"Irreligious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lies in religion, lies in the pulpit, 'nail't wi' Scripture,' lies in the counting room railed with false entries, religious lies, told by Deacon Longface, for the advancement of what the Deacon calls 'the gospel,' and irreligious lies told by Bill Snooks, and clenched with an oath, lies in good books, and lies in bad ones, lies written, and printed in the newspapers, and lies whispered in the ear, and any number of lies sent by telegraph! ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the mind of Europe: it is the belief or want of belief, the religious or irreligious views, the grasping ambition, the headlong desire of an impossible or unholy happiness, the reckless sway of unbridled passions, which try to spread themselves among all nations, and bring them ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in; it pains the imagination to be obliged to assimilate those operations, for a moment, to the brief energy of a human will, or the manipulations of a human hand.... No, there is nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to conceive creation, as well as reproduction, carried ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... accomplished by prayer, must pray. In that way only, and not by communication of knowledge from another, could he understand it as a practical effect. And to understand it not practically, but only in a speculative way, could not meet any religious wish, but merely an irreligious curiosity. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... glorious to entrap A common enemy, who had destroy'd Such numbers of our Nation: and the Priest Was not behind, but ever at my ear, Preaching how meritorious with the gods It would be to ensnare an irreligious 860 Dishonourer of Dagon: what had I To oppose against such powerful arguments? Only my love of thee held long debate; And combated in silence all these reasons With hard contest: at length that grounded maxim So rife and celebrated in the mouths Of wisest ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... directly home, and told the story of my wrongs to Master Hugh; and I am happy to say of him, irreligious as he was, his conduct was heavenly, compared with that of his brother Thomas under similar circumstances. He listened attentively to my narration of the circumstances leading to the savage outrage, and gave many proofs of his strong indignation at it. The heart of my once ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... not read, and the best divines such as could not write. In all their preachments they so highly pretended to the Spirit, that some of them could hardly spell a letter. To be blind with them was a proper qualification of a spiritual guide, and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost convertible terms. None save tradesmen and mechanics were allowed to have the Spirit, and those only were accounted like St. Paul who could work with their hands, and were able to make a pulpit before ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the Gentiles the same?" There are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the Drumtochty ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... Christianity, and finally to justify an attitude of doubt concerning the very foundations on which Christianity was based. Empiricism, Sensualism, Materialism, and Scepticism in philosophy, undermined dogmatic Christianity, and prepared the way for the irreligious and indifferentist opinions, that found such general favour among the educated and higher classes ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... their religious or rather irreligious opinions, you must not conclude their people of quality atheists—at least, not the men. Happily for them, poor souls! they are not capable of going so far into thinking. They assent to a great deal, because it is the fashion, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Life, as many have been; which in effect is the same in Nature, though different in the time, yet this was allow'd among the Jews by the Law of God; and is the constant practice of our own and other Christian Nations in the World: the which our Author by his Dogmatical Assertions doth condem as Irreligious; which is Diametrically contrary to the Rules and Precepts which God hath given the diversity of men to observe in their respective Stations, Callings, and Conditions of Life, as hath ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... glass away with contempt for its virtue of comfort; and I laughed, I think, in a disagreeable way, so that the old man, unused to manifestations as harsh and irreligious ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... all snuff-takers, who committed the heinous sin of taking a pinch in any church; and so late as 1690, Innocent XII. excommunicated all who indulged in the same vice in Saint Peter's church at Rome. In 1625, Amurath IV. prohibited smoking as an unnatural and irreligious custom, under pain of death. In Constantinople, where the custom is now universal, smoking was thought to be so ridiculous and hurtful, that any Turk, who was caught in the act, was conducted in ridicule ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... ungraciousness of their children, who hardly ever shew them, that their own actions are governed by reasonable or moral motives? Can the gluttonous father expect a self-denying son? With how ill a grace must a man who will often be disguised in liquor, preach sobriety? a passionate man, patience? an irreligious man, piety? How will a parent, whose hands are seldom without cards, or dice in them, be observed in lessons against the pernicious vice of gaming? Can the profuse father, who is squandering away ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... things were very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that, roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a few exceptional men—Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his disciples might ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... followers of Buddh with those of Roman devotees. But he is not going to dwell here on this point; it is dwelt upon at tolerable length in the text, and has likewise been handled with extraordinary power by the pen of the gifted but irreligious Volney; moreover, the elite of the Roman priesthood are perfectly well aware that their system is nothing but Buddhism under a slight disguise, and the European world in general has entertained for some time past an inkling of ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... sure of his ground with regard to Asako. To take a wife from her husband against his will, seems to the Japanese mind so flagrantly illegal a proceeding; and old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke had warned his irreligious son most gravely against the danger of tampering with the testament of Asako's father, and of provoking thereby a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... dying breath had designated his son Richard as his successor in the office of the Protectorate. Richard was exactly the opposite of his father,—timid, irresolute, and irreligious. The control of affairs that had taxed to the utmost the genius and resources of the father was altogether too great an undertaking for the incapacity and inexperience of the son. No one was quicker to realize this than Richard ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... suggested by some train of thought which Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing. I do not think one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by it as an irreligious or even profane speech. It is a better way always, in dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it follow out