"Omnipotency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is perfect in goodness." Words so easily come to obscure what they were meant to reveal; and if we think how the notion of perfect goodness rules and sways such a man's mind, we shall not wonder that he did not stumble at the omnipotency which revolts us, cowed as we are by the presence of evil. The old gentleman dressed like a king;—this was not the part of his ideas about God which occupied Duerer's mind. He accepted it, but did not think about it: it filled what would otherwise have been a blank in his mind ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... with a pleasure, always fresh in the minds of women, the omnipotence of her magnificent regard by the answer which, without saying a word, the chevalier made to it. And in fact, the blushes which empurpled his cheeks spoke better than the best speeches of the Greek ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... confidential letters, he had only a complaint to utter in order to introduce himself and to solicit his pay, Alberoni would very easily have been able to dishonour him, because he had no commission after having roundly asserted that he was charged with one of great importance. But omnipotence says and does with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in this path prove her intellectual omnipotence, but yet she will please less, because she will be less original. She will fancy she augments her power by venturing into the depths of these reveries, beneath which we deplorable common mortals are buried, and she will be mistaken. In fact she is much superior to this extravagance, this vagueness, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... into limbo, and doom 318:12 all things to decay. We must silence this lie of material sense with the truth of spiritual sense. We must cause the error to cease that brought the belief of sin and death 318:15 and would efface the pure sense of omnipotence. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... her aims according to her means. Would that every man might realize this simple lesson and maxim—there would be less call for a rank and wanton hankering for relapses into archaic but evidently not wholly outgrown tendencies to the assumption of "omnipotence of thought," revived again from time to time as "New Thought." Psychiatry restores to science and to the practical mind the right to reinclude rationally and constructively what a narrower view of science has, for a time at least, ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... other hand, it come into a man's possession accompanied by a pure unselfish motive that controls, it comes the nearest to omnipotence of anything we handle. Gold of itself seems to have the puckering quality of a green persimmon. The green fruit will contract the mouth to its smallest proportions. And unmellowed gold acts in the same way upon the mouth ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... Heaven respecting matter, inviolable, mental processes might be instantaneous, and mental laws at any moment disregarded by their Institutor: so that the spirit of a man might be brought to maturity in a moment, though the resources of Omnipotence would be overtaxed, or its consistency abandoned, in the endeavor to produce the same result ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... effect with such means at her disposal? She can do all except either create matter or destroy it. These two extremes of power the deity has reserved for himself only; creation and destruction are the attributes of his omnipotence. To alter and undo, to develop and to renew—these are powers which he has handed over ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... kings held their power immediately from God, "Suarez boldly opposed the thesis of the initial sovereignty of the people; from whose consent, therefore, all civil authority immediately sprang. So also, in opposition to Melanchthon's theory of governmental omnipotence, Suarez a fortiori admitted the right of the people to depose those princes who would have shown themselves unworthy of the trust reposed in them." (De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, Third Edition, p. 495.) Suarez' refutation of the Anglican ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... to pass. Such shows are over for each soul They had respect to. In the roll Of judgment which convinced mankind Of sin, stood many, bold and blind, Terror must burn the truth into: Their fate for them!—thou hadst to do With absolute omnipotence, Able its judgments to dispense To the whole race, as every one Were its sole object. Judgment done, God is, thou art,—the rest is hurled To nothingness for thee. This world, This finite life, thou hast preferred, In disbelief of God's plain word, To heaven and to infinity. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... further. Daring to believe himself the earthly representative of Omnipotence, whose duty it was to see that all had the rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming that a woman's chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the practice of plural marriage, as a "Prophet of God," on the authority of a direct revelation from the Almighty. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... with in the case of the Emperor Sushun. His remains did not receive even the measure of respect that would have been paid to the corpse of the commonest among his subjects. Nothing could indicate more vividly the omnipotence of the o-omi; everything had been prepared so that his partisans could bury the body almost before it was cold. Had Prince Shotoku protested, he would have been guilty of the futility described by a Chinese proverb as "spitting at the sky." Besides, Shotoku and Umako were allies otherwise. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... stand much chance in resisting the claims or the will of a legitimate prince. A nod or a word, from such a king, can consign the greatest noble to hopeless impotence. And he can do this from the mighty and mysterious force of ideas alone. Neither king nor parliament can ever resist the omnipotence of popular ideas. When ideas establish despots on their thrones, they are safe. When ideas demand their dethronement, no forces can long sustain them. The age of Queen Mary was the period of the most unchecked absolutism in England. Mary was apparently a powerless woman when Lady ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... broad expanse, in the dim distance, like huge clouds, were the misty blue Laurentian hills, grand, eternal, steadfast, an emblem of Omnipotence itself. ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... Creator to shorten the process, to help man in his painful and often unsuccessful search after truth, and to make known that which exists in the Divine mind and purpose? To say that he cannot, is in fact to depose him from the throne of omnipotence, and to bring us back either to two eternal independent principles, incapable of all communication, or to drive us to Pantheism. If there ever was a period in duration in which God could act upon matter, or endue infinite intelligences ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to be grateful for; for after the rash attempt I made to secure my freedom, I have reason to be thankful for the mercy shown to me. Death—dreadful death of soul and body—would have been my portion; but, by the mercy of Omnipotence, I have been spared to repentance—John iii. I have now come to bitterness. The chaplain, a pious gentleman, says it never really pays to steal. "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt." Honesty is the best policy, I am convinced, and I would not for ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... manner of necessity, that a man of so holy a conversation should work those things, which other men could not perform; and that, resigning himself to God, with an entire confidence and trust, in the most dangerous occasions, God should consign over to him some part of his omnipotence, for the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... next client from conviction of robbing the mail; and I will not deny that I made a considerable handle of the fortunate discovery of the letter which had saved an innocent girl, on the day before, in my appeal to the jury; and if I made them feel that the finger of Omnipotence was in the work, I did it because I sincerely believe my client was innocent of all crime; and I am sure they ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... land and natural values; then, association and distribution through labor until complete equality is attained. Chasms are scattered along our road, the sword is suspended over our heads; but, to avert all dangers, we have reason, and reason is omnipotence. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... cannot do that," replied he, and she said, "O boy, I will come to thee." So she gathered her skirts and making a spring, landed on the other side of the river by him; whereupon he drew near to her, wondering at her beauty and grace, and saw a form that the hand of Omnipotence had tanned with the leaves of the Jinn and which had been fostered by Divine solicitude, a form on which the zephyrs of fair fortune had blown and over whose creation favourable planets had presided. Then she called out to him, saying, "O Muslim, come and wrestle before the day break!" ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... wanted to make him suffer. He had imagined that poverty and hard, dirty work would be the fittest requital he could bestow. If Jack MacRae had been gifted with omnipotence when he read that penned history of his father's life, he would have devised no fitter punishment, no more fitting vengeance for Gower than that he should lose his fortune and his prestige and spend his last years getting his bread upon the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... brilliant orators and lawyers, while the Democrats were dominated by one powerful man, who held the Presidential office. Consequently the Whigs proclaimed a Constitutional doctrine which practically amounted to Congressional omnipotence, and for many years assailed Jackson as a military dictator who was undermining the representative institutions of his country. The American people, however, appraised these fulminations at their ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... continually produces in human affairs, of the imperceptible fibres of the web which lies between two souls, preventing always the fullest understanding, unless Love, the magician, gives new sight—amounts to the proclamation of practical Omnipotence. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the child of genius because he is the child of God. Those beautiful words, "made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned after the divine. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... courage from a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition. The plans of mankind will no longer be interfered with by the finger of a supposed omnipotence, and no one will believe that nations or individuals are protected or destroyed by any deity whatever. Science, freed from the chains of pious custom and evangelical prejudice, will, within her sphere, be supreme. The mind will investigate without reverence and publish its conclusions without fear. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... unexpected door which sheds at the back of our old convictions more than one unexpected door, which sheds upon the life and habits of our secret being sufficient light to puzzle us for many a long day. This brings us back once more to the omniscience and perhaps the omnipotence of our hidden guest, to the brink of the mysterious reservoir of every manner of knowledge which we shall meet with again when we come to speak of the future, of the talking horses, of the divining-rod, of materializations and miracles, in short, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... giants on the earth in those days—giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence, the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage, the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... on May 10 to the Rev. John Newton:—'We rejoice in the account you give us of Dr. Johnson. His conversion will indeed be a singular proof of the omnipotence of Grace; and the more singular, the more decided.' Southey's Cowper, xv. 150. Johnson, in a prayer that he wrote on April 11, said:—'Enable me, O Lord, to glorify Thee for that knowledge of my corruption, and that sense of Thy wrath, which my disease and weakness and danger ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... is foreign to the nation by its interests, by its privileges, and often by its origin. The Cardinals and Prelates are not, properly speaking, the Pope's subjects, but rather his ghostly confederates, and the partners of his omnipotence. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... "A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... surrounding it. Nowhere else in the heavens is the architecture of a nebula so clearly displayed. It is an unfinished temple whose gigantic dimensions, while exalting the imagination, proclaim the omnipotence of its builder. But though unfinished it is not abandoned. The work of creation is proceeding within its precincts. There are stars apparently completed, shining like gems just dropped from the hand of the polisher, and around them are masses, eddies, currents, and swirls of ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... that place where none but the courageous can go. Many are the blazing and terrible forms of this God that men speak of and worship in the world. Many also are the names, of truthful import, of this Deity in all the worlds. Those names are founded upon his supremacy, his omnipotence, and his acts. In the Vedas the excellent hymn called Sata Rudriya, hath been sung in honour of that great God called the infinite Rudra. That God is the lord of all wishes that are human and heavenly. He is omnipotent, and he is the supreme master. Indeed, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... ask why we have thus lost democracy, I say from two causes; (a) The omnipotence of an unelected body, the Cabinet; (b) the party system, which turns all politics into a game like the Boat Race. Is that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a nobleman." This assurance, assisted by the consolations of a firm trust in God, caused her to raise her head with a meek smile. He continued to speak of the impregnable hopes of the Christian who founds his confidence on Omnipotence; and while his words spread a serenity through her soul, that seemed the ministration of a descended saint, she closed her hands over her breast, and silently invoked the protection of the Almighty ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... fact, impossible to conceive of an eternal hell co-existing with an eternal heaven, without also seeing that it limits eternally the divine Omnipotence; for the omnipotence of God is in carrying out his will to have all men saved by becoming holy. Unless God's laws are obeyed, God is not obeyed; and he is not sovereign if not obeyed. Hell is a condition of things hostile to God's will: it is a permanent and successful rebellion of a part of the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... supporting fish, but no fish existed. It hence forcibly appears that theatres of life must have remained unserviceable, or in the possession of a tenantry inferior to what might have enjoyed them, for many ages: there surely would have been no such waste allowed in a system where Omnipotence was working upon the plan of minute attention to specialities. The fact seems to denote that the actual procedure of the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring a long space of time for its evolution. In this supposition the long existence ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... visibly. Every moment he felt steadier mentally. And yet he was saying to himself that General T—- was perfectly capable of shutting him up in the fortress for an indefinite time. His temperament fitted his remorseless task, and his omnipotence made him inaccessible