"Casuistry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him on the throne of Poland—but, of a truth, under the vassalage of the Emperor of the French! Kosciusko was not to be consoled for Poland by riches bestowed on himself, nor betrayed into compromising her birthright of national independence by the casuistry that would have made his parental sceptre the ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... as tyrannical, over-bearing, malignant, and treacherous. He did his best to counsel moderation and mutual toleration, for he felt that these needless theological disputes about an abstract and insoluble problem of casuistry were digging an abyss in which the Republic might be swallowed up for ever. If ever man worked steadily with the best lights of experience and inborn sagacity for the good of his country and in defence of a constitutional ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... casuistry, but the compassion the heart decides for itself. But, sir," deepening in seriousness, "as I now for the first realize, you but a moment since introduced the word irresponsible in a way I am not used to. Now, sir, though, out of a tolerant spirit, as I hope, I try my ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... their artful evasion of them. The Pharisees could be easy enough to themselves when convenient, and always as hard and unrelenting as possible to all others. They quibbled, and dissolved their vows, with experienced casuistry. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees in Matthew xv. and Mark vii. for flagrantly violating the fifth commandment, by allowing the vow of a son, perhaps made in hasty anger, its full force, when he had sworn that his father should never be the better for him, or anything ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye—these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued—where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... enable a man to save himself the trouble of reasoning. It encourages the indolent propensity of deciding difficulties by precedent instead of principles. Macaulay, for example, was once required to argue the point of political casuistry as to the degree of independent action permissible to members of a Cabinet. An ordinary mind would have to answer by striking a rough balance between the conveniences and inconveniences likely to arise. It would be forced, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... war therefore inevitable, and must we not prepare diligently for it? I will answer all these questions quite simply and directly without casuistry and logic-chopping, and honestly desiring to avoid paradox and "cleverness." And these quite simple answers will not be in contradiction with anything that I have written, nor will they invalidate any of the principles I have attempted ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of Peter forms a subject of Christian casuistry in patristic literature, and this passage recalls the famous classical parallel in Euripides (Hipp. 612), "the tongue hath sworn: yet unsworn is the heart." Cf. Augustine, cont. mendacium: "In that denial he held fast the truth ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... services of a special class of students. The scribes, who interpret the law and apply it to life, obtain great influence and become the virtual rulers of the nation. While no doubt guided in the main by the noble spirit of their religion, they are led by their system into many absurdities, and their casuistry even becomes at times immoral. They afford the classical example of the results which flow from the doctrine of verbal inspiration, thoroughly worked out; and the life of the Jews under them becomes highly unnatural and artificial, and tends to occupy itself with the husk ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... trade." This episodic discussion ended, the story of the will is resumed. The father, when on the point of destroying it, was seized with a scruple of conscience, and hastened to a cure well versed in casuistry. As in England the agents of the law itself not seldom play the part of arbitrary benevolence, which the old Diderot would fain have played against the law, the scene may perhaps ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... had been anticipating a long struggle to bring the young criminal to see the error of his ways; but instead, he found that he had to use his skill in casuistry to convince the boy that he was not hopelessly sullied. And when at last Samuel had been persuaded that he might take up his life again, there was nothing that would satisfy him save to go back where he had been before, and take up that struggle ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... plans, the steel had entered the hearts of all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his "schipperkes" were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism would pass, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Moral Sense which finds in the Atonement of our LORD nothing but a stone of stumbling and a snare. It is true of Popish error also;—for what else is this but a setting up of the Human above the Divine,—(Tradition, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, the casuistry of the Confessional, and the like,)—and so, once more substituting the creature for the Creator?—What again is the fashionable intellectual sin of the day, but the self-same detestable offence, under quite a different disguise? ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the echoes of this casuistry in his brain. It seemed to him but a part of the ingenious system of evasion whereby a society bent on the undisturbed pursuit of amusement had contrived to protect itself from the intrusion of the disagreeable: a policy summed up in Mr. Langhope's concluding advice ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... a thief; apples and plums and so on are quite safe, though the turnip-tops are not: there is a subtle casuistry involved here—the distinction between the quasi-wild and the garden product. He is not a poacher in the sense of entering coverts, or even snaring a rabbit. If the pheasants are so numerous and so tame that passing carters have to whip them out of the way of the horses, it is hardly wonderful ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... expose her; to conceal it, however, was questionable, as the Prince might complain afterwards that a straight princess had been promised, and a crooked one fraudulently substituted,—and so on, though a good deal more of such quaint casuistry, in which the Landgrave was accomplished. The amount of his answer, however, to the marriage proposal was an unequivocal negative, from which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... smell of the lamp. He ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... had the courage to have added, "and sugar!" How dangerous it is to expose them to such temptations! The boy must have immediately perceived the object of his nurse's casuistry. He must guess that she would be blamed for the addition of the sugar, else why should she wish to suppress the word? His gratitude is engaged to his nurse for running this risk to indulge him; his mother, by the force of contrast, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... sour. However, we had excellent