its own thought. It will keep to it for a while; then it will quit the rail, so to speak, and run to any side-track ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nature is liable, and provides for the public and private worship of God, the creator and governor of the universe, and for the performance of such acts of charity as are the ornament and comfort of Christian societies:—Whereas irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the Sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... made the fatal mistake of intrusting their children's education to those whose gifts were wholly intellectual and not spiritual, and who have misled the young pupils entrusted to their care, into an irreligious or infidel life, or, at best, a career of mere intellectualism and worldly ambition. In not a few instances, all the influences of a pious home have been counteracted by the atmosphere of a school which, if not godless, has been without that fragrance of spiritual devoutness and consecration ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... been prevailing faults in the Church. Nor is this to be wondered at: for subject as Christianity is to the assaults of unprincipled foes, we are naturally disposed to regard everything like an exposure of ecclesiastical misconduct as the offspring of malevolence or irreligious feeling. Not even this last consideration, however shall deter me from the honest expression ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... upon the Parisian world and middle classes throughout France. They, no doubt, indicate clearly enough the state of general opinion at this time. But what then? Their great compeers, the giants of thought, foreshadow what it will be. The profligate novels, licentious drama, and irreligious opinions of the middle class now in France, are the result of the infidelity and wickedness which produced the Revolution. The opinions of the great men who have succeeded the school of the Encyclopedie, who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... anything else that the world thinks worth having. He gave them fair warning that the world would hate them, and try to crush them. He told them, as the Gospel for to-day says, that they should be driven out of the churches; that the religious people, as well as the irreligious, would be against them; that the time would come when those who killed them would think that they did God service; that nothing but labour, and want, and persecution, and slander, and torture, and death was before them—and ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... keeps alive the fire of love. To lead a noble, a beautiful, and a useful life, we should accept and follow the ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help. Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered, must both know and believe. They must understand ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... an evil spirit. She had not received signs sufficient to warrant her believing in them. In the case of this woman these doctors and masters discovered lies; a lack of verisimilitude; faith lightly given; superstitious divinings; deeds scandalous and irreligious; sayings rash, presumptuous, full of boasting; blasphemies against God and his saints. They found her to have lacked piety in her behaviour towards father and mother; to have come short in love towards her neighbour; ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... employments, or by the credit which it derives from them. More than this; if it be granted that Religion tends in general to produce usefulness, particularly in the lower orders, who compose a vast majority of every society; and therefore that these irreligious men of useful lives are rather exceptions to the general rule; it must at least be confessed that they are so far useless, or even positively mischievous, as they either neglect to encourage or actually discourage that principle, which is the great operative ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial, and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere is steeped in the spirit ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... annuity, with a view to give his wife and children an interest in keeping him alive; but this Machiavellian piece of foresight was scarcely necessary. His son, young Felipe Belvidero, grew up as a Spaniard as religiously conscientious as his father was irreligious, in virtue, perhaps, of the old rule, "A miser has a spendthrift son." The Abbot of San-Lucar was chosen by Don Juan to be the director of the consciences of the Duchess of Belvidero and her son Felipe. The ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... to enjoy it! Just as some women become nuns, and flagellate themselves,—and then when they are writhing from their own self-inflicted stripes, they dream they are the 'brides of Christ,' entirely forgetting the extremely irreligious fact that to have so many 'brides' the good Christ Himself might possibly be troubled, and would surely occupy an inconvenient position, even in Heaven! Each man,—each woman,—makes for himself ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... not have stooped to quote Shakespeare, considering him very irreligious and sometimes quite indelicate, and having forbidden the reading of him in the Gordon family. Nevertheless the unspoken thought of her mind was his—that the lady ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday and sit during the sermon with his wife's bonnet upon his head? Not a trifle, I'll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then it is the influence of fashion; and what is the influence of fashion but the influence that other people's actions have on our actions—the ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... flag on this donjon was, at the era engaging us, the disenchanter of the Greeks; insomuch that in passing the Sweet Waters of Asia they hugged the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, crossing themselves and muttering prayers often of irreligious compound. A stork has a nest on the donjon now. As an apparition it is not nearly so suggestive as the turbaned sentinel who used to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... he said to her, walking slowly after all the other guests, "feels the liveliest interest in your dear Athanase; but I fear it will vanish through his own fault. He is irreligious and liberal; he is agitating this matter of the theatre; he frequents the Bonapartists; he takes the side of that rector. Such conduct may make him lose his place in the mayor's office. You know with what care ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... be in her sister's company for a month without discovering that Lady Fareham's whole life was given up to the worship of the trivial. She was kind, she was amiable, generous, even to recklessness. She was not irreligious, heard Mass and went to confession as often as the hard conditions of an alien and jealously treated Church would allow, had never disputed the truth of any tenet that was taught her—but of serious views, of an earnest ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... searched for new ones. Isis or Mithras might help where Jupiter was powerless, and uncouth lustrations of the blood of bulls and goats might peradventure cast a spell upon eternity. The age was too sad to be an irreligious one. Thus from whatever quarter a convert might approach the gospel, he brought earlier ideas to bear upon its central question of the person of the Lord. Who then was this man who was dead, whom all the churches affirmed to be alive and worshipped as the Son of God? If he was divine, there must ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... during periods of trouble, and to the havoc made in the