as an awful chastiser of those bigoted and quarrelsome Irish who have ever been hostile to law and order, and uncontrollable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Constantinople, is the most important commercial centre in the East. It is the open door to mysterious Asia, and within its boundaries are found representatives of every race and religious belief of that little-known continent, the land of mystics, nomads, and fanatics. It is a mistake to imagine that the so-called Smyrna rugs are made in that city. As a matter of fact, no rugs are manufactured there. It is the export ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... man has a religious belief peculiar to himself? Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the Salvation Army fell under the laws of the municipalities against nuisances. The final judicial decision in this case was in effect that while persons of every religious belief are free to worship in Switzerland, none in doing so are free seriously to annoy ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... particular argued in great detail (adv. Marc. I. 9-19) that every God must, above all, have revealed himself as a creator. In opposition to Marcion's rejection of all natural theology, he represents this science as the foundation of all religious belief. In this connection he eulogised the created world (I. 13) and at the same time (see also the 2nd Book) argued in favour of the Demiurge, i.e., of the one true God. Irenaeus urged a series of acute and weighty objections to the cosmogony of the Valentinians (see II. 1-5), and showed how untenable ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... religious aspect of his character came to be emphasised. In common acts of life, public and private, the depths of his religious convictions very visibly appeared. And while it is impossible to understand his religious belief except through the knowledge of his life and writings on ordinary subjects, it is impossible on the other hand, to understand his life and writings without bearing in mind how vivid was his realisation of those truths of religion on which he most habitually dwelt. It was this which enabled him to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... elementary stages," the Duchess said, "there is no doubt that it is a power which can do a great deal for us towards solving the mysteries of existence. Personally, I consider it absolutely and entirely inimical to any form of religious belief." ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... occasion for opposition by its inherent claims, independently of accidental causes. For it asserts authority over religious belief in virtue of being a supernatural communication from God, and claims the right to control human thought in virtue of possessing sacred books which are at once the record and the instrument of this communication, written by men endowed with supernatural inspiration. The inspiration of the writers ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... obliging host; he cared for money only as a means of enjoyment, but it formed no part of his scheme of happiness to employ it in promoting the pleasures, or relieving the necessities of others, except in so far as such pleasures were connected with his own gratification. He was absolutely devoid of religious belief or opinions, but he left to all others the unquestioned liberty of rendering that homage to religion from which he gave himself a plenary dispensation. His general conduct was stained with no gross immorality, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... antichristian systems of thought. In earlier times, indeed, this union of philosophy with theology was by no means so imperative. A philosophy like that of Greece, which inherited its speculations from a poetical theogony, would see no difficulty in attributing to the god or gods of its religious belief a secondary and derived existence, dependent on some higher and more original principle, and in separating that principle itself from all immediate connection with religion. It was possible to assume, with the Ionian, a material substance, or, with the Eleatic, an indifferent ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... an old woman, and was, all his life, drunken and quarrelsome. Yet such a man came over to be the guardian of a people who knew not when they were to be tomahawked by the savages or driven into further exile by the zealots who were disturbed at the nature of their religious belief. ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... paths, and I fear some doubtful expedients, there was always one thing which I have striven to cherish and keep pure, and that in turn has rewarded me for my devotion in many a dangerous hour, my religious belief. Now I am Catholic, and I could wish that my son should be Catholic also; these horrible errors, believe me, are as dangerous to the soul as just now they happen to be fatal to the body. May I hope that you, who were brought up but not born in heresy, will consent to ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... real object of the revolution? What was its peculiar character? For what precise reason was it made, and what did it effect? The revolution was not made, as some have supposed, in order to destroy the authority of religious belief. In spite of appearances, it was essentially a social and political revolution; and within the circle of social and political institutions it did not tend to perpetuate and give stability to disorder, or—as one of its chief adversaries ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... God had sent him to Nunsmere Common and destined him to be the mean instrument of Emmy's deliverance? He rubbed the warm pipe bowl against his cheek and excogitated the matter in deep humility. Yes, perhaps God had sent him. His religious belief was nebulous, but up to its degree ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... different divinities were worshipped did not know how to handle the Jews. They did not understand the Jewish character at all. Extreme tolerance (based upon indifference) was the foundation upon which Rome had constructed her very successful Empire. Roman governors never interfered with the religious belief of subject tribes. They demanded that a picture or a statue of the Emperor be placed in the temples of the people who inhabited the outlying parts of the Roman domains. This was a mere formality and it ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... arising from variety of origin. The English in New England presented a very marked contrast to the English in New York and in Virginia. The settlements of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay comprised communities of zealous Calvinists, rigid in their religious belief and ceremonies, codifying their religious principles into political law, and adhering resolutely, through thick and thin, to the idea expressed, by one of the early Puritans, that "our New England was originally a plantation of religion, and not a ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... preserved. A new force had been introduced, and it was disintegrating that mass of social fibre which is modern man, and the decomposition teemed with ideas of duty, virtue, and love. He interrupted Lizzie's chit-chat constantly with reflections concerning the necessity of religious belief in women. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... occur, in the course of the existence of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken, whilst the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... to the mortal remains of the old Countess. Although feeling no remorse, he could not altogether stifle the voice of conscience, which said to him: "You are the murderer of the old woman!" In spite of his entertaining very little religious belief, he was exceedingly superstitious; and believing that the dead Countess might exercise an evil influence on his life, he resolved to be present at her obsequies in order to implore ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Baltimore, who, like the first, was a Roman Catholic, and was influenced in his attempts at colonization by a desire to found a refuge for people of his own faith. At that time in England no Roman Catholic was permitted to educate his children in a foreign land, or to employ a schoolmaster of his religious belief; or keep a weapon; or have Catholic books in his house; or sit in Parliament; or when he died be buried in a parish churchyard. If he did not attend the parish church, he was fined L20 a month. But ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... with the French ladies he sought the lawyer. "Come, my friend," he urged, "if your legs have nothing to say against it, if your religious belief permits, and if you have studied your Latin speech enough for one day, I will find you a good shady spot where you can witness what no mortal eye has seen in all these eighteen Christian centuries, and is little likely to see again in ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... when a youth of fifteen went to be matriculated at Oxford, he was required first to subscribe the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religious Belief. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... why a man's religious belief (which is of course the ground of his religious life) should be supposed to come to him without the trouble of learning, any more than any other body of truths and principles on which people act," Mr. Andrewes went on. "And yet what religious instruction do young people of the educated ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with their simple home customs and their family affections, with their games and sports, their legends and their songs, their dances, fasts, and feasts, their hunting and their fishing, their tribal feuds and wars. They had but little religious belief, save that founded upon the superstition that lies at the foundation of all uncivilized intelligence, and though their customs show a certain strain of cruelty in their nature, this was not a savage and vindictive cruelty, but was, rather, the result of what was, from their way of looking at things, ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... is not a religion but merely a theology; in the language of St. James, "faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone." In other words, no man is religious who does not govern his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand, mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts from the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a first-class man (both in 'Mods' and 'Greats'), proxime accessit for the Hertford, and a Fellow of Pembroke. He learnt German, and specialised in metaphysics. A review which he wrote of Mr Balfour's 'Foundations of Religious Belief' showed how much more deeply than the average journalist he had studied the subjects about which philosophers doubt; and his first book—'Monologues of the Dead'—established his claim to scholarship. Some critics called them vulgar, and ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... now to give the alarm of fire, and to summon everybody to lend a helping hand in extinguishing the flames, but to persuade the storm either to go somewhere else or to act with moderation. This old custom—now dying out—is no doubt founded on the religious belief that when the church bell is rung with faith a storm will do no harm; but the country people join to the religious idea the notion that the vibration of the atmosphere, caused by the ringing, dissipates the storm or turns it in another direction. Unfortunately for the ancient custom, churches ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... up religious belief. It often decides to what church we shall go, and what religious tenets we shall adopt. It goes into the pulpit, and decides the gown, and the surplice, and ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... nucleus of religious belief there grew up in course of time a number of legends, some of which possess considerable interest. Like other thoughtful races, the Iranians speculated upon the early condition of mankind, and conceived a golden age, and a king then reigning over a perfectly happy people, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... wrangles as to whether the gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have hardly raised this question, and have accepted the credible and incredible with equal complacency. I have done this because credibility is a subjective condition, as the evolution of religious belief clearly shows. Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that the miracles occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... whatever religious belief born or residing in the territories annexed to the Kingdom of—— in virtue of the Treaties of London and Bucharest, and who do not claim a foreign nationality and cannot be shown to be claimed as nationals of a foreign state shall be entitled to full civil and political rights as nationals ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... newspaper to publish his work. In "The Interval," Mr. O'Sullivan has sought to suggest the spiritual effect of the war upon a certain type of mind. He has rendered with faithful subtleness the newly aroused longing for religious belief or some form of concrete spiritual expression that bereavement brings. This state has a pathos of its own that the author adequately realizes in his story, and his irony in portraying it is ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the verb whose root is that of mysterion, mysterium, "mystery." In the Greek world "mysteries" were systems of religious belief and practice derived, perhaps, from pre-Hellenic times, and jealously guarded from common knowledge by their votaries. Admission into their secrets, as into those of Freemasonry now, was sought by people of all kinds, from Roman consuls ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... secrets of the ancient world—and such a man is always very much of a humanist. My grandmother, alert, clear, decided on all doctrinal points, argumentative, with all her wits fine-edged by the Shorter Catechism, could not abide the least haziness of outline in religious belief. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... without hope; but it is possible that I have no longer the strength for it, and that, like other men, I must be sustained and consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and immortality—that is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type. Reason and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must have their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the tradition of childhood, into the common hope. It takes so ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... liberty is guaranteed to everyone in the United States. There is equal religious liberty in England, but the King is compelled to belong to a particular section of the Christian Church, whereas in the United States no restriction is placed on the religious belief of the President; thus one President was a Baptist, another a Unitarian, and a third a Congregationalist; and, if elected, a Jew, a Mohammedan, or a Confucianist could become the President. Several Jews have held high Federal offices; they have even been Cabinet Ministers. Article ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... as compared with the imperfect military instruments possessed by the other. They were not essentially different, in that the one fought with lances and the other with guns. But they were essentially different in the whole tone of their religious belief. ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... that, in reclaiming the outcast from the error of his ways, she was making an offering acceptable to that God whom her mere prayers could not move to look with favour upon her prodigal son Andrew. Nor from her own acknowledged religious belief as a background would it have stuck so fiery off either. Indeed, it might have been a partial corrective of some yet more dreadful articles of her creed,—which she held, be it remembered, because she could not ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... natural that the ancient Norwegians should become warlike and brave men, since their firm religious belief was that those who died of sickness or old age would sink down into the dark abode of Hel (Helheim), and that only the brave men who fell in battle would be invited to the feasts in Odin's Hall. Sometimes the earls or kings would make war ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... those studies which amuse but never satisfy the higher intellect, became disgusted betimes with mere legal dialectics. Those grand and absorbing mysteries connected with the Christian faith and the Roman Church (grand and absorbing in proportion as their premises are taken by religious belief as mathematical axioms already proven) seized hold of his imagination, and tasked to the depth his inquisitive reason. The Chronicle of Knyghton cites an interesting anecdote of his life at this, its important, crisis. He had retired to a solitary ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... weak, blue eyes, the white of which predominated. Simply dressed, he nevertheless gave the impression of superior social station. He was of the New England theological-seminary type—narrow-chested, gaunt as to visage, by temperament drawn to theology, or, in default of religious belief, an ardent enthusiast in sociology. The contracted temples, uncertain gaze, and absence of fulness beneath the eyes betrayed the unimaginative man. Art was a sealed book to him, though taxation fairly fired his suspicious soul. He was nervous because ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... not propose to embark at this late hour on what ethnologists know as the "Hamitic" problem. But it is a fact that many striking parallels to Egyptian religious belief and practice have been traced among races of the Sudan and East Africa. These are perhaps in part to be explained as the result of contact and cultural inheritance. But at the same time they are evidence ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... travels. He was not precisely the sort of traveller to write a paper for the evening meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, nor was he sufficiently interested in philosophical theories to speculate on the developments of Mormonism as illustrative of the history of religious belief. We were looking out of the window of the Salt Lake House one morning, when Brigham Young happened to pass down the opposite side of Main Street. It was cold weather, and the prophet was clothed in a thick cloak of some green-colored material. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... be a solution to any of our fundamental problems, and mankind will never, in the full sense of the word, be free, as long as there exists in the human mind the insanity of religious belief. As long as God occupies a portion of our thoughts, mankind must be content to suffer the ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... new, and while we compelled every sect to contribute to the payment of a pretended national religion, we became at once the abhorrence of all the Catholics and Protestants in Europe. The repulsion of our religious belief counteracted the attraction of our political principles.—But truth is at length triumphant, and all the ill-intentioned shall no more be able to detach our neighbours from the dominion of the rights of man, under pretext of a religious dominion which no longer exists.—The ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... district school, was a fair writer and speller and, like her father very fond of reading. She learned to cook and sew, make butter and cheese, spin and weave, and was very domestic in all her tastes. The Reads and Anthonys were near neighbors, and although differing widely in religious belief, a subject of much prominence in those days, they were on terms of intimate friendship even before the ties were made still closer by marriage ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... would say, the real. On the contrary, in Kant's opinion the material world is only the presentation to our senses of something deeper, of which our senses are no judge. The reality lies behind this sensible presentation and appearance. The world of religious belief is the world of this transcendent reality. The spirit of man, which is not pure reason only, but moral will as well, recognises itself also as part of this reality. It expresses the essence of that mysterious reality in terms of its own essence. Its own essence as free spirit is the highest ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... martyrised expression. In her heart she felt a sick trembling of her religious belief that Elektra was the greatest opera ever composed. For Audrey had the prestige of Paris and of the