to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... letter, are all things of Divine truth and of Divine good, even from their firsts. And as all things of Divine truth and Divine good are together in their outmost, which is the sense of the letter of the Word, there evidently is the power of Divine truth, yea, the omnipotence of the Lord in saving man. For when the Lord operates He operates not from first things through mediates into outmosts, but from first things through outmosts and thus into mediates. This is why the Lord ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Code Civil (art. 1895) makes the nominal value entirely conclusive; so, also, the Prussian Landrecht (I, 790): which is to proclaim the omnipotence and infallibility of the state power in the most ingenuous or else in the most brutal manner. The power given by Puchta to metallic value (Pandecten, VII, aufl., 38) is applicable neither to paper money nor to small coin; and it ignores ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... been customary to divide the attributes of God into two classes: the Natural, and the Moral. The Natural attributes are Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Eternity; the Moral attributes: Holiness, Righteousness, Faithfulness, ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... wrath. "Eh, You gave me power to reason, so they say! and will You slay me, too, if I presume to use that power? I say, then, it was flagrant and tyrannical and absurd! 'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so!' O Setebos, it wasn't worthy of omnipotence. You know it wasn't!" In such a frame of mind I came again to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... greatest degree of credit be due? Again: Another consideration is, that we have no right to make the examination. What I shall say upon this head I design exclusively for the law-loving and law-abiding part of the House. To those who claim omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the plenitude of their assumed powers are disposed to disregard the Constitution, law, good faith, moral right, and everything else, I have not a word to say. But to the law-abiding part I say, examine the Bank charter, go examine the Constitution, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... altogether incapable of its achievement, is no help. Moreover, the commonplaces which even the most freethinking of Unitarians seem to consider as axiomatic, are to me far from certain, and even unthinkable. For example, they are always talking about the omnipotence of God. But power even of the supremest kind necessarily implies an object—that is to say, resistance. Without an object which resists it, it would be a blank, and what, then, is the meaning of omnipotence? It is not that ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... stab her eyes with red-hot thrusts; and shivering from head to foot, she slowly realized the suspicious significance of the disappearance of the will, which was the sole obstacle that debarred her from her grandfather's wealth. Although sustained by an unfaltering trust in the omnipotence of innocence, she was tormented by a dread spectre that would not "down" at her bidding; how could she prove that the money and jewels had been given to her? Would the shock of the tidings of her arrest kill her mother? Was there any possible way by which she might ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... important now that I retrace my way toward a makeshift of Omnipotence. But for this I will ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... even as Christ is the head of the Church," is certainly to be qualified by the evident points of difference in the subjects spoken of. It certainly does not mean that any man shall be invested with the rights of omnipotence and omniscience, but simply that in the family state he is the head and protector, even as in the Church is the Saviour. It is merely the announcement of a great natural law of society which obtains through all the tribes and races of men,—a great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... property more insisted upon than any other, and whatever other properties are given to him they are all in the infinite degree. The properties alledged to be proved are, eternity, infinite knowledge and power, unchangeableness, unity, omnipotence, action from all eternity, and independence. Benevolence and moral government are also ascribed to him but confessedly with a less degree of certainty, though the most desireable of all his given properties. Upon the subject of benevolence, Dr. Priestley ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... not have endowed material atoms at the outset with certain properties and energies, the gradual evolution of which in after ages would produce all the phenomena of nature, without the necessity of his incessant presence, agency, and control. Certainly, we may not put bounds to omnipotence; though we may assert of a given hypothesis respecting its exercise, that it is inconceivable, or involves wholly incongruous ideas. The necessary attributes of matter, according to our conception of it, are extension, figure, impenetrability, and ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... great man did not trouble himself with a personal answer. His reply was given vicariously, through one P. T. Mallencroft, his secretary, on flawless paper, three sentences in bold clear type and a Spencerian signature closing it. It was a bloodless thing. It spoke the commands of omnipotence as though carved on tablets ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... danger to which I might expose myself in the way thither. I began, likewise, to consider Carwin's return to molest me as exceedingly improbable. He had relinquished, of his own accord, his design, and departed without compulsion. "Surely," said I, "there is omnipotence in the cause that changed the views of a man like Carwin. The divinity that shielded me from his attempts will take suitable care of my future safety. Thus to yield to my fears is to deserve ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... due to her brains and efforts. She raised her chin arrogantly. She had never been thwarted and the person was not born who could defeat her ultimately in any ambition! Her mental elation gave her a feeling akin to omnipotence. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... of the mind, with which we are sufficiently acquainted. Reflect upon it. Consider it on all sides. Do you find anything in it like this creative power, by which it raises from nothing a new idea, and with a kind of Fiat, imitates the omnipotence of its Maker, if I may be allowed so to speak, who called forth into existence all the various scenes of nature? So far from being conscious of this energy in the will, it requires as certain experience as that of which ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... takes the form of a noun, as before suggested; and, in that form, the reader, if he will, may call it a noun: as, "What do ye more than others?"—Bible. "God in thus much is bounded, that the evil hath he left unto an other; and that Dark Other hath usurped the evil which Omnipotence laid down."