rage of parties. The Province, like the great world from which it was so far remote, was distracted with what are sometimes called religious quarrels, but what I prefer to describe as exceedingly irreligious quarrels, carried on by men professing to be Christians, and generated in the heat of disputes concerning the word of the great Teacher of "peace on earth." Out of these grew any quantity of rebellion and war, tinctured with their ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... be distinctly understood that the Indian was not the thoughtless, unimaginative, irreligious, brutal savage which he is too often represented to be. He thought, and thought well, but still originally. He was religious, profoundly and powerfully so, but in his own way; he was a philosopher, but not according to Hittell; he was a worshipper, but not after the method ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... paraphrasing Matthew Arnold, define religion as motivated ethics. Ethics is a knowledge of right conduct, religion is an agency to produce right conduct. And its working is more like that of instinct than it is like that of reason. The irreligious man, testing a proposition by reason alone, may decide that it is to the interests of all concerned that he should not utter blasphemy. The orthodox Christian never considers the pros and cons of the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... a proud woman. And because she would lose the friendship of all proud women and clean thinking men if she condoned what you intend to do. It's horrible to see you turned from a simple, stupid, but honourable boy, into a hard, selfish, irreligious man—and all the result of being rich. I should never have thought it could have made such a dreadful difference so quickly. But I have not changed, Raymond. And I tell you this: if you don't marry Sabina; if you don't ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... always respected religion," said he; "the morality of the Gospel is the noblest gift ever bestowed by God on man." The Jesuits strenuously urged him to put into their hands a corrected copy of the Lettres Persanes, in which he had expunged the passages having an irreligious tendency, but he refused to give it to them; but he gave the copy to the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, and Madame Dupre de St Maur, who were in the apartment, with instructions for its publication, saying, "I will sacrifice every thing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... girl. He was also a well-educated boy and anxious to make the best of any opportunities which came his way. He told us that there was an interesting cathedral in the town and proposed that we should all go and see it after lunch. Thompson is not an irreligious man. Nor am I. We both go to church regularly, though not to excess, but we do not either of us care for spending week day afternoons in a cathedral. Thompson still hankered after a Turkish bath. I had a plan for getting a bedroom somewhere and going ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... perpetual tinkle of little bells. But in her work among the poor she revolts from system or organization. She hates the workhouse. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauperism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lavishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely with the sensible prose of the Deaconess. While the one enters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... another and much more frequently exercised influence which may seriously retard a disembodied entity on his way to Devachan, and that is the intense and uncontrolled grief of his surviving friends or relatives. It is one among many melancholy results of the terribly inaccurate and even irreligious view that we in the West have for centuries been taking of death, that we not only cause ourselves an immense amount of wholly unnecessary pain over this temporary parting from our loved ones, but we often also do serious injury to those for whom we bear so deep an affection ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... no rabid Churchmen, of any school of thought, ever again take exception to the irreligious character of playhouse entertainments. Let them read the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre in The Times for March 13:—"During Holy Week this theatre will be closed, re-opening on Saturday, March 28, with The Bells, which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... course of their acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits; that among his own connections he was esteemed and valued—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... would do. There is no iconoclast in the world like an extreme Mohammedan. Last time they overran this country they burned the Alexandrian library. You know that all representations of the human features are against the letter of the Koran. A statue is always an irreligious object in their eyes. What do these fellows care for the sentiment of Europe? The more they could offend it the more delighted they would be. Down would go the Sphinx, the Colossi, the Statues ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... women can find no satisfaction in dogmatic religion; and Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its essence. It is the entanglement of religion in dogma that still keeps the world superficially irreligious. Now, though no religion can escape the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more easily and light-heartedly than any other. That religion is art; for art is a religion. It is an expression of and a means to states of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... simplest thing in the world to make the chartered libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to bid him throw off his undertaker's garb and gloom and to adopt his free theories ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... ourselves into the college grounds, and went up to the south porch of the chapel, where we could hear the service proceeding within. I can remember Hugh saying, as the Psalms came to an end "Anglican double chants—how comfortable and delicious, and how entirely irreligious!" ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has cheered me for you, Margaret, though, as we poor irreligious human beings often say to each other, 'I wish I had your faith.' You have given me more than I had, however. But are we to say no more about anything? Must we leave this comfortable fire, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... the unjust, the reprobate; sons of men, sons of Belial, the wicked one; children of darkness. V. be impious &c adj., profane, desecrate, blaspheme, revile, scoff; swear &c (malediction) 908; commit sacrilege. snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c 989; desecrating &c v.; profane, irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, un-regenerate; hardened, perverted, reprobate. hypocritical &c (false) 544; canting, pietistical^, sanctimonious, unctuous, pharisaical, overrighteous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reduced to a dreadful alternative. A remarkable instance of this is furnished by a clause in the will of the late Colonel Thomas, of the Guards, written the night before he fell in a duel, Sept. 3, 1783:—'In the first place, I commit my soul to Almighty GOD, in hopes of his mercy and pardon for the irreligious step I now (in compliance with the unwarrantable customs of this wicked world) put myself under the necessity of taking.