automobile. Mrs. Spatt, however, said not a word. Mr. Ziegler, on the other hand, after shuffling some seconds for utterance, ejaculated with ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... principal seaport, and continued the war for about four years, when a treaty of peace was concluded. Annam was compelled to pay 25,000,000 francs for the expense of the war, and permit every person to enjoy his own religious belief. The missionaries were to be protected, commercial relations were established, and in 1886 a treaty was ratified at Hue, by which the country was placed under the protection of France, though the native princes were nominally continued in power. This was the beginning of ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... sympathy for her own people, it is not without a singular value for readers whose religious belief differs from that of the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... wanted Graham to go. But in giving him he was giving him to the chance of death. Then he must hold to his belief in eternity. He must feel that, or the thing would be unbearable. For the first time in his life he gave conscious thought to Natalie's religious belief. She believed in those things. She must. She sat devoutly through the long service; she slipped, with a little rustle of soft silk, so easily to her knees. Perhaps, if he went to her ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, for the first time found in this colony, had, as its first effect, the banishment of all forms of sectarian persecution, so that the maxim of the Broad Church—"Freedom in non-essentials"—was here put in practical activity to an extent ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:" to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man! All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in thy so genial heart, would have healed again, had not its life-warmth been withdrawn. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... chestnut-colored brick of the Russell Square houses had some curious connection with her thoughts about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... virility was renewed, he looked out once more upon life with eyes militant and brave heart. He was full of the sense of having passed through some purging and beneficent experience. It was not that his religious belief or disbeliefs had been affected, or even quickened by anything he had heard—yet, from first to last, those two hours had been full of delight to him. The vast, dimly-lit building, with its imposing array of statuary, shadowy figures of great ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... thin indeed yet sufficient, which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its better future. Over against the vain confidence of the multitude Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of his religious belief, but now he confronted their present depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still more alien to his nature than temerity. In the name of Jehovah he bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged that ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine. This was the essay Nature, which was published in 1836. By its conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The essay had a very small circulation at first, though later ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which has been the theme of Dr. Baird in the substantial work to which so many years of his life have been devoted. It is to the elucidation of one portion only of the history of this period that he has given himself; but although in this, the story of the Huguenots, nominally only a matter of religious belief was involved, it in fact embraced almost the entire internal politics of the nation, and the struggles for supremacy of its ambitious families, as well as the effort to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... is needed in using it. For the revival of Pantheism at the present day is much more a tangible resultant of action and reaction between Science and Religion than a ghost conjured up by speculation. Thus, religious belief, driven out from "the darkness and the cloud" of Sinai, takes refuge in the mystery of matter; and if the glory passes from the Mount of Transfiguration, it is because it expands to etherialise ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... that we still have settlements in close proximity to each other, whose peoples use different languages in daily conversation, who vary radically in religious belief, have few natural traits in common, and are almost, if not altogether, 'natural enemies' each to each. Thus we have a settlement of Protestant Highland Scotch close by a large estate peopled with Monaghan or Kilkenny Irish Catholics; and perhaps ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... cattleman's fancy, she did not weigh his remarks very heavily. She guessed why Stewart might have been angry at the presence of Padre Marcos. Madeline supposed that it was rather an unusual circumstance for a cowboy to be converted to religious belief. But it was possible. And she knew that religious fervor often manifested itself in extremes of feeling and action. Most likely, in Stewart's case, his real manner had been both misunderstood and exaggerated. However, Madeline had a curious desire, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... might be worth one's while to enquire as to the prevalency of this practice amongst different people, and whether or not it is in general connected with any peculiarities of religious belief. That it was in use in early times, is certain, for we find a prohibition against it in the Mosaic code, Deut. xiv. 1. and an allusion to it in Jerem. xvi. 6. Mr Harmer, who has some observations on the subject, seems to be of opinion that the expression used in Deuteronomy, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... friend, the Emperor there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men; who do all live and work, these many centuries now; authentically patronised by Heaven so far; and therefore must have some 'religion' of a kind. This Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of certain Laws of Heaven; observes, with a religious rigour, his 'three thousand punctualities,' given out by men of insight, some sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the same,—the Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one. He has ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... much use to argue the matter, I suppose," were her words. "It seems to me as if in talking to you I see my old mental self in a mirror, if you'll pardon me for saying so. When we come out from any conviction, and most of all from a religious belief, it seems to us a profound misfortune that any man should still believe what we have decided is false. By and by I think you will see that the chief point is that a man shall believe. What he believes doesn't so ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... reflective