—Tupper's Book of Thoughts, p. 45. Some call it a pronoun. But it seems to be pronominal, merely by ellipsis of the noun after it; although, unlike a mere adjective, it assumes the ending of the noun, to mark that ellipsis. Perhaps therefore, the best explanation ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... are required to adore him, although it must be clear to the commonest capacity to-day that the worship of such a deity is devil-worship. I do not say there is no God; I only say this is not God—this blood-lover, this son-slayer, this blind omniscience, this impotent omnipotence, this merciful cruelty, this meek arrogance, this peaceful combatant; this is not God, but man. The mind of man wars with the works of God to mar them. Man tries to make us believe that he is made in the image of God; but what happened was just the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... seems to me not merely baseless, but impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of possibility ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... strength, as if it would be dangerous for me to feel (what is the truth) that there is nothing in me keeping me back from the grossest and vilest sin. This is a delusion of the devil. My only safety is to know, feel, and confess my helplessness, that I may hang upon the arm of Omnipotence ... I daily wish that sin had been rooted out of my heart. I say, 'Why did God leave the root of lasciviousness, pride, anger, etc., in my bosom? He hates sin, and I hate it; why did He not take it clean away?' I know many answers to this which completely satisfy my judgment, ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... Descartes held that mind and matter are so different as to make any action of the one on the other impossible. When I will to move my arm, they said, it is not my will that operates on my arm, but God, who, by His omnipotence, moves my arm whenever I want it moved. The modern doctrine of psychophysical parallelism is not appreciably different from this theory of the Cartesian school. Psycho-physical parallelism is the theory that mental and physical events ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... befalls us—that we can make common cause with Him, and pity Him for His thwarted plans, His endless disappointments, His innumerable failures, His grievous sufferings. It would be easy to love God if He were like that—yet who dares to say it or to teach it? It is the dreadful doctrine of His Omnipotence that ruins everything. I cannot hold any communication with Omnipotence—it is a consuming fire; but if I could know that God was strong and patient and diligent, but not all-powerful or all-knowing, then I could commune with Him. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pass away—not in irreverence I write it—and we stood face to face with a new heaven and a new earth—where, in the Grand Canon of the Colorado River, the sublimity of the Almighty Builder's beauty and omnipotence was voiced in one stupendous Word, wrought in enduring color in everlasting stone. Cleaving its way westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... not the force of thine argument," replied the knight, "and yet have I remarked an omnipotence in truth, that doth make me insist on having recourse to Governor Winthrop. As is the God-like sun, animating and vivifying all things, searching into dark recesses and driving out bats and impure vermin by his intolerable presence, and unveiling ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Creation must be reproved, and in the midst of the successes by which patient insight will be surprised, the fact of the confirmation of species in plants and animals must remain always a miraculous one. What outstretched sign of constant Omnipotence can be more awful, than that the susceptibility to {204} external influences, with the reciprocal power of transformation, in the organs of the plant; and the infinite powers of moral training and mental conception over the nativity of animals, should be so restrained within impassable ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... guide and bless, is responded to by man, who loves, obeys, and enjoys. Nothing is gained by attributing to nature vicegerent forces. Is it not preferable to say that she responds to intelligent, loving Omnipotence? Our finiteness is illustrated by our initiation into organized being. Emerging from a rayless atom, too diminutive for the sight, we gradually develop and advance to the maturity of those conscious powers, the exercise of which furnishes indubitable evidence of our immortality. We are ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... And there was the gentle Joseph, with a reverent, wondering look on his worn features; and there the conscious, self-possessed, but adoring expression on the sweet face of the Child-Mother; and there the helpless form and pleading hands of Him whose omnipotence stretches through infinity, and in whose fingers colossal suns and their systems are but the playthings of this moment in His eternal existence, which we call Time. Three shepherds stood around, dazed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... sheer power of intelligence, and whom he might ride to glory or the grave at pleasure. Which was it to be? He lingered long, relishing the details of schemes that he was too idle to pursue. Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feeling several inches higher than when he came in. Such is the power of a good address, and such is the omnipotence of the great organ. Mr. Jerry Hollowell sat down and began to fan himself. It was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... perfectly communicated externally to a creature that the created nature and the divinity retaining each of them its own properties were, notwithstanding so united together that they were but one same person. Now of all the creatures which that Sovereign Omnipotence could produce, He thought good to make choice of human nature which afterwards in effect was united to the person of God the Son, He created it, and to it He destined the incomparable honour of personal union with His divine majesty, to the end that for all eternity ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... in this sacrament, there is, by the omnipotence of God, a conversion, or change, of the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ, and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... is almost to be so; to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself. Thus earnest resolution has often seemed to have about it almost a savor of omnipotence.—Samuel Smiles. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... we really know of the Imperial wanderer, whose journeyings may still be traced by the monuments that sprang up in his footsteps! Never since the world began has there been a traveller in the grandiose style of Hadrian; he perambulated his world like a god, crowned with a halo of benevolence and omnipotence. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... obedience and commercial restraints as from taxation of revenue, being unrepresented here, I pronounce them futile, frivolous, and groundless. Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declaration of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel that tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part, of the legislature or by the bodies who compose it, is equally ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... European powers has deprived them of the culture of civilised life, as they neither serve to swell the ambitious views of conquest, nor the avarice of commerce. Here the sacred finger of Omnipotence has interposed, and rendered our vices the instruments of virtue; and although that unfortunate man Christian has, in a rash unguarded moment, been tempted to swerve from his duty to his king and ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... them I thought this inadvisable, as any rupture in our friendly relations with the natives would have been quite fatal—if not to our lives, at least to our chances of reaching civilisation. Moreover, my people were not by any means without a kind of religion of their own. They believed in the omnipotence of a Great Spirit in whose hands their destinies rested; and him they worshipped with much the same adoration which Christians give to God. The fundamental difference was that the sentiment animating them was not love, but fear: ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... they looked below into the inky depths of the thunder clouds, pierced and riven by jagged lightnings, followed by deafening bellowings and crashings of thunder, and then cast their eyes up to the sun shining in full-orbed splendor over all, they realized as never before the presence and majesty of Omnipotence. ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... The omnipotence of the majority and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the United States, have not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but they exercise the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration. As ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... teach your children gentleness, And mercy to the weak, and reverence For Life, which, in its weakness or excess, Is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, Or Death, which, seeming darkness, is no less The selfsame light, although averted hence, When by your laws, your actions, and your speech, You contradict the very things ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... divinities: these, in fact, had surrendered their original characteristics in order to become forms of the Sun, Amon as well as the others—and the new belief displayed itself in magnifying the solar deity, but the solar deity united with the Theban Amon, that is, Amon-Ra. The omnipotence of this one god did not, however, exclude a belief in the existence of his compeers; the theologians thought all the while that the beings to whom ancient generations had accorded a complete independence ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... fully. But from the case of Papilio dardanus alone there is much to be learnt which is of the highest importance for our understanding of transformations. It shows us chiefly what I once called, somewhat strongly perhaps, the omnipotence of natural selection in answer to an opponent who had spoken of its "inadequacy." We here see that one and the same species is capable of producing four or five different patterns of colouring and marking; thus the colouring and marking are not, as has often been supposed, a necessary ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... purely for his country's sake, not knowing whether, if he laid down his life, he should ever find it again, or whether, if he took it up hereafter, he should take it up in heaven or hell. Come, parson!" he said, turning to the minister, "what has ever been conceived of omnipotence, of omniscience, so ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted with ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... blood For sacrifice, before his shrine for ever 310 In adoration bend, or Erebus With all its banded fiends shall not uprise To overwhelm in envy and revenge The dauntless and the good, who dare to hurl Defiance at his throne, girt tho' it be 315 With Death's omnipotence. Thou hast beheld His empire, o'er the present and the past; It was a desolate sight—now gaze on mine, Futurity. Thou hoary giant Time, Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,— 320 And from the cradles of eternity, Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep By the ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... varieties of timbers; large white-woods and bass-woods will be seen towering above the forest. The white ash, the shag bark, the black cherry, will have become abundant. The woods will seem to have been growing deeper and denser every mile of the way. Soon the traveler will doubt, whether Omnipotence himself could have planted the trees larger, taller, and ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... reasonable, when you are talking about finite creatures; but try to think for one moment of an archangel, a pure and clear-eyed intelligence, deliberately choosing to rebel against Omnipotence! He must have known it would be utterly, absolutely, forever hopeless! Intelligent creatures do not rebel under conditions like that, particularly when you combine with the absolute hopelessness of the case the fact that he knew he was ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... been his will, the omnipotence of his power is always the same; and in whatever way this supreme will has been manifested, nothing can diminish its greatness. As regards, then, the decrees of this infinite wisdom, I confine myself to the limits of a simple observer of nature. Then, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Jews cannot but regard their presence in any other land except Palestine as a sojourn in captivity," and "they are held to obey their own authorities rather than a strange government." This explains "the omnipotence of the Kahals," which, contrary to the law of the state, employ secret means to uphold their autonomous authority both in communal and judicial matters, using for this purpose the uncontrolled sums of the special Jewish revenue, the meat tax. The education of the Jewish youth is entrusted to ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... too incoherent for organized prayer; nevertheless his agonized cry to Omnipotence was, indeed, a supplication to which the Lord must have inclined favorably, for, in the midst of his desolation and bewilderment, the door opened and Dirty Dan O'Leary ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... had got his logic of him! If Congress does not possess the power, why taunt it with its weakness, by asking its exercise? Why mock it by demanding impossibilities? Petitioning, according to Mr. Wise, is, in matters of legislation, omnipotence itself; the very source of all constitutional power; for, asking Congress to do what it cannot do, gives it the power—to pray the exercise of a power that is not, creates it. A beautiful theory! Let us work it both ways. If to petition ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... consequence to observe their separate influence, in order to obviate some of their ill effects. Love is unquestionably the most powerful, and is less under the controul of the understanding than any of the rest. It has a kind of omnipotence ascribed to it, which belongs not to any other. 'Love is strong as death; many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown it.' Other passions are necessary for the preservation of the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the remembrance of his own sufferings—urged on by the consideration that a mother, brothers, and sister, were still grinding in the prison-house of bondage, in common with three millions of our Father's children—sustained by an unfaltering faith in the omnipotence of truth and the final triumph of justice—to plead the cause of the slave, and by the eloquence of earnestness carried conviction to many minds, and enlisted the sympathy and secured the co-operation ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown
... impracticability of their attempts in 1715, and 1745. That they failed, I bless GOD; but cannot join in the ridicule against them. Who does not know that the abilities or defects of leaders and commanders are often hidden, until put to the touchstone of exigency; and that there is a caprice of fortune, an omnipotence in particular accidents and conjunctures of circumstances, which exalt us as heroes, or brand us as madmen, just as they are for ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of Clery," he exclaimed, clasping his hands and beating his breast while he spoke, "blessed Mother of Mercy! thou who art omnipotent with Omnipotence, have compassion with me, a sinner! It is true, that I have something neglected thee for thy blessed sister of Embrun; but I am a King, my power is great, my wealth boundless; and, were it otherwise, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that nothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; with Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not help ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... aspire by their own efforts to that divine perfectibility of which it teaches that man is capable, and by attaining which man becomes God—and thus is explained both the quiescence of the imaginary celestial, and the plenary omnipotence of the real Manushi Buddhas—thus, too, we must account for the fact that genuine Buddhism has no priesthood; the saint despises the priest; the saint scorns the aid of mediators, whether on earth or in heaven; 'conquer (exclaims the adept or Buddha to the novice or BodhiSattwa)—conquer ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... monarch, struck with awe, Dismissed the people then; Contending with Omnipotence He felt indeed ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... confidently do other than leave them to perish, is to us unknown. It may