beds. In my room there was a small collection of books, on a dusty shelf, which I should not have expected to find in such hands. Among them were some old works of theological casuistry, Metastasio, a translation of Voltaire's plays, and a geographical dictionary in Italian. I learnt that they had belonged to the proprietor's uncle, a medico at Padua, and were heirlooms with his property, which our host inherited. The ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me, perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who, in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she showed herself a dialectician ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... no doubt, by subtle casuistry persuaded himself that he was doing good to the boy. He would be educated by the Jesuits, with whom he had cast in his lot; he would be trained as a son of the Catholic Church, and by this he hoped to gain favour, and strike off ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... paternal corrections can be carried without abuse, and the problem whether a man who kills a person, whom he believes and has reason to believe to be his father, but who is not so in fact, is guilty or not of the sin of parricide, seem rather questions for clerical casuistry than considerations which bear upon facts. The final conclusion drawn from these various reflections is, that the court confirms the judgment of the Perugian tribunal, in ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... and recklessly? She found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the resources of an over-abundant casuistry. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Captain's conscience had no right to be quite at peace. For certainly he had not told all the truth to his dear friend, the Count of Fieramondi. Yet since no more was heard of Paul de Roustache, and the Countess's journey remained an unbroken secret, these questions of casuistry need not be raised. After all, is it for a man to ruin the tranquillity of a home for the selfish pleasure of ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... of morality with the considerations that can be shown to produce general happiness. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between these rules and considerations, utility is the only sure criterion. To the extreme situations in which casuistry revels, as when a man is called upon to sacrifice his life or his personal honour for his country's good, the Utilitarian would apply this unfailing test inexorably; in such cases a man ought to decide upon a calculation of the greatest happiness of the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... too good to take part, but not too good to take profit. Charles Sumner happened to be the partner to receive these stolen goods, but between his friend and his father the boy felt no distinction, and, for him, there was none. He entered into no casuistry on the matter. His friend was right because his friend, and the boy shared the glory. The question of education did not rise while the conflict lasted. Yet every one saw as clearly then as afterwards that a lesson of some sort must be learned and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... probabilities and degrees of evidence. He had a manifest incapacity, which was quite as much moral as intellectual, for looking facts in the face and pursuing trains of thought to unwelcome conclusions. He often took refuge from them in clouds of casuistry. The scepticism which was a marked feature of his intellect allied itself closely with credulity, for it was directed against reason itself; and though he has expressed in admirable language many true and beautiful thoughts, the glamour of his style too often concealed much weakness and uncertainty ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... point of view of the "pound-of-flesh" incident (1 : 393-410), writes, "I may remark that this recital [i.e., of the decisions], which here borders on the comic, is based upon serious traditional legends which have to do with Buddhistic casuistry" (p. 397). Benfey's fragmentary citations are not very convincing; but this Jataka proves that his reasoning, as ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... of property interests resting under a growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a series of problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a rehabilitation of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and conscientious lady of the writer's acquaintance became possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in a Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Church? A man who lives with a woman and does not hide it, who even declares his firm intention of continuing to live with his concubine—can he be admitted to baptism? Augustin has to answer all these questions, and go into the very smallest details of casuistry. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... his virtuous resolutions. The first half of them he carried out perfectly: he did go straight to Cecil Tresilyan, and tell her of his intentions to depart. She did not betray much of her disappointment or surprise, but she argued with so fascinating a casuistry against the necessity of such a sudden step, that it was no wonder if she soon convinced her hearer of the propriety of at least delaying it. In a case like this an excuse of "urgent private affairs" that would ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... passed the point of casuistry too. "Well, of course I don't know, Mrs. Saunders. Has she said anything ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... fiery than gratitude. At the other extreme stand relations like that with Anne Park, the heroine of Yestreen I had a Pint o' Wine, which were purely passionate and transitory. Between these come a long procession affording excellent material for the ingenuity of those skilled in the casuistry of the sexes: the boyish flame for Handsome Nell; the slightly more mature feeling for Ellison Begbie; the various phases of his passion for Jean Armour; the perhaps partly factitious reverence for Highland Mary; the respectful adoration for Margaret Chalmers to whom he is supposed to have ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... given him the permission he asked of her was, that before so sudden and unexpected a demand she found herself confused and helpless; had she been able to reflect, the temptation would probably have been resisted, for the pleasantness of the thought made her regard it as a grave temptation. Casuistry and sophistical reasoning with her own heart ensued, to the increase of her morbid sensitiveness; she persuaded herself that greater insight into the world's evil would be of aid in her struggle, and so the contents ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... dear," said B. to L., the vicar corroborating like the sound of a small amen. For a while the donor resolutely declined to buy split-cane rods, deeming high-class greenhearts sufficient for beginners, though the vicar argued that it was always wise in tuition to begin as you intend to proceed. This casuistry ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... poor man who dared not offer it for sale. Once in his possession, the thought of giving it up, or of letting the owner redeem it, had never even