in this utterance than the parson was in the habit of displaying; but he liked the doctor, and, although as well as every one else he knew him to be no friend to the church, or to Christianity, or even to religious belief of any sort, his liking, coupled with a vague sense of duty, had urged him to this most unassuming attempt to cast the friendly arm ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... now a recognized principle of philosophy that no religious belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd, can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as true, without having had in the beginning ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Mr. Mansel is a desperate attempt to save Orthodox doctrines from the objections of reason, not by replying to those objections and pointing out their fallacy, but by showing that similar objections can be brought against all religious belief. For example, when reason objects to the Trinity, that it is a contradiction, Mr. Mansel does not attempt to show that it is not a contradiction, but argues that our belief in God is another contradiction ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... declared, "and I would die for a religious belief. But I don't suppose you ever felt that you could die ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... or Anglican revival to dislike it heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most prosperous because they were morally the best. Although he did not accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most philosophic form of religious belief, and Puritanism the soundest sort of ethical creed. The Church of England as understood by his father was to him the healthiest of ecclesiastical institutions, teaching godliness, inculcating duty, saying as little as possible about dogma. Religion, he said, was meant to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... usually people who have healed themselves of a serious diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food, almost as a matter of religious belief. They have become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they'll consume ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... influence of the heart upon the intellect and scholarship, let us hasten to confess that the heart determines the religious belief and creed. It is often said that belief is a matter of pure reason determined wholly by evidence. And doubtless it is true that in approaching mathematical proofs man is to discharge his mind of all color. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... needful.' Mark, 'how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; how, without it, worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury.' Of how much else, 'for a pure moral nature, is not the loss of Religious Belief the loss?' 'All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in the so genial heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... point of the registers, some may be shocked at the idea of a religious register at all, a register framed on the principle of religious belief. We may wish—we do wish—that it were otherwise. We hope that time, with careful and impartial statesmanship, will make things otherwise. Only let us not forget that the difference between Mahomedanism and Hinduism is ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... sentence to give the least encouragement to Christianity. But, although a contrast appears to exist, there is really none. Locke was what may be called a Bible Christian. He rejected all theological systems, and constructed his religious belief in the truly Protestant way,—with the Bible and his inner consciousness. His creed was the Bible as conformed to reason; but he never doubted which, in the event of a conflict, ought to give way. To him the destructive criticism ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... young man whose religious belief was shattered in childhood and restored to him by the little white lady, many years older than himself, to whom ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... in circumstances of which we are necessarily ignorant. Thus I only venture on a surmise as to the germ of a faith in a Maker (if I am not to say "Creator") and Judge of men. But, as to whether the higher religious belief, or the lower mythical stories came first, we are at least certain that the Christian conception of God, given pure, was presently entangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Marchen about the Deity, the Madonna, her Son, and the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... feeling that his religious belief would be in the way of his advancement, when he changed his master he changed his Church. He was given the command of the valley of Barcelonnette, whence he made many excursions against the Barbets; then he was transferred to the command ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... from early times the recognised method of uprooting heretical notions of religious belief of every class. The first to suffer from this cause in England was Alban, who died at the stake in the year A.D. 304. Since his day, thousands have suffered death on account of their religious belief, through intolerance; but that is ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... zeal that had prompted them, were fruitless, or worse. The supposed conversions had produced no change of habits. So degraded had become the character of this once independent people, that professions of religious belief had been made, and the ordinances of religion submitted to, "when an Indian wanted a new blanket, or a squaw a new gown."[19] Thus, according to governor Houston, the only fruits produced by the boasted labours of the missionaries, have been dissimulation ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... resent for a time public supervision of their hygiene teaching and practice. However, the case could be so presented that they would ask for it, because it would help not only their pupils and society but the schools themselves. No religious belief or private investment can afford to admit that it disregards child health; state supervision would require nothing more than evidence ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... consideration from their Mahomedan countrymen. As a public-server therefore, I would be unworthy of the position I claim, if I did not support Indian Mussalmans in their struggle to maintain the Khilafat in accordance with their religious belief. I believe that in supporting them I am rendering a service to the Empire, because by assisting my Mahomedan countrymen to give a disciplined expression to their sentiment it becomes possible to make the agitation ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... which she made use of. Many people are right in what they do, but without knowing why; some wrong, with very fair reasons. She, however, is wrong both ways, but she had been brought up in principles