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... answer, I produced this book. A Calvinist minister of Orleans Writ this, to justify the admiral For taking arms against the king deceased; Wherein he proves, that irreligious kings May justly be ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... was speaking figuratively, or was, at any rate, not to be taken literally, and with that he passed on to something more comfortable. He did not, of course, really believe this, but he had to tell himself so; for otherwise he would have to alter his whole way of life, or confess himself an irreligious man. But he was, on the contrary, a highly religious man, and he had no disposition to ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he said, "very, especially to a man who has seen stout and elderly females sit in that same chair and state their conviction that they were destined to be George Eliots or Charlotte Brontes, women who had written one improper or irreligious novel, which had obtained a certain success in ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... as he looked towards me. "Do you know, Nikhil," he said, "I believe Sandip is not irreligious—his religion is of the obverse side of truth, like the dark moon, which is still a moon, for all that its light has gone over ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... the table. The only orthodox book is Beecher's Sermons,—and I believe Dr. Argure says they are not orthodox; the only approach to fiction is one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' books, I do not now remember which one. "Well," said I to myself, "whatever this man is, he is not irreligious." ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... on the other hand, however, fanatics and rogues, men representing the worse elements of society. The people shunned the clergy, and held them up to ridicule. They formed a class apart, not in sympathy with the parishioners. They committed serious transgressions, were irreligious and transformed the service of God ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Butler threw out in a sermon before the House of Lords, in 1741, does honour to his political sagacity, as well as to his knowledge of human nature; he calculated that the irreligious spirit would produce, some time or other, political disorders similar to those which, in the seventeenth century, had arisen from religious fanaticism. "Is there no danger," he observed, "that all this may raise somewhat like that levelling spirit, upon atheistical ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... received was the fracture of one of his ankle-bones. [Note. The whole of this account is fact, without the slightest alteration.] "He's the only man who could have done it, though," I afterwards heard some of the seamen remark. "He prayed that he might do it, and he did it, do ye see." Even the irreligious often acknowledge the efficacy of the prayers of ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... have to say for yourself?" the officer asked gently. "You must realize, of course, that such irreligious behavior precludes your moving in general society for ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... skittle-alley, for they are all threaded to you, and to despise them would be to blaspheme against continuity, and to blaspheme against continuity would be to deny Eternity. Love you cannot help, and hate you cannot help; but contempt is—for you—the sovereign idiocy, the irreligious fancy!" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the eighteen fifties a non-catholic of very irreligious character, made targets of the eyes of a statue of Saint Benedict, belonging to San Carlos Mission, taking advantage of the neglected condition of the place at the time. A few days after this proceeding the man was struck blind. This incident is no legend, but within the remembrance of many ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... course, running about the place like rabbits. But we never took any notice of them, I need hardly say. But I am told that nowadays country society is quite honeycombed with them. I think it most irreligious. And then the eldest son has quarrelled with his father, and it is said that when they meet at the club Lord Brancaster always hides himself behind the money article in The Times. However, I believe that ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... time to vindicate the reputation of so many people whom you have calumniated; for what innocence can be so generally acknowledged as not to suffer contamination from the daring aspersion of a society of men scattered throughout the world, who, under religious habits, cover irreligious minds; who perpetrate crimes as they concoct slanders—not against, but in conformity with, their own maxims? No one can blame me, surely, for having destroyed the confidence which you might otherwise have inspired, since it is far more just to vindicate for so many good people whom you have decried, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... a particular Manner the Priests Office: This I have known done in so audible a manner, that sometimes their Voices have been as loud as his. As little as you would think it, this is frequently done by People seemingly devout. This irreligious Inadvertency is a Thing extremely offensive: But I do not recommend it as a Thing I give you Liberty to ridicule, but hope it may be ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... thrown on the American shore, with one hundred and five pounds in her purse of clear gain on the voyage, a conviction arises that she could not guess wrongly. She might have tossed up, having coins in her pocket, heads or tails? but this kind of sortilege was then coming to be thought irreligious in Christendom, as a Jewish and a Heathen mode of questioning the dark future. She simply guessed, therefore; and very soon a thing happened which, though adding nothing to strengthen her guess as a true one, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... are often very odd things in the eyes of irreligious people. Do you count yourself among the latter ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... into which we are not concerned to inquire. But where the evil in question is a moral evil, which a man can scrutinise, and where that moral evil has its origin within ourselves, let us not imagine that we can clear our consciences by this general, not to say irreligious, way of putting aside the question." Pitt concluded by urging on the house the influence which their decision would produce in other countries, and that the divine blessing was to be expected on their own, by exertions in such a righteous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... superior confidence with one of them, whether relative or friend, even the pastor or family physician, is the man invoked against in the marriage charge, who "puts them asunder." Where unhappily the husband is irreligious and the wife is forced to seek confidential help and consolation of her spiritual adviser, she should strictly limit these to religious matters, else she will grow apart from her husband. George Moore, in his collection of stories entitled, "The Untilled Field," presents the ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... truly have been named the New Incarnation, since the outward modifications of visible form were but the symptoms of a freshly-communicated informing intelligence). It transfigured them; from men sunk in the gross and sensual thoughts and aims of an irreligious and priest-ridden age—an age which ate and drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes, and maundered of the divine right of kings—from this sluggish degradation it roused and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as Puritans. It was a transfiguration, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... he is made strong, sane, useful, and reliable. The most irreligious thing in this world is a religion that makes