be impossible to renew them by repentance—beyond the power of Omnipotence ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... Kitchener. Millions of us were confident that the hero of Kartoum would save the world. It was not so decreed. Almost immediately another name flashed into the ken of every one, until even lisping children said Joffre with reverence second only to that wherewith they named Omnipotence. Then the weary years dragged on, and so many men were incredibly brave and good that it seemed hard for anyone to become pre-eminent. We began to say that in a war so vast, so far-flung, no one ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... great many excellent people in the world who are strongly prejudiced against what they designate "isms," but who are always glad of any opportunity of serving God, as they express it. I ask what can finite beings do to serve Omnipotence unless it be to exert all their powers for the good of humanity, for the uplifting of man, which, if aught of ours could do, must rejoice our Creator. When we see more than one-half of the adult human family—reasonably industrious and intelligent, if we make for them no larger claim, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Babette, "why must he die, now that the day of our happiness approached. God! Enlighten my understanding! Enlighten my heart! I do not understand thy ways! Notwithstanding all thy omnipotence and wisdom, I still grope ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... the quiet retreats of Tibur, I could not but entertain apprehensions for the safety of the friends I had just left. I felt that where such men as Varus and Fronto were at the head of affairs, wielding, almost as they pleased, the omnipotence of Aurelian, no family nor individual of whatever name or rank could feel secure of either fortune or life. I had heard indeed such expressions of regard fall from the Emperor for Piso and his beautiful wife, that I was sure that if ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... be that the prospect of an "exceeding, even an eternal weight of glory" may be needed to support our frail purposes under the crushing afflictions of our mortal lot. It may be that, by the perfect arrangements of Omnipotence, the sufferings of all may be made to work out the ultimate and supreme good of each. He next makes this grand concession: To the orthodox Christian, who fully believes all he professes, cheerful resignation to the divine will is ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... was not itself languishing for love could not pour forth to another with such convincing truth, overwhelming power, and glowing fervour the ardent longing of a soul seized by the omnipotence of love. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... upon them; and that they wonder at its being supposed by some, whom they called men of little judgment, that the heaven of the Omnipotent God consists only of the spirits and angels who come from one earth, when these are so few that, relatively to the Omnipotence of God, they are scarcely anything, and this would be the case even if there were myriads of systems with myriads of earths. They said, moreover, that they knew of the existence of earths in the universe exceeding in number some hundreds ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... worse. The man of very regular conduct is too often a prig, if he be not worse—a rabbi. I, for my part, want to be startled out of my conceits; I want to be put to shame in my own eyes; I want to feel the bridle in my mouth, and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the omnipotence of circumstances. (5) If I from my spy-hole, looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken evidences of a plan and some signals of an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very much disputed thing amongst the experts whose business it is to inform us on the subject—our psychologists. The majority of modern psychologists seem to reject it altogether. On the other hand, no theologian has ever yet reconciled it in any intelligible scheme with the supposed omnipotence of God. But it is not necessary to enter into these abstruse considerations. Let us take the ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... should be laid in the principles of a sound historical philosophy of society. We can hardly wonder at it. What is interesting, and what we do not notice earlier in the century, is that in the System of Nature the revolt against the impotence of society, and the revolt against the omnipotence of God, made a firm coalition. That coalition came to a bloody end for the time, four-and-twenty years after Holbach's book proclaimed it, when the Committee of Public Safety despatched Hebert, and better men than ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... were cleverer than that, youngster," said Blondet. "No. Upon my word, as I looked at that forehead of yours, I credited you with the omnipotence of the great mind—the power of seeing both sides of everything. In literature, my boy, every idea is reversible, and no man can take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side. Everything is bi-lateral ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... insoluble) that we have an illusion of liberty, an illusion that we are free, which suffices for us to acquire merit if we do right and demerit if we do wrong, and that this illusion of liberty is a relative liberty, which leaves the prescience of God, and therefore His omnipotence, absolute. Man is also extremely weak, debilitated, and incapable of good on account of original sin, the sin of our first parents, which is transmitted to us through heredity and paralyses us. But God helps us, and this is what is termed grace. He helps us gratuitously, as is indicated by ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... it is better for the general welfare of the world that a man who dwells three hundred miles from London should have some interest, however slight, in international politics, and some knowledge, however fragmentary, of natural forces, rather than a slipshod belief in ghosts, witches, and the omnipotence of "squire." It is not from such minds that empire is made or deserved, and if with the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and forgotten, we who have, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... arbiter, sure to be backed by nine-tenths of the physical forces of society. He underrates, if he does not altogether ignore, the much wider and deeper influence of the Royal name; its power over passion as well as over ignorance. The omnipotence of Parliament, even when, in the belief of half the nation, a Parliamentary majority represents a minority of the people, is due less to traditional respect for the House of Commons, or superstitious reverence for a majority vote, such as prevails in America, than to the fact, that resistance ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... repudiated him; the South burned him in effigy. Yet, almost single-handed and alone, Garrison continued to fight on, declaring that "his reliance for the deliverance of the oppressed universally is upon the nature of man, the inherent wrongfulness of oppression, the power of truth, and the omnipotence of God." After the greatest civil war that ever immersed a nation in a baptism of blood and tears, Garrison, unlike most reformers, lived to see the triumph of the cause for which he fought and every slave not only ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Joseph now went to his master for consultation only. He was already meditating a tilt against classical traditions, and Grecian conventionalities, in short, against the leading-strings which held down an art to which Nature as she is belongs, in the omnipotence of her creations and her imagery. Joseph made ready for a struggle which, from the day when he first exhibited in the Salon, has never ceased. It was a terrible year. Roguin, the notary of Madame Descoings and Madame Bridau, absconded with the moneys held back for seven years from Madame ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of GOD. These doubts had been infused in conversation by the reasoning of an eminent lawyer. If you believe in the doctrine of everlasting punishment said he, and believe also in the prescience of GOD, and in HIS Omnipotence, must you not admit that GOD might prevent the sinner from entering at all into this world of probation? into this world of trial which is to prove too severe for his powers of resistance? If I know ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... ideas of omnipotence; and I fancy he would say that the Infinite Being who made every shining star is hardly likely to be on the look-out ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception, of Omnipotence. ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Christian. Here the warfare is not to be eternal. The victory of good is to come. Divine help is promised, that it may be secured in every soul. The conquest of evil by good is within that Christian omnipotence which Paul knew. "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." It requires a Christ to show that the path to rest is through toil; that the way to ease is through suffering; that the ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... the motley host Three prime gradations may be rank'd: the first, To mount upon the wings of Shakspeare's mind, And win a flash of his Promethean thought, To smile and weep, to shudder, and achieve A round of passionate omnipotence, Attend: the second, are a sensual tribe, Convened to hear romantic harlots sing, On forms to banquet a lascivious gaze, While the bright perfidy of wanton eyes Through brain and spirit darts delicious fire The last, a throng most pitiful! who seem, With their corroded figures, rayless ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... oftentimes can scarce utter three or four words, but they faint away. Therefore, to comprehend much in a few words, the Voice is an Emanation from that very Spirit, which God breathed inth Man's Nostrils, when he Created him a living Soul. Hence also, The Word of God, the Son of God, the Omnipotence of God, &c. are in Holy Scripture oftentimes homonymous, or of the ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... for defence; and neither Christian nor Bridgenorth held it sound policy to practise openly, even under parliamentary authority, against a lady so little liable to hesitate upon the measures most likely to secure her feudal sovereignty; wisely considering that even the omnipotence, as it has been somewhat too largely styled, of Parliament, might fail to relieve them from the personal consequences ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... sacrifices reek upon their naked altars. Under their roofs, visited only by the light that steals through their narrow entrances, stand unnoticed, unworshipped, unmoved, the mighty idols of old Rome. Human emotion, which made them Omnipotence once, has left them but stone now. The 'Star in the East' has already dimmed the fearful halo which the devotion of bloodshed once wreathed round their forms. Forsaken and alone, they stand but as the gloomy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... expounded by the agitator of Nazareth preserved the germ of life, of truth and justice, so long as it was the beacon light of the few. The moment the majority seized upon it, that great principle became a shibboleth and harbinger of blood and fire, spreading suffering and disaster. The attack on the omnipotence of Rome was like a sunrise amid the darkness of the night, only so long as it was made by the colossal figures of a Huss, a Calvin, or a Luther. Yet when the mass joined in the procession against the Catholic ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... pleased him, but would not have been shocked at all at the idea that he might not please to give this or that man any help. In their eyes power was a grander thing than love, though it is nowhere said in the Book that God is omnipotence. Such, because they are told that he is omnipotent, call him Omnipotence; when told that he is Love, do not care to argue that he must then be loving? But as to doing what he wills with a word—see what it cost him to redeem the world! He did ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... suddenly addressing the Deity in the second person, he says "the Mountains saw Thee, and they trembled, the Overflowing of the waters passed by, the Deep uttered his voice, and lift up his hands on high[84]." In another place, the Deluge is nobly animated, in order to display the Omnipotence of God. "The waters (says the Psalmist) stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled, at the voice of ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... religious proclivities were more pronounced than those of other children I cannot say, but certainly, as a child, I was in the habit of appealing to Omnipotence to gratify every ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... continued Arthur, "but when you come to look into it it comes out clear enough. It is one of the instances of the omnipotence of capital. Parliament can do such a thing, not because it has any creative power of its own, but because it has the command of unlimited capital." Mr. Wharton looked at him, sighing inwardly as he reflected that unrequited love should have brought a clear-headed ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... That Omnipotence which has called the world with all its living creatures into one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... not therefore I deny the birth, The Virgin's motherhood, the resurrection, Who know not how mine own soul came to earth, Nor what shall follow death. Man's imperfection May bound not even in thought the height and girth Of God's omnipotence; neath his direction We may approach his essence, but that He Should dwarf Himself to ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... watch, and, doubtless, did their whole duty. But what are sentinels when the power of Omnipotence is put forth? An angel of the Lord makes his appearance. The keepers saw him, and fell down like dead men. The angel rolled away the stone, and the conqueror came forth to live in the hearts of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... rise before my eyes, so young and fair and rich in life and yet so pathetic in their troubled earnestness that a great flood of pity wells up in my heart for the poor young souls, so danger-bound and suffering, and withal so daring and so recklessly confident in the might and right of love, and the omnipotence of youth. Ah! If God had seen fit in his infinite wisdom to save just one treasure from the wreck of Eden, what a race of thankful hearts this earth would bear, had he saved us youth alone therewith to compensate us ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... spoil the interest and probability of his story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity. One never understands why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action. Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the whole ineffective. Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational: they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background. Their interventions only make the struggle seem ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Great, the Mighty, the Tremendous, the Merciful, the Gracious, the Benign, the Wise, the Faithful, the Just, and the Virtuous; Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence, are His alone, whose Being knew no beginning, and can ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... communion, is the growing disbelief in the objective validity of prayer. And a similar remark applies to the belief in miracles. But to a much less extent. All ancient religions were based on miracle, and even to the later religious consciousness a denial of miracle seems to deny the divine Omnipotence. Jewish theology from the Rabbinic age sought to evade the difficulty by the mystic notion that all miracles were latent in ordered nature at the creation. And so the miraculous becomes interconnected with Providence as ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... it is not in the power of God to bring it about, that the angles of a triangle taken together shall amount to anything else than two right angles, so it is not within the compass of Divine omnipotence to create a man for whom it shall be a good and proper thing, and befitting his nature, to blaspheme, to perjure himself, to abandon himself recklessly to lust, or anger, or any other passion. God need not have created man at all, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... large and rather high up, but Rawson-Clew was a man of fair height; he was also usually considered an honourable one, but when he heard the voice, saying something which was plainly only meant for the hearing of Omnipotence, he did not go away. He put his hands on the flintwork of the window-sill and in a moment found himself in the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... to find many texts which state God's existence, His Unity, His Omnipotence, His Omniscience. We prefer however to refer the student to whole Books and long passages: such, for instance, as the training of Israel to worship God—the awe and reverence which appear in all the language about God—the consistent Holiness of His character as presented in all the Books. ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... be easier than he supposed to present his own system in an equally irrational aspect. If you measure the proceedings of omnipotence by the uses to which a wise and benevolent man would put such superhuman power, if we can imagine a man of this kind endowed with it, De Maistre's theory of the extent to which a supreme being interferes in human things, is after all only a degree ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... in the Gladstonian arrangement he treats as a fatal defect, would have undoubtedly appeared to him a preposterous contrivance. It would have seemed to him impossible that a legislature like Congress, with the traditions of parliamentary omnipotence still strong in the minds of the members, would ever submit to have its acts nullified by a board composed of half a dozen elderly lawyers. Nor would he have treated as any more reasonable the expectation ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house of—Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle West. The men of this minority were slow to admit the omnipotence of Jasper Grierson's money, and the women were still slower to accept Miss Grierson ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to his successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... not an impersonal force, nor even simply the creator of the universe as philosophy might conceive Him.[1] Creative power is not of course denied, but it is qualified by what theology calls the 'moral attributes of God.' We do not ignore His omnipotence, but we look beyond it, to 'the love that tops the power, the Christ in God.'[2] It is not necessary here to sketch the Old Testament teaching with regard to God. It is sufficient to state that the New Testament writers, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... white lady of the English sort, and treated her within the hut as white ladies were invariably treated in Queensland; but she considered that at Boupari one must do as Boupari does, and it never for a moment occurred to her simple mind to doubt the omnipotence of Tu-Kila-Kila in his island realm any more than she had doubted the omnipotence of the white man and his local religion in their proper place (as ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... exhausted by the might of their own despair, they fell to rise no more. A long, tearful silence ensued. Here and there a faint moan struggled for utterance, and a defiant arm was raised as though to threaten Omnipotence; then the poor, puny creatures, whom hunger had bereft of reason, shivered, dropped their hands, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... in the hand of Divine Omnipotence, a two-edged sword. It wounds the rebellious, it sanctifies him who ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... though not always useful labors, he soon forgot whatever of disagreeable nature pertained to his situation. This small and dark apartment was the only portion of the house to which, since one firmly repelled invasion, Mrs. Melmoth's omnipotence did not extend. Here (to reverse the words of Queen Elizabeth) there was "but one master and no mistress"; and that man has little right to complain who possesses so much as one corner in the world where he may be happy ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had questioned Shimas touching disputed points of olden time and had been duly answered, he presently said, "Now tell me by what power is the creature able to transgress against his Creator, seeing that His omnipotence is without bounds, even as thou hast set forth, and that naught can overcome Him or depart from His will? Deemest thou not that He is able to turn His creatures from this disobedience and compel them eternally to hold the Truth?" Answered Shimas, "In very sooth Almighty ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... somewhere," says he, "that at its uttermost this success is but the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who yet feels himself to be a symbol and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Christian Science unveil the true idea,—namely, that earth's discords have not the reality of Mind in the Science of being; and this idea—dematerializing and spiritualizing mortals—turns like the needle to the pole all hope and faith to God, based as it is on His omnipotence and omnipresence. ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... small spot, amidst innumerable worlds, taking a survey of the universe, comprehending its arrangement, and entering into the scheme of that wonderful connection and correspondence of things so remote, and which it seems the utmost exertion of Omnipotence to have established? What a volume of wisdom, what a noble theology do these discoveries open to us! While some superior geniuses have soared to these sublime subjects, other sagacious and diligent minds have been inquiring into the most minute works of the Infinite Artificer; the same care, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... this question of color in nature, broadly studied, leads us quickly to contemplate and adore the love of God. If God were the Almighty chiefly,—if he desired to impress us most with his omnipotence and infinitude, and make us bow with dread before him, how easily the world could have been made more somber, how easily our senses could have been created to receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, how easily the mountains might have been ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... famine, after that it would behove the author to write a tale of the pestilence; and then another, a tale of the exodus. These three wonderful events, following each other, were the blessings coming from Omniscience and Omnipotence by which the black clouds were driven from the Irish firmament. If one through it all could have dared to hope, and have had from the first that wisdom which has learned to acknowledge that His mercy endureth for ever! And then ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... undoubtedly, a masterly stroke of preparation on the part of Jerry. The torches, on the application of the match, emitted a broad sheet of flame, which glared upon the invaders like a sudden flash of lightning, and utterly confounded them. It seemed like the bolt of Omnipotence thrown across their path in the hour ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... thoughts through space, Where worlds in trillions roll, Each fashioned for its time and place, Each portion of the whole; Till our weak minds may feel a sense Of Thy Supreme Omnipotence. ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as it seems to me, is the case: We are fighting God's cause, but God counts but very little. We are not laying hold of His Omnipotence; we are trusting entirely in big guns, while God is forgotten. That is why the war drags on. I tell you,' and his