of strong religious belief, and she belongs to a church which teaches that miracles have never ceased from the days of the Apostles till now. Those who believe that a miracle ever was performed cannot doubt that another may be performed now; the only question is as to the fact. We believe that miracles ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... every hand are found the evidences of the cultured refinement of its occupants. A tour of a few months in the Old World not only gave Mr. Ames needed rest and relaxation from business cares, but also furnished him with opportunities for observation which were most judiciously improved. In his religious belief he is a Unitarian, and has for many years been an active member of the Unitarian ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... is supposed to be under divine patronage, criticism of the social order savours of impiety, while criticism of the religious belief is a direct challenge to the ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... name given to the ultimate authority or standard in religious belief, such as the Bible alone, as among Protestants; the Bible and the Church, as among Romanists; reason alone, as among rationalists; the inner light of the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... materialism or your religious belief, you can join us in accepting this practical-science point of view as a common platform upon which to approach our second fundamental proposition, that "all bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... I am concerned," replied the director, "I have no religious belief. But I consider that the Church and the Stage are two great social powers, and that it is beneficial that they should be friends and allies. For my own part, I never lose an opportunity of sealing the alliance. This coming Lent, I shall have Durville read one ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... America, one of the most ennobling conditions of its colonization, that it was made at a time when the deepest religious feeling prevailed throughout Europe, when devotion to some religion was found in every one, when the Bible was a newly found and deeply loved treasure; when the very differences of religious belief and the formation of new sects made each cling more lovingly and more earnestly ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... him in religious belief—that was a distinct comfort. Catholics were not numerous, and to preserve the faith was no slight struggle. He was thoroughly conversant with the state of affairs in the province of New York where Catholics could not, because of the iniquitous law and the prescribed ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... inexperienced and untried in the art of ruling, had introduced order and good government, toleration and justice, wherever he conquered; that he conquered only that he might introduce those principles; that he made no distinction between men on account of their diversity of race or of religious belief; they, apt to believe in the incarnation of the deity, must have recognised something more than ordinarily human, something approaching to the divine and beneficent, ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... prevails largely among rude and uncivilised races, survivals of which even linger on in our own country. To trace back the history of plant-worship would necessitate an inquiry into the origin and development of the nature-worshipping phase of religious belief. Such a subject of research would introduce us to those pre-historic days when human intelligence had succeeded only in selecting for worship the grand and imposing objects of sight and sense. Hence, as Mr. Keary observes,[1] ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... making her own religion predominant, or of oppressing that which was newly established, open resistance was announced to her in threatening terms by its leader John Knox. However much this reaction against her religious belief straitened her on the one side, yet on another side it opened out to her a wider prospect. She already had numerous personally devoted partisans in Great Britain, both in Scotland where she could yet once more call ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... interval signify as much to the local official and the necessary entry would be made in the registers. These formalities would be quite independent of any religious ceremonial the contracting parties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure the modern State ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the Northern races continued forward to put into practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine Right, they destroyed, symbolically, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... instincts. The violence of the Revolution, its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses. The Reformation, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the French religious wars, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror are phenomena of an identical kind, brought about by crowds animated by those religious sentiments which necessarily ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... and capacity; the duration and grandeur of his glory, pure, clean, without spot or envy, and that long after his death it was a religious belief that his very medals brought good fortune to all who carried them about them; and that more kings and princes have written his actions than other historians have written the actions of any other king or prince whatever; and that to this very day the Mohammedans, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... illustration of the fact that the divines are by no means all arrayed upon one side of the question in hand. And indeed, in the present transition period, until some one goes much deeper into the heart of the subject, as respects the relations of modern science to the foundations of religious belief, than either of these writers has done, it is as well that the weight of opinion should be distributed, even if only according to prepossessions, rather than that the whole stress should bear upon a single point, and that perhaps the authority of an interpretation of Scripture. A consensus ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... affection! Erasmus was as dear as a beloved son to these good women, and Frau Lerch's reproach that her intercession for him was but lukewarm had not been wholly groundless. The next day these friends who, notwithstanding the difference in their religious belief, had treated her more kindly than any one in Ratisbon, would hear this and condemn her. That should not be! She would not suffer them to think of her as she did of the shameless old woman whose footsteps she still ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... flesh and the temptations of the world." A strong ascetic tendency in human nature, particularly active in the Orient, undoubtedly explains in a general way the origin