people think that an imputed or technical salvation absolves them from the necessity of practical salvation, the working out of the best and noblest in their lives. Religion without morality ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... interested in social service to be present at a convention of representatives of religious orders. In practice there is still a clean-cut dividing line between those interested in social progress and those engaged in so-called religious work. The social workers are not irreligious; many of them believe their service to be of the highest type of religious expression. The representatives of the church are welcomed by social workers into their councils, but it is feared that often these representatives are not taken seriously because for so long ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... political field and go to the religious at one jump—since your last visit here much has been said and written and published to the effect that a great change, or a considerable change at least, had taken place in your religious, or irreligious views. I would like to know ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... motives that so often set the laity quarrelling during the incessant and involuntary companionship of a sea-voyage. Mr. Macaulay, finding that the warmth of these debates furnished sport to the captain and other irreligious characters, was forced seriously to exert his authority in order to separate and silence the disputants. His report of these occurrences went in due time to the Chairman of the Company, who excused himself for an arrangement which had turned out so ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... as usual with petitions and complaints, they rose silently and quietly, in a manner that would have become the most orderly of Christian congregations accustomed to all the impressive decorum of civilised church privileges. Poor people! They are said to have what a very irreligious young English clergyman once informed me I had—a 'turn for religion.' They seem to me to have a 'turn' for instinctive good manners too; and certainly their mode of withdrawing from my room after our prayers bespoke either a strong feeling of their own or ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... taking part against me and my comrades with the rich who did no work. If the Church had never set itself against me, perhaps I should never have set myself against the Church; but what is done is done: you will find me irreligious, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... illuminated with inner light,—he cast from him the ideals which he had hitherto cherished. As if for the first time seeing clearly, he felt that men should not be hampered by dogmas which cramp and restrain. A line he had seen somewhere, and which he had put aside as irreverent and irreligious, kept repeating itself over and over ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... distinction between those who professed religion and those who made no profession. Their own religion was national. There was no division between the religious and irreligious. All were religious. In other words, they were all educated in the same faith, all united in observing the same religious rites, and all entertained the same religious belief, as had been handed down to them from their forefathers. This ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... cannon, culverins, and a considerable number of muskets; and sent him some engineers from those who came on those ships, so that they might inspect his fortifications and reside in them or in his city. Some accepted that abode, and the loose and irreligious liberty of life permitted in that country. There, by reason of the many trading-posts and fleets from the north, they lived as if they were not outside their own countries, since they had intercourse with their kinsmen and friends, or ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... do not excite yourself about it, for it only makes your asthma worse, and does no especial good to anybody. Things may be as you say. Certainly I intended nothing irreligious. Yet these extended naps, appropriate enough for saints and emperors, are out of place in one's own family. So, if it is not stuff and nonsense, it ought to be. And that I ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... tribunals. They maintained a tolerable show of religion, however, considering it a matter of prime importance to have the services of chaplains, and to give due public prominence to doctrinal questions. Their courts were most generally irreligious, and sometimes ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... and deep-thinking Christian, melancholy by temperament, and grieved by what seemed to him the hopelessly irreligious condition of his age. In his view not only the religious life of the nation, but (what he regarded as synonymous) the church itself, was in an almost hopeless state of decay, as we see from his first and only charge to the diocese of Durham and [v.04 p.0883] from many passages ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... not the ballot so much as the dissolution of the marriage tie. They propose to form a tie for the term of five, six or seven years. Mark the men or women who are the most strenuous advocates of woman suffrage. They are irreligious and immoral. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... bracketing of his person with another's was distasteful to him. Besides, the man who had sprung up at his elbow bore a reputation that was none of the best. The owner of a small chemist's shop on the Flat, he contrived to give offence in sundry ways: he was irreligious—an infidel, his neighbours had it—and of a Sabbath would scour his premises or hoe potatoes rather than attend church or chapel. Though not a confirmed drunkard, he had been seen to stagger in the street, and be unable to answer when spoken to. Also, the woman with whom he lived was not ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... peoples and governments to afford a shallow secular education, without the learning of religious truth, or the moral obligations that it teaches. The child taught and trained for this world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... stairs with the rocking chair, she thought, "Nothing could be more suiterble. We are both about the same age; I am most respecterbly connected—in fact, I regard myself as somewhat his superior in this respect; he is painfully undeveloped and irreligious and thus is in sore need of female influence; he is lonely and down-hearted, and in woman's voice there is a spell to banish care; worst of all, things are going to waste. I must delib'rately face the great duty ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... say when the daughter of the house inquired if her Toy-Pom was not really rather a darling, or the host proclaimed to the world that he never took potatoes with fish? What would the host and daughter say if their guest began to prophesy or discuss the nature of justice? There is something irreligious in the incongruity of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... is, "man (body, soul, and spirit) is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." (vol. ii. p. 372) Mr. Darwin adds: "He who denounces these views (as irreligious) is bound to explain why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... self-possessed countenance, her decided mouth, ever busy hands, and unpretending but well-chosen style of dress, without seeing that her energy and intelligence were of a high order; and there was principle likewise, though no one ever quite penetrated to the foundation of it. Certainly she was not an irreligious person; she conformed, as she said, to the habits of each family she lived with, and she highly estimated moral perfections. Now and then a degree of scorn, for the narrowness of dogma, would appear in reading history, but in general she was ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... battle should go against us, tell me, what is your resolution concerning flight and death?" Brutus answered, "When I was young, Cassius, and unskillful in affairs, I was led, I know not how, into uttering a bold sentence in philosophy, and blamed Cato for killing himself, as thinking it an irreligious act, and not a valiant one among men, to try to evade the divine course of things, and not fearlessly to receive and undergo the evil that shall happen, but run away from it. But now in my own fortunes I am of another mind; for if Providence shall not dispose ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... "He's inclined to brood about things like shimmys. They were just starting to do the—maxixe, wasn't it, Jimmy?