occurred to him. Yet the treasure made him rejoice with a trembling which all his casuistry would have found it hard to explain; for he would not confess to himself its real cause—namely, that his God-born essence was uneasy with a vague knowledge that it lay in the bosom of a thief. "Don't you think, sir," said Dawtie, "that ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... the gospel,' then. How grand the unity and simplicity thus breathed into our duties and through our lives! All duties are capable of reduction to this one, and though we shall still need detailed instruction and specific precepts, we shall be set free from the pedantry of a small scrupulous casuistry, which fetters men's limbs with microscopic bands, and shall joyfully learn how much mightier and happier is the life which is shaped by one fruitful principle, than that which is hampered by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale; ten minutes afterwards ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... sort of a fellow Lord Bacon was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since—agreeably instigated thereto by the casuistry ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... laughed in pure joy at his praise of her; for every bantering phrase had then been a caress. But now the words returned with a sinister meaning. She knew they were true as far as Amherst was concerned: in the arts of casuistry and equivocation a child could have outmatched him, and she had only to exert her will to dupe him as deeply as she pleased. Well! the task was odious, but it was needful: it was the bitterest part of her expiation that she must deceive him once more to save him from the results ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... too, George II., had thoughts of bringing her over and declaring her Queen Dowager, one can hardly believe that a ceremonial divorce had passed, the existence of which process would have glared in the face of her royalty. But though German casuistry might allow her husband to take another wife with his left hand, because his legal wife had suffered her right hand to be kissed in bed by a gallant, even Westphalian or Aulic counsellors could not have pronounced that such ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... pressure of a rising gale, so that human mass surged and broke in waves of audible emotion, when Beryl's voice ceased; for the grace and beauty of a sorrowing woman hold a spell more potent than volumes of forensic eloquence, of juridic casuistry, of rhetorical pyrotechnics, and at its touch, the latent floods of pity gushed; people sprang to their feet, and somewhere in the wide auditory a woman sobbed. Habitues of a celebrated Salon des Etrangers recall the tradition of a Hungarian ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... answer to my angry missive of April came to me towards autumn, and who wrote back from Virginia with war for war, controlment for controlment. These menaces, however, frightened me little: my poor mother's thunder could not reach me; and my conscience, or casuistry, supplied me with other interpretations for her texts of Scripture, so that her oracles had not the least weight with me in frightening me from my purpose. How my new loves speeded I neither informed her, nor any other members of my maternal or paternal ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... amusement, although we are accustomed to use the club freely throughout the daytime. All the more reason, then, that once in a while—I need a distraction and there are some interesting psychological deductions—But hang casuistry; it is enough to say ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... one of those good, simple-minded creatures, educated abroad, who, when invited to fight, simply bow, and load two pistols, and get themselves called at six; instead of taking down tomes of casuistry and puzzling their poor brains to find out whether they are gamecocks or ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... forty-two short days, on the 27th of the 12th Month (March) 1671-2, he had fully analysed 'The Design,' exposed the sophistry, and scripturally answered the gross errors which abound in every page of this learned and subtle piece of casuistry. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that a poet should have any opinions about Russia, or, having some, should find anybody to take them seriously. It is all cant, my friends—nothing but cant; and at its base lies the old dispute between principle and casuistry. If politics and statecraft rest ultimately on principles of right and wrong, then a poet has as clear a right as any man to speak upon them: as clear a right now as when Tennyson lifted his voice on behalf of the Fleet, or Wordsworth penned his 'Two Voices' sonnet, or Milton denounced the massacres ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... distractions, desire, nay insist, that their confessors shall absolve them for their acts of inconstancy. The priests, on their side, are drawn or forced on, step by step. There grows up a vast literature, at once various and learned, of casuistry, of the art of allowing all things; a progressive literature, in which the indulgence of to-night seems to become the severity of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... young minds of the right or wrong views of political questions entertained by their instructors. The fathers were right. When the life of the nation is concerned,—in the struggle with foreign or domestic foes,—there is a right and a wrong in politics which casuistry may seek to confuse, but which sound moral sentiment cannot mistake, and which those who have schools of learning in charge should be held to respect. Better the College should be disbanded than be a nursery of treason. Better these halls even now should be levelled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... subject referred to by De Morgan is his expression of opinion in his Theological Essays (1853) that future punishment is not eternal. As a result of this expression he lost his professorship at King's College. In 1866 he was made Knightbridge Professor of Casuistry, Moral Theology, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... explanation. The philosophy of our Household Cavalry, like the religion of Napoleon's "Old Guard," is adapted for action rather than casuistry. He did not tell her that in the journey of life for some the path is made smooth and easy, for others paved with flint and choked with thorns; but that a wise Director knows best the capabilities of the wayfarer, and the amount of toil required to fit him for his rest. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... David all that she had done for him. He would give up everything rather than desert David Sechard; David must witness his success. It was one of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so well—unconscious revelations ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... fix upon a definite ratio of income or property of universal obligation, will give constant ground for questions of casuistry inevitably tending rather to screen the conscience, than to stimulate ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... of casuistry, Amelie, like others of her sex, placed a hand of steel, encased in a silken glove, upon her heart, and tyrannically suppressed its yearnings. She was a victim, with the outward show of conquest over her feelings. In the consciousness of Philibert's ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... things to pack, luncheon to be got ready, and the Fontainebleau pension to be telephoned to, there was little time to waste on moral casuistry; and Susy asked herself with a certain irony if the chronic lack of time to deal with money difficulties had not been the chief cause of her previous lapses. There was no time to deal with this question either; no time, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... connexion and general principles. If I cannot but be viewed as an enemy of the Church of England as a Methodist, it is a poor compliment to tell me that I am friendly to it as a man. I do not understand the hair-splitting casuistry which separates the man ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... is a simpler thing than we have supposed. One can go into a theological library today and find stacks and stacks of volumes on religion, ethics, theology, casuistry, exegesis, philosophy, the Bible, ecclesiastical history, mysticism, apologetics, metaphysics and a dozen other subjects, all designed to illuminate, define and expound the realities that Jesus taught; but somehow they seem worthless when we note the clear grasp of the inner truth that the simple ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... penetrating imagination that reveals as by a lightning flash unsuspected depths of human character or of moral law. But he has the gnomic faculty that can convey truths of general experience in aphoristic form, and he can wind into a debatable moral issue with adroit casuistry. Take for instance the discussion (II, i, 149-79) on the legitimacy of private vengeance, or (III, i, 10-30) on the nature and effect of sin, or (V, ii) on Nature's "blindness" in her workings. In lighter vein, but winged with the shafts of a caustic humour are Bussy's ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... pedant are neighbours. Their kinship is visible in the fop. The subtile is derived from the sensual. Gluttony affects delicacy, a grimace of disgust conceals cupidity. And then woman feels her weak point guarded by all that casuistry of gallantry which takes the place of scruples in prudes. It is a line of circumvallation with a ditch. Every prude puts on an air of repugnance. It is a protection. She will consent, but ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... worrying until her own interests seemed threatened. But the dog evidently thought of the welfare of his absent master, and had a vague troubled sense that something was wrong. He waddled up to the intruder, and gravely smelled of him. By some canine casuistry he arrived at the same conclusion which society had reached—that Haldane was a suspicious character, and should be kept at arm's-length. Indeed, the sagacious beast seemed to feel toward the unfortunate youth precisely the same impulse which had actuated all the prudent citizens ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a rough shelter. That whole chapter, describing the indefatigable industry with which they labour on the voluntary task, their glee in the truantry from the labour for which they are paid, their casuistry over the theft of milk for the pious purpose of keeping the poor lad alive, the odd blending of cowardice and magnanimity in their terror of the sickness and in their constant care that some one should at least be always in earshot of the boy, ready to pass ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... his troubles ceased. He gave up his speculations and casuistry, and concluded to take things as he found them and to make them better. He became more than ever the friend and patron of his servants, rendered to them, to the best of his ability that which was just and equal, felt ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... rainfalls, the sowing of the maize and the corn, the travail of the earth and the growing and developing of the stately heads of maize from one tiny, dried, yellow grain—that he has no inclination for petty casuistry, for arguments or philosophy. God's work is all that he ever sees: the book of life and death ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... purpose to enter into the range of this great controversy, or to endeavour to estimate its value, or the merits of the attack and defence on particular points. The subject is one by itself, more or less entering into the whole question of morals, and especially the immense fabric of casuistry or moral theology built up by successive teachers in the Jesuit schools. Trained, as he was, a devout disciple of the Roman Church, enthusiastic on behalf of its doctrines and preachers, Pascal had apparently no knowledge of the details of Jesuit ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... of food and rum, double and triple; and the assignment of men to earn wages, as the salaries of their masters, were gradually substituted by payments in money. The small sums formerly allowed, were rather the wages of servants who live on their fees: by a casuistry, never long wanting to those who earnestly seek it, even men beyond the rank of overseers, persuaded themselves that the recognised stipends were never intended to be reckoned as payment.[139] The tender of these supplies was a source of profit to the officers; ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... taken refuge in casuistry and told the king that it was not for a pope to be bound to the cardinal's promises, in which contention he would have been supported by the Jesuits. However, in his heart Ganganelli had no liking for the Jesuits. He was a Franciscan, and not ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for an instant; but that his conscience troubled him may be fairly inferred from the fact that he withheld from the World for twenty years afterward the knowledge that he was their author. It is probable that in this case, as in others, he was a victim of that casuistry which teaches that "the end justifies the means;" that he hoped and believed that the assertion of these baleful doctrines would act solely as a check upon any tendency to further centralization of power in the General Government and insure that ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... "science of casuistry," by which the moral value of an act is determined and the exact degree of guilt attaching to a ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... advice? I have consulted God and demigod; the nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-eyed Minerva. Both have said the same. My own heart was telling it already. Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with all this paralysing casuistry. I am happy to-day ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Vooda's persuasive tongue and knack of casuistry, did not wish to argue the point—knowing, as he did full well, the object of Vooda's visit—and at once made up his mind that he would not ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... movement attracted the greatest attention. The Scholastic system of philosophy had been abandoned in favour of the teaching of the Leibniz-Wolf school and of Kant. The entire course of study for ecclesiastical students underwent a complete reorganisation. Scholasticism, casuistry, and controversy were eliminated. Their places were taken by Patrology, Church History, Pastoral Theology, and Biblical Exegesis of the kind then in vogue ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... mischievous; but it was altogether inefficient as a means of binding the supple and slippery consciences of cunning priests, who, while affecting to hold the Jesuits in abhorrence, were proficients in that immoral casuistry which was the worst part of Jesuitism. Some grave divines had openly said, others had even dared to write, that they had sworn fealty to William in a sense altogether different from that in which they had sworn fealty to James. To James they had plighted the entire ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a reason, for a woman—" It was the answer she would have given to Popple or Van Degen, but she saw in an instant the mistake of thinking it would impress her father. In the atmosphere of sentimental casuistry to which she had become accustomed, she had forgotten that Mr. Spragg's private rule of conduct was as simple as ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... him," answered the Duke, smiling at her casuistry. "Nor had I any scruple in disappointing him. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... dedications; for he says in the famous one "to the Free-thinkers:"—"I could never approve the custom of dedicating books to men whose professions made them strangers to the subject. A Discourse on the Ten Predicaments to a Leader of Armies, or a System of Casuistry to a Minister of State, always appeared to me a ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... A levite suspected that the casuistry and marvellous cures of the Nazarene must be due to a knowledge of the incommunicable name, Shemhammephorash, seared on stone in the thunders of Sinai, and which to utter was to summon life or beckon death. Another had heard that while in Galilee he ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... a brook through a meadow and gave Hugh opportunity to contemplate incidentally the play of air and light in Ramsey's curls without her having the slightest suspicion of him!—gave her chances to ply him with questions in autobiography and social casuistry and to enjoy keenly the ridiculous majesty of his eyes and voice, while the two dear chaperons talked apart as obliviously as if she were merely asking him how deep the whiskey ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... prayer begs that "the sound of this bell may put to flight the fiery darts of the enemy of men"; and others vary the form but not the substance of this petition. The great Jesuit theologian, Bellarmin, did indeed try to deny the reality of this baptism; but this can only be regarded as a piece of casuistry suited to Protestant hardness of heart, or as strategy in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... indeed—save in one instance soon to be noticed—seriously charged against him. There is not in the Diary the faintest trace of any act which might be so much as questionable or susceptible of defence only by casuistry. That he should have perpetuated evidence of any flagrant misdoing certainly could not be expected; but in a record kept with the fulness and frankness of this Diary we should read between the lines and detect as it were in its general flavor any ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... object at first was to prove to the world at large how very little difference America's participation in hostilities would make. When America tacitly negatived this theory by the energy with which she raised billions and mobilised her industries, Hun propagandists, by an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad the opinion that these mighty preparations were a colossal bluff which would redound to Germany's advantage. They said that President Wilson had bided his time so that his country might strut as a belligerent ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... phase, erratic even among his countless vagaries, shed on his relation to Johnson! Never, we may rest assured, did he tell the sage of this hidden passage in his life; yet how often do we find him putting leading questions to his friend and Mentor on all points of Catholic doctrine and casuistry, purgatory, and the invocation of the saints, confession, and the mass! There can be no doubt that this wrench left a deep impress on the confused religious views of Boswell, and this is the clue which explains ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... circumstances can only be called an inevitable development,—the one goal to be aimed at being the substitution of Constitutional Government for the dictatorial rule. The author deals at great length with the background to this idea, playing on popular fears to reinforce his casuistry. For although constitutional government is insisted upon as the sole solution, he speedily shows that this constitutionalism will depend more on the benevolence of the dictator than on the action of the people. And should his advice be not heeded, when Fortune wills that Yuan Shih-kai's rule ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... A man can't make cannons any the better for being his own cousin instead of his proper self [she sits down in the deck chair with a bounce that expresses her downright contempt for their casuistry.] ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... casuistry, could it not defend Beachcombing? Does not the law recognise it under the definition of trover? Why bother about the law and the moralities when it is all so pleasing, so ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Aquinius his Case. This is, I take it, some confused allusion to the great Dominican Doctor, S. Thomas Aquinas, who was regarded as being the supreme Master of scholasticism and casuistry. Casuistry must be taken in its true and original meaning—the balancing and deciding of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... relaxed religion of the Greek church, where a trivial penance atones for every thing, and ceremonial takes the place of morals, as it inevitably does wherever a religion is encumbered with unnecessary forms, could be no restraint on the conduct of a daring and imperious woman. By some of that easy casuistry which reconciles the powerful to vice, she had fully convinced herself that she ought, for the sake of her throne, never to submit to matrimonial ties again; and she adopted the notorious and guilty alternative of living with a succession of partners. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of "Paradise Lost", interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... supreme fact of moral obligation in general, that is, the duty of unconditionally obeying the right when the right is known to us. It is no more the duty of the moral law to set about codifying laws than it is of the conscience to practise casuistry. Conscience is not a theoretical instructor, but a practical commander. The intelligence, the reason in man it is to which is allotted the function of formulating laws and of deciding what is and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... helpful stupidity, the old nun brought formidable support to the conspiracy. They had imagined her timid; she proved herself bold, verbose, violent. She was not troubled by any of the shilly-shallyings of casuistry, her doctrine was like a bar of iron, her faith never wavered, her conscience knew no scruples. She considered Abraham's sacrifice a very simple affair, for she herself would have instantly killed father or mother at an order from above, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... endeavored at much length to establish rules for the complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man. At that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view emerges (see, e.g., Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, pp. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... her ears as she was shaping her reply to Mr. Mortimer. They sounded like half-past, and in that case it must have been a quarter to eight when she stood on her doorstep. Finally, there was the reason of reasons which superseded the necessity of any further attempt to persuade herself by any casuistry—she must ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... supreme, and superior to all interests, were, with a sovereign, subordinate to the great duty of insuring the safety of his country. Nor could it be imagined that Francis would be so romantic in his principles, as not to hearken to a casuistry which was so plausible in itself, and which so much flattered all the passions by which, either as a prince or a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... he heard of a promise so rash, so fatal; but his was not the casuistry which could release his master from the fetters with which his unwary confidence had bound him. It was otherwise with Wilkin Flammock. He stared—he almost laughed, notwithstanding the reverence due to the Castellane, and his own ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... adopted and he goes to hear a sermon On the Growing Habit of Careful Patient Investigation as Encouraging Casuistry. [October 1897.] ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... But, as the breeze grew stronger, its voice among the branches was as if it said, "Hush! Hush!" and I resolved that to no mortal would I disclose what I had heard. And, though there might be room for casuistry, such, I conceive, is the most equitable ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... casuistry, Wilks, and I want you, as a judge of what a loyal citizen should do, to say what is our duty in regard to the ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... greatest vigor and glory; the Talmud was completed at the time when the Roman empire was in its decay. That the Jews were saved from similar disintegration, was due very largely to the Talmud. The Talmud is thus one of the great books of the world. Despite its faults, its excessive casuistry, its lack of style and form, its stupendous mass of detailed laws and restrictions, it is nevertheless a great book in and for itself. It is impossible to consider it further here in its religious aspects. But something must be said in the next ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... the others. This inconsistency, which so sadly weakens the noble character of the royal proclamation and detracts from the merits of the Queen as an enemy of slavery, could hardly have proceeded from her own inclinations but was rather the outcome of some casuistry that constrained her action without convincing her judgment. The Queen doubtless saw with pain and disappointment that, owing to the Admiral's measures and proposals, which were in surprising contradiction with the lofty and ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... in the decay of the doctrine of eternal damnation, we have the same point illustrated. Right through history it has been the social instincts that have acted as a corrective to religious extravagance. And it is worth noting that with the exception of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions have contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics. On the contrary it has been a very potent cause of confusion and obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have been created and the ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... pepper-fire of casuistry by throwing Eva Bernheimer at his head. Despite his determination to avoid a "scene," he felt his bottled-up indignation rising. A light ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and had been disqualified. Those were the simple facts; and no casuistry by the cleverest of London lawyers could get away ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... preferred to a glorious death the good which he might still be able to perform. 'A rhetorician would have had much to say upon that point.' It may be observed however that Plato never intended to answer the question of casuistry, but only to exhibit the ideal of patient virtue which refuses to do the least evil in order to avoid the greatest, and to show his master maintaining in death the opinions which he had professed in his life. Not 'the world,' but the 'one wise man,' is still ...
— Crito • Plato
... them to "accept the situation" and gradually wean themselves from us and from our affairs? It would be idle to determine this question in the abstract: it is perhaps idle to decide any question of casuistry in the abstract. But, in practice, there are constantly arising questions which really require some decision of this abstract problem ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... anxious that the reader should go along with the short remainder of this story, because it bears strongly upon the true moral of our Eastern policy, of which, hereafter, we shall attempt to unfold the casuistry, in a way that will be little agreeable to the calumniators of Clive and Hastings. We do not intend that these men shall have it all their own way in times to come. Our Eastern rulers have erred always, and erred deeply, by doing too little rather than too much. They have been too ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Free Church, which, though new to it, yet come to be adopted by a majority, should be left open questions also. Of course, of novelties in doctrine we do not speak,—we trust that within the Free Church none such will ever arise; we refer rather to those semi-metaphysical points of casuistry, and nice questions of conduct, in which the differences that perplex non-established Churches are most liable to originate,—matters in which one man sees after one way, and another man after another,—and which, until heaped ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... obduracy of any party conviction, especially whilst in the centre of fiery partisans. But sorrow, in such a case, is a sentiment of deeper vitality than anger; and this sorrow for the result will co-operate with the original scruples on the casuistry of the questions, to reproduce the demur and the struggle many times over, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... interpretations, scientific, historical, moral, or religious, of the mythological fables. Ovid's Art of Love, of which more than one rendering was made, aided in the formation or development of the mediaeval theory of love and the amorous casuistry founded ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... could not but notice the growth of Orfutt's clerk in the confidence of all the people. In all the games, he was chosen umpire or referee; in most cases of dispute he was consulted, and his judgment was followed. Long before he became a lawyer, people were accustomed to say, in a matter of casuistry: ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... last period set in. All his afternoons must have been those of a faun—a faun who with impeccable solicitude put on paper what he saw in the heart of the bosk or down by the banks of secret rivers. The sad turpitudes, the casuistry of concupiscence, the ironic discolourations and feverish delving into subterranean moral stratifications were as yet afar. He was young, handsome, with a lithe, vigorous body and the head of an aristocratic Mephistopheles, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by a knock at the studio door, which thereupon opened to admit a small dapperly-dressed man with a silky moustache ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Much subtile casuistry has been expended upon the point, whether Paul Jones was a knave or a hero, or a union of both. But war and warriors, like politics and politicians, like religion and religionists, admit ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran down altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among men—his native servants if no others were near by. Here is a bit of confession and casuistry quite a la Stevenson: ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... a low bow—Two misfortunes, quoth the corporal to himself, are twice as many at least as are needful to be talked over at one time;—the mischief the cow has done in breaking into the fortifications, may be told his honour hereafter.—Trim's casuistry and address, under the cover of his low bow, prevented all suspicion in my uncle Toby, so he went on with what he had to say to ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... shrugged his shoulders. "I can't split hairs," he said, "or enter on an argument of sentimental casuistry. But I tell you this, Morris, although you are my only son, and the last of our name, that rather than do such a thing, under all the circumstances, it would be better that you should take a pistol and blow ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... his art certain faculties which become essential characteristics of his later work. There is no humour in these early poems, or (since Naddo and the critic tribe of Sordello came to qualify the assertion) but little; there is no wise casuistry, in which falsehood is used as the vehicle of truth; the psychology, however involved it may seem, is really too simple; the central personages are too abstract—knowledge and love and volition do not exhaust the soul; action and thought are not here incorporated one with ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... dead one; and that, since swineherds could hardly avoid contact with their charges, their calling was implicitly forbidden.[111] Unfortunately, the authorised version expressly says "dead carcase"; and thus the most rabbinically minded of reconcilers might find his casuistry foiled by that great source of surprises, the "original Hebrew." That such check is at any rate possible, is clear from the fact that the legal uncleanness of some animals, as food, did not interfere with their being lawfully possessed, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... out of Ireland, spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters, letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments and hesitations for the ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... of casuistry was engaging the thoughts of the Dean of St. Neot's. Morewood had been to see him, had told without disguise the whole story of his blunder at the dinner-table at Ashwood, had referred to Alexander Quisante's serious illness, and had finally, without apology and without periphrasis, ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... all comports with the public good. He is, indeed, a most sneaking democrat, who finds it necessary to consult a neighbourhood before he can indulge his innocent habits and tastes. It is sheer meddling, and no casuistry can fitly ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... place, that the principle broached "is merely a suggestion of the learned commentator as a possible policy, and has no support either in the practice of nations or the works of publicists";—but the editor never condescends to meet the French writer upon his own field of casuistry and speculation. And in this we think he is right. The discussion of rules existing only in a text-writer's belief in their abstract justice, would be entirely useless labor in any writer in the English language; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... delicate art in expression, which, from its illustrious ancient exemplar, has received the name of the Socratic irony. With this fine weapon, in great part, it was, wielded like a magician's invisible wand, that Pascal did his memorable execution on the Jesuitical system of morals and casuistry, in the "Provincial Letters." In great part, we say; for the flaming moral earnestness of the man could not abide only to play with his adversaries, to the end of the famous dispute. His lighter cimeter blade he flung aside before he had done, and, toward the last, brandished ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... strict casuistry, Kate was resolved to let herself out; and did so; and, for fear any man should creep in whilst vespers lasted, and steal the kitchen grate, she locked her old friends in. Then she sought a shelter. The air was not cold. She hurried into a chestnut wood, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... like the flowers, if we can be. It is because you could, that I have always secretly admired you. Cling to that trade; believe me, it is the right one. Be happy, be idle, be airy. To the devil with all casuistry! and leave the state to Gondremark, as heretofore. He does it well enough, they say; and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... placed. Satisfied on this topic, he proceeded to revise the memoranda which he had taken down from the mouth of the person employed to interrupt the funeral service of the late Lord Ravenswood. Bred to casuistry, and well accustomed to practise the ambidexter ingenuity of the bar, it cost him little trouble to soften the features of the tumult which he had been at first so anxious to exaggerate. He preached to his colleagues of the privy council the necessity of using conciliatory ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... able to deny either the sequence of the phenomena produced, or the chain of reasoning (supposing it to be sound) which leads to the conclusion based upon them. Invite the same men to judge of a picture, or consult them on a question of moral casuistry, and they will propound the most opposite opinions; nor will there be any objective test by which you can affirm that one opinion is more correct than another. The deliverances of the external sense are, or at least ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... impossible for her to think of him as a criminal. That he had been the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a question in her mind how clearly he had perceived the immorality of his course, and of theirs. He had not been given to casuistry, and he had been brought up in a school the motto of which he had once succinctly stated: the survival of the fittest. He had not been, alas, one of those ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Camusot. To Lousteau he had expressed the utmost disgust for this most hateful of all partitions, and now he himself had sunk to the same level, and, carried away by the casuistry of his vehement desire, had given the reins ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... thanks for the sermons, which I will certainly return as you suggest. I had the other day a trying experience, and I think a hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not by any means sure I was wrong. Long ago, before my present crisis, I had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small debate on labour. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the love of Money which is the 'Root of all Evil.' But money is certainly the cause of the love of Money. Therefore, Money is the deepest 'Root of Evil.'" (Observe, here, the young student's pride of reason, and the consciousness of a gift for casuistry!) Under the head of "Domestic News" occur some remarks on the sea-serpent, the deduction from various rumors about the monster being that "he seems to possess a strange and we think rather unusual faculty of appearing in different shapes to different eyes, so that where one person sees a shark, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Thomson informs us, "will tell of gods and giants and canoes greater than mountains and of women fairer than the women of these days, and of doings so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." They do not deal with "problems" about the propriety of cannibalism or the casuistry of polygamy [Laughter.] The Athenians fined for his modernite the author of a play on the fall of Miletus because he reminded them of their misfortunes. But many of our novelists do nothing but remind us of our misfortunes. Novels are becoming tracts on parish councils, free love and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... appointed to search all the public and private libraries, booksellers shops and warehouses, in this kingdom, for such books as are of no use to the owner, or to the public, viz. all comments on the Holy Scriptures, whether called sermons, creeds, bodies of divinity, tomes of casuistry, vindications, confutations, essays, answers, replies, rejoinders, or sur-rejoinders, together with all other learned treatises and books of divinity, of what denomination or class soever; as also all comments on the laws of the land, such as reports, law-cases, decrees, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Religion, very consistent with their Conduct, in regard of the Turk. To maintain a Catholick Prince at St. Germains, and support the Enemy of Christianity at Constantinople with great Remittances of Moneys, and a constant Supply of Engineers; is a piece of State Casuistry above my Comprehension, and Prince Eugene had a great deal of Reason to knock his Breast, and hold up his Hands to Heaven, when he saw French Engineers dragg'd out of Turkish Mines in Hungary with Agnus Dei's, and ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... contrived, by an artful and technical interpretation, to find statutes which favored their ends. They wrought out asceticism into a system, and observed the most painful ceremonials—the ancestors of rigid monks; and they united a specious casuistry, not unlike the Jesuits, to excuse the violation of the spirit of the law. They were a hierarchical caste, whose ambition was to govern, and to govern by legal technicalities. They were utterly deficient in the virtues of humility and toleration, and as such, peculiarly offensive to the Great ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... received yesterday your answer, dated March 10. My offer was an honest one, and surely could only be construed as such even by the most malignant casuistry. I could answer you, but it is too late, and it is not worth while. To the mysterious menace of the last sentence, whatever its import may be—and I cannot pretend to unriddle it—I could hardly be very sensible even if I understood it, as, before it can take ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and generosity were not extremely common. The brutal soldiers satisfied their sensual appetites, without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their female captives: and a nice question of casuistry was seriously agitated, Whether those tender victims, who had inflexibly refused their consent to the violation which they sustained, had lost, by their misfortune, the glorious crown of virginity. [103] Their were other losses indeed of a more substantial kind, and more general concern. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... seemed to belie their nature, in the monomania of some intense desire. In Spain, a scholar reputed of austere morals murdered and robbed a traveller for money in order to purchase books,—books written, too, by Fathers of his Church! He was intent on solving some problem of theological casuistry. In France, an antiquary, esteemed not more for his learning than for amiable and gentle qualities, murdered his most intimate friend for the possession of a medal, without which his own collection was incomplete. These, and similar ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... business to offer sacrifices which the other party ought not to accept. It is true that in the application of this simple rule difficult problems may arise; but a little tact will generally go a long way towards solving them. In these matters an ounce of tact is worth a pound of casuistry. And in our every-day England, in all classes, it is my profound conviction that a reasonable selflessness is very far from uncommon, very far from being confined to the "converted" of any religion. For forty years I have watched it growing and spreading before my very ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... the very utmost in the garb of retaliation for counter aggressions on the part of the enemy, stands forward uniformly in the van of such motives as it is thought worth while to plead. But in French casuistry it is not held necessary to plead anything; war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the purpose of publishing and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... who, in crossing the Alps, finds himself weather-bound at St. Bernard's on Ash-Wednesday, you surmise a remedy: you descry some opening from "the loopholes of retreat," through which a few delicacies might be insinuated to spread verdure on this arid desert of biscuit. Casuistry can do much. A dead hand at casuistry has often proved more than a match for Lent with all his quarantines. But sorry we are to say that, in this case, no relief is hinted at in any ancient author. A grape or two, (not a bunch of grapes,) a raisin ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of the American Church to slavery, and the duties of private Christians, the whole casuistry of this portion of the question, so momentous among descendants of the Puritans,—have been discussed with great acuteness and rare common-sense by Messrs. Garrison, Goodell, Gerrit Smith, Pillsbury, and Foster. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various |