and growth of the institution. Various forms of philosophy and religious belief fostered this monastic inclination from time to time by imparting fresh impetus to the desire for soul-purity or by deepening the sense ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod lived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned to them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. These writers accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we know that their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, and they thus provided an early bond ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... purchase such commodities in this land as our country did not possess. He then asked me if our country had any wars; to which I answered, that we were at war with the Spaniards and Portuguese, but at peace with all other nations. He farther asked me, what was my religious belief; to which I made answer, that I believed in God, who created the heavens and the earth. After many questions about religion and many other things, he asked me by what way we came to his country. Having with me a chart ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Catholic habit of reserving esoteric truths). Isaac Williams on Reserve in Religious Teaching, No. 80 of Tracts for the Times, made a great sensation; see R. W. Church's comments in The Oxford Movement. Strictly, accommodation (2) or (3) modifies, in form or in substance, the content of religious belief; reserve, from prudence or cunning, withholds part. "Economy'' is used ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... home, what were the religious belief and worship of the Irish Celts while still pagans? Very few positive facts are known on the subject; but we have data enough to show what they were not; and in such cases negative proofs ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... allegiance and oaths imposing religious tests once operated to debar many, but all that is now required of a member is a very simple oath or affirmation of allegiance, in a form compatible with any shade of religious belief or unbelief. Any male British subject who is of age is qualified for election, unless he belongs to one of a few small groups—notably peers (except Irish); clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, and the Church of Scotland; certain office-holders; bankrupts; and persons convicted ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... There is no religious belief more muddled by the numbers of ceremonious laws and commentaries prescribing its ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... years ago my faith was shaken by what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, but I nursed my religious belief from my mother's bosom; my religion was born and bred in my bones; every drop of blood in my person was electrified in childhood by the cungerings of Catholic legerdemain, and I was taught at my mother's knee to ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... papers, nor would money be spent in this way by their publishers, unless the atheistic and anti-religious works found many purchasers among those who inserted a plank in their party platform stating that the Socialist movement was primarily an economic one and was not concerned with matters of religious belief. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... not,' Julia replied, 'think that her faith in Judaism is of much avail to her. She has found pleasure in reading the sacred books of the Jews, and has often expressed warmly her admiration of the great principles of moral living and of religious belief found in them; but I do not think that she has derived from them that which she conceives to be the sum of all religion and philosophy, a firm belief and hope of immortality. I am sure she has not. She has sometimes ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... examine attentively the character of the facts relative to the religious belief of the Gauls, we are led to recognise two systems of ideas, two bodies of symbols and superstitions altogether distinct—in a word, two religions: the one altogether sensible, derived from the adoration of natural phenomena, and by its forms, as well as by its literal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... accelerating influence, but not as the underlying cause. It is more intelligent, and more to the point, to recognize frankly that among a large and increasing proportion of our people there has been a crumbling away of religious belief. As a result of that, the fundamental feelings of the soul—faith, conscience, aspiration—are being neglected ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... And even now it is with great difficulty that genuine information can be obtained of them. Their aged men are fast falling into their graves, and they carry with them the records of the past history of their people; they are the initiators of the grand rite of religious belief which they believe the Great Spirit has granted to his red children to secure them long life on earth and life hereafter; and in the bosoms of these old men are locked up the original secrets of this their most ancient belief. * ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... church services for some time after his marriage, and the children were christened. But the eldest son did not remember the period of even partial conformity, and considered himself to have been brought up from the first without any religious belief. James Mill had already taken up the uncompromising position congenial to his character, although the reticence which the whole party observed prevented any open expression ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... agreed that there was something weird in the long continuance of fine weather, and that the moon had a strange look. They spoke of the uncertainty of life. Dunham regretted, as he had often regretted before, that his friend had no fixed religious belief; and Staniford gently accepted his solicitude, and said that he had at least a conviction if not a creed. He then begged Dunham's pardon in set terms for trying to wound his feelings the day before; and in the silent hand-clasp that followed they ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... philosophy, and should find able adherents to string on its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is surpassingly strange.... In many respects these speculations are important, and worthy the attention of thinking men. They seek to revolutionize the religious belief of the world, and if accepted would destroy most of the existing theology and philosophy. They indicate tendencies among scientific thinkers, which, though probably temporary, must, before they disappear, descend to lower strata, and reproduce themselves in grosser ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... son of Lord John Russell, wrote an "Analysis of Religious Belief," which, as merely sceptical, his father took steps to secure