—when he became a monk, and it haunted him his whole first year. You'd see him when he was peeling potatoes, putting his arm around the bucket and making irreligious ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in the fun, but the mother was quiet and pensive, and got rather huffed when her husband chided her in his good-humoured way with being indifferent to the happy surroundings. Poor woman, she was troubled about Jimmy's prayer, and thought it irreligious to be joyous in the midst ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... heaven begun in him? Rather, who would not wish to have lived his life, and to have died his death? How well for him that he lived, not for man only, but for God! What are all the interests, pleasures, successes, glories of this world, when we come to die? What can irreligious virtue, what can innocent family affection do for us, when we are going before the Judge, whom to know and love is life eternal, whom not to know and not to love is ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... which these holy men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, the impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of his saints, is always in a measure noble, and to be distinguished with all reverence from the abominations of the irreligious painters following, as of Camillo Procaccini, in one of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the Brera, at Milan, and other such, whose names may be well spared ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... with his odd mixture of many religious and irreligious dialects, what there is of him is as good as Sam Weller or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... life and career of Joseph Smith, Jr., or 'Joe Smith,' as he was universally named, and the Smith family, they were popularly regarded as an illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless, irreligious race of people—the first named, the chief subject of this biography, being unanimously voted the laziest and most worthless of the generation. From the age of twelve to twenty years he is distinctly remembered as a dull-eyed, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Mrs. Sampson. "Ever since I knew him he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... goes, we are not monastics," he said, with a sparkle in his deep-set eyes; "we are but a family of ancient lineage, expelled from our home in these irreligious times. It is no longer in our power to do all the good we would, and therefore we are much undervalued. Perhaps you have heard of ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... of theology, which has become famous both in England and abroad, had its origin at Oxford, about A. D. 1838. Some distinguished members of the university thought that the church of England was in an alarming position, and that irreligious principles and false doctrines had been admitted into the measures of the government of the country on a large scale. To check the progress of these supposed errors and mischievous practices, they published a series of "Tracts for the Times," on such subjects as the constitution of ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... small way, and believe they have discharged their duty. That is not the case. When a man has the honour to be a priest, he must be active. It is necessary, as in the time of the persecutions, to make proselytes and win souls; to confront the irreligious propaganda with our propaganda; lampoons, with lampoons; speeches, with sermons; acts, with acts. In short, we must struggle. Can we remain still and idle, when our Holy Father is imprisoned in ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... A scientist, living in an age when science is dogmatically irreligious, he turned from its cocksure reasoning to ask for the facts. He went to the lives of the saints! Not to Herbert Spencer, you see. When he wanted to study the religious experience he went to the people who ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author of certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in his conversation. She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be well understood when he was told that the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper that his proof- reader—a young lady—had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... effort. Socrates for the Lodge had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally. The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a disturber and innovator. And the democracy was still smarting from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides, understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the treacheries of Alcibiades, another. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle's roof has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this yard there was a well. Aunt Dide's bedroom was on the left side of the passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one chair; Silvere slept in a still smaller ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... than ever assembled at the Hotel de Rambouillet met in the salons of Madame Geoffrin and Madame de Tencin and Madame du Deffand and Madame Necker, to discuss theories of government, political economy, human rights,—in fact, every question which moves the human mind. They were generally irreligious, satirical, and defiant; but they were fresh, enthusiastic, learned, and original They not only aroused the people to reflection, but they were great artists in language, and made a revolution ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... only thus, madame," resumed the cardinal, this time allowing himself to be tempted by the attractions of the crawfish's tails, "it is only thus that charity has any meaning. I care little that the irreligious should feel hunger, but with the pious it is different;" and the prelate gayly swallowed a mouthful. "Moreover," resumed he, "it is well known with what ardent zeal you pursue the impious, and those who are rebels against the authority ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... clergyman of the Church of England and an eye witness of some of the phenomena. His point of view is that of an ardent believer in the verity of witchcraft, and his narrative of the Tedworth affair finds place in a treatise designed to discomfit those irreligious persons who maintained the opposite.[B] It is therefore evident that his account of the case is to be regarded as a piece of special pleading, and as such must be received with ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... that demands a worthier speaker and another occasion. But no one who knew Mr. Gladstone could fail to see that it was the essence, the savor, the motive power of his life. Strange as it may seem, I can not doubt that while this attracted many to him, it alienated others, others not themselves irreligious, but who suspected the sincerity of so manifest a devotion, and who, reared in the moderate atmosphere of the time, disliked the intrusion of religious considerations into politics. These, however, though numerous ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... Oriental colouring, the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... that there is such a process as evolution; second, that he had discovered the method by which evolution is accomplished. Before his time there was no general agreement as to the fact of evolution. People generally thought the idea absurd, as well as irreligious. All previous efforts on the part of advanced thinkers to persuade mankind of the truth of evolution had been nearly without effect. Among the early philosophers the whole idea was purely speculative. They made no attempt to prove it, and the conception was without influence upon the thinking ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... alone in the little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, "And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... own way," cried Fichta, "I would shut up these irreligious American schools. Religion is the base of the social ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... to the Protestant critic of Catholicism, nothing more needs to be brought out prominently, than the firm hold our religion can exercise over souls that are naturally irreligious. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... will remind you how quick and strong such influences may easily prove, independent of all intention or desire on our part, or even in spite of our deliberate wishes or hopes. One man is careless or irreligious, and his weaker neighbours catch the infection of his example; another indulges in some bad habits of language or conduct, or he is addicted to some low taste, or he lives by some low standard, and this or that companion is drawn down to his level; and so the evil of his life ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... stay in trouble, his guide in every difficulty, Jackson's individuality was more striking and more complete than that of all others who played leading parts in the great tragedy of Secession. The most reckless and irreligious of the Confederate soldiers were silent in his presence, and stood awestruck and abashed before this great God-fearing man; and even in the far-off Northern States the hatred of the formidable "rebel" ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... as 'at the equinoxia,' have become nearly equal; and society can scarce take one step for the general benefit, without experiencing, as a thwarting and arresting influence, the effects of religious difference. Do we regret that the Government of a country such as ours should be practically irreligious in its character? Alas! were every Government functionary in the empire a thoroughly religious man, Government could not act otherwise than it does in not a few instances, just in consequence of our religious differences. Are there millions of the people sinking ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... courts, in an age notoriously pleasure-loving, profligate, and irreligious, she deliberately and whole-heartedly cast in her lot with the despised people of God, "accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt." She was tried by repeated bereavements, and she had to bear ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... Sage answered with a sarcastic smile. "But now I think of it, has your attention never been drawn to the character of our people? Peaceful, yet fond of warlike shows and bloody fights; democratic, yet adoring emperors, kings, and princes; irreligious, yet impoverishing itself by costly religious pageants. Our women have gentle natures yet go wild with joy when a princess flourishes a lance. Do you know to ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... sentiment itself, largely the accident of untoward circumstances, is alien to the character and temperament of the Irish people. In short, I have urged that the policy of revenge is un-Christian and unintelligent, and, that, as the Irish people are neither irreligious nor stupid, it is un-Irish. I well remember taking up this position in conversation with some very advanced Irish-Americans in the Far West and the reply which one of them made. "Wal," said my half-persuaded friend, "mebbe you're right. I have two sons, whom I have raised ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... it is not altogether satisfactory and profound—yet the thought itself is one that has a great deal in it that is true and important, and may be very helpful and profitable to us now; for there is a religious way, as well as an irreligious way, of saying there is nothing new under the sun. It may be the utterance of a material, blase, unprofitable, spurious philosophy, or it may be the utterance of the profoundest, and the happiest, and the most ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Englishman should be called a Duca. If it had been Baron, or even Count, the name would have been less offensive. And then to her mind hereditary titles, as she had known them, had been recommended by hereditary possessions. There was something to her almost irreligious in the idea of a Duke without an acre. She could therefore only again shake her head. "He has as much right to it," continued Mrs. Roden, "as has the eldest son of the greatest peer ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... is very surprising that Maimonides the rationalist should so far have forgotten his own ideal of reason and enlightenment. He is here playing into the hands of those very Mutakallimun whom he so severely criticises. They were more consistent. Distrustful of the irreligious consequences of the philosophical theories of Aristotle and his Arabian followers, they deliberately denied causation and natural law, and substituted the will of God as interfering continuously in the phenomena of nature. A red object continues red because and as long as God creates the ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the Frenchmen at the court of Frederick, whom Voltaire subsequently joined; men who, imbued with the most extravagant form of the philosophy of sensation, verged upon materialism; there were coteries of literary persons in Paris, which were the rallying point of sceptical minds, and centres of irreligious influence. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... [John Allen was himself so fierce an unbeliever, and so bitter an enemy to the Christian religion, that he was very fond of asserting that other men believed as little as himself. It was almost always Allen who gave an irreligious turn to the conversation at Holland House when these subjects ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... its strength depends to so great a degree upon "conversion," upon docile acceptance of the doctrines of the "Master" as interpreted by the popes and bishops of this new church, it fails to arouse the irreligious proletariat. The Marxian Socialist boasts of his understanding of "working class psychology" and criticizes the lack of this understanding on the part of all dissenters. But, as the Socialists' meetings against the "birth strike" indicate, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... art, and that practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners, machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the love of life in the consciousness ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... is a common and general error of the uninitiated to bring the following accusations against philosophers. Some of them think that those who explore the origins and elements of material things are irreligious, and assert that they deny the existence of the gods. Take, for instance, the cases of Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and other natural philosophers. Others call those magicians ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the most ferocious animal has necessarily its intervals of repose, these intervals in man are greatly influenced by the immoral character of the conduct which may have preceded them. He appears to be at peace, indeed, but it is an irreligious, malignant peace; a savage sardonic smile, destitute of all charity or dignity; a love ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... part too, majority by count of heads, were dragging him to Tartarus again. "Exquisite, unparalleled!" exclaimed good judges (as Fleury himself had anticipated, on examining the Piece):—"Infamous, irreligious, accursed!" vociferously exclaimed the bad judges; Reverend Desfontaines (of Sodom, so Voltaire persists to define him), Reverend Desfontaines and others giving cue; hugely vociferous, these latter, hugely in majority ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... adhered to it, (because, in spite of and alongside the tendency to a deeper perception, men still persisted in deducing righteousness from a punctilious observance of numerous particular commandments, because in so doing they became self-satisfied, that is, irreligious, and because in belonging to Abraham they thought they had a claim of right on God). For all that, so far as a historical understanding of the activity of Jesus is at all possible, it is to be obtained from the soil of Pharisaism, as the Pharisees were those who cherished and ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... justly earned? And yet in spite of all, Meletus, you will have it that by such habits I corrupt the young. We know, I fancy, what such corrupting influences are; and perhaps you will tell us if you know of any one who, under my influence, has been changed from a religious into an irreligious man; who, from being sober-minded, has become prodigal; from being a moderate drinker has become a wine-bibber and a drunkard; from being a lover of healthy honest toil has become effeminate, or under the thrall of some ...
— The Apology • Xenophon
... that among the righteous awaked applause, he came forward and knelt at the mourners' bench. His religion "took," they said, as if speaking of vaccination, and before long he entered the pulpit, ready gently to crack the irreligious heads of former companions still stubborn in the ways of iniquity. From behind a plum bush, in the corner of the fence, he had seen Mrs. Mayfield and had blinked, as if dazzled by a great light. Nor was it till the close of day that he had the courage to ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... to righteousness in another way. Open the heart and Christ comes in. Trust Him and He fills our poor nature with 'the law of the Spirit of life that was in Christ Jesus,' and that 'makes me free from the law of sin and death.' Righteousness, meaning thereby just what irreligious men mean by it—viz. good living, plain obedience to the ordinary recognised dictates of morality, going straight—that is most surely attained when we cease from our own works and say to Jesus Christ, 'Lord, I cannot walk in the narrow path. Do Thou Thyself come to me and fill my heart and keep ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dropped at the first blast of that irreligious outbreak. But the white-lawn tie reassured him. There was no time for argument. Before those loafers was no fit place. He grabbed up the little man, poked him into the pung, held him in with one hand and with the other ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... temporary discomfort about the 39 Articles from an irreligious young man, who had been my schoolfellow; who one day attacked the article which asserts that Christ carried "his flesh and bones" with him into heaven. I was not moved by the physical absurdity which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... how could any body live? Right feeling is shown by considering such points, and making for the demise of others even more preparation than for our own. Otherwise there is a selfishness about it by no means Christian-minded. You look at things always from such an intense and even irreligious point of view. But such things are out of my line altogether. Your Aunt Mary ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the Bishop. He a mortal like to US? Death was not for him intended, though communis omnibus: Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sabot—who have come to ask me for this . . . You—the only irreligious man in my parish! Why, it would be a scandal, a public scandal! The archbishop would give me a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... published in 1848, the twenty-sixth book to flow from Marryat's pen. It was completed after his death by a member of his family. It is intended for children, and its religious overtones are in contrast to Marryat's other works. He was far from irreligious, but this book is definitely in a ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Thomas Paine appeared in America as a political writer, and his florid pamphlet on "Common Sense" was much applauded by the people. Adams's opinion of this irreligious republican is not favorable: "That part of 'Common Sense' which relates to independence is clearly written, but I am bold enough to say there is not a fact nor a reason stated in it which has not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the privilege of the author extend to irreligious and immoral works, calculated only to corrupt the heart, and obscure the understanding? To grant this privilege is to sanction immorality by law; to refuse it is to censure the author. And since it is impossible, in the present imperfect state of society, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... each of them talked in his own way, and at the same time. Mr M'Lean said, he had a confutation of Bayle, by Leibnitz. JOHNSON. 'A confutation of Bayle, sir! What part of Bayle do you mean? The greatest part of his writings is not confutable: it is historical and critical.' Mr M'Lean said, 'the irreligious part'; and proceeded to talk of Leibnitz's controversy with Clarke, calling Leibnitz a great man. JOHNSON. 'Why, sir, Leibnitz persisted in affirming that Newton called space sensorium numinis, notwithstanding he was corrected, and ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... in the least; but wills have an irreligious appearance, in my eyes. There are a good many Wychecombes, in England; I wonder some of them are not of our family! They tell me a hundredth cousin is just as good an heir, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... me to hell, had filthie pleasure no other pillowe to leane vpon but his spreaded limmes? On thy flesh my fault shall bee imprinted at the day of resurrection. O beauty, the bait ordained to insnare the irreligious: rich men are robd for theyr welth, women are dishonested for being too faire. No blessing is beautie but a curse: curst bee the time that euer I was begotten: curst be the time that my mother brought me ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been "more fool than knave." A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... "Whereas, irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; this way of acting being contrary to their own interest as ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... The comfortably rich. 2. The decently comfortable. 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious. 4. The very poor, who are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