the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... would overcome her by the fear of denunciation, which would terrify her soul even though she had dared to declare to herself that in her stress of misery she would throw overboard all consideration of her soul's welfare. Though she intended no longer to live in accordance with her religious belief, she feared what religion could say to her,—dreaded to the very marrow of her bones the threats of God's anger and of Satan's power with which her aunt would harass her. If only she could rid herself of it all! Therefore, though she perceived ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... the Latin "credo, I believe"—is, in its ecclesiastical sense, used to denote a summary or concise statement of doctrines formulated and accepted by a church. Although usually connected with religious belief, it has a wider meaning, and designates the principles which an individual or an associated body so holds that they become the springs and guides of conduct. Some sects of Christians reject formal creeds and profess to find the Scriptures sufficient ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... alike, and between them all were constantly little skirmishes of wit, and any one who tacked a thesis on the door had to fight for it. Luther Burbank rightly says that children should not be taught religious dogma. The souls of the Rossettis were not water-logged by religious belief formulated by men with less insight ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Imposing any disability, or conferring any privilege, advantage, or benefit, on account of religious belief, or raising or appropriating directly or indirectly, save as heretofore, any public revenue for any religious purpose, or for the benefit of the holder of any religious office ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... from the execution of the laws to which I have alluded; nor was any one ever condemned by the head of the church for putting Protestants to death. Until, therefore, Rome repeals her exterminating decrees, she must submit to the heavy charge of maintaining the right to persecute men for their religious belief. ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already so hugely cheated; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that gave it the sanctity of a religious belief. At any rate, a distinct sense of discomfort tempered the satisfaction with which, a day or two later, I heard from her that her father had consented to ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... supplementing from them my own experience of London society. The result is that I am more and more confirmed in the fears with which I have already worried you. Two movements are plainly going on in the life of our day. The decay of religious belief is undermining morality, and the progress of Radicalism in politics is working to the same end by overthrowing social distinctions. Evidence stares one in the face from every column of the papers. Of course you have read more or less about the recent "scandal"—I mean the most recent.—It ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Judgment.' Everyone has heard of the picture before seeing it, and almost everybody is surprised or disappointed on seeing it for the first time. Then, too, the world's ideas about the terrific subject of the painting have changed since Michelangelo's day. Religious belief can no more be judged by the standard of realism. It is wiser to look at the fresco as a work of art alone, as the most surprising masterpiece of a master draughtsman, and as ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... speaker read copious extracts from the statutes of the different states in reference to the qualifications for the exercise of citizenship—the religious belief necessary; and, on concluding, asked, "Had they (the members who drew up these state constitutions) ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... upon the people, and during the short period of his administration Alva executed eighteen thousand patriots, including many Catholics; for, in his rage against the free spirit of the Netherlanders, he recognized no distinction in condition or in religious belief. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... they could not but respect himself, he was so consistent and Christianlike in his conduct. Persecution arose in the country where he lived, and men and women were cruelly murdered because of their religious belief. For a long time he was left unmolested, but one day a band of soldiers came to his house, and asked him whether he was a Papist or a Protestant (Papist, Jacques, being a man who has sold his liberty in religious matters ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... truly the end of Christian preaching. What we are most in need of today is a corrected perspective of our faith; without it we darken counsel as we talk in confusion. So, while we may not attempt here a detailed and reasoned statement of religious belief, we may try to say what is the fundamental attitude, both toward nature and toward man, that lies underneath the religious experience. We have seen that we are not stating that attitude very clearly nowadays in our pulpits; hence we are often ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... given word, by the "fealty" and "loyalty" that bound vassal to lord and lord to king. A common faith in its possession of supernatural truths and supernatural powers had bound men together in the religious society which knew itself as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now broken and the feudal conception of society was passing away. On the other hand the individual sense of personal duty, the political consciousness of each citizen that national order and national welfare are essential to his own well-being, had not yet come. The bonds ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... and thus to help not a few to find a way for themselves out of the perplexity. And this inquiry may well begin by asking what is the origin and nature of scientific belief on the one hand and of religious belief on the other. In this Lecture I propose to ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... the stricken field, and spent a night with them. He was afflicted and confounded by the information which they gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship. He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians, and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Science is properly marked by the erection of a visible house of worship in this city, which will be dedicated tomorrow. It has cost $200,000, and no additional sums outside of the subscriptions are asked for. This particular phase of religious belief has impressed itself upon a large and increasing number of Christian people, who have been tempted to examine its principles, and doubtless have been comforted and strengthened by them. Any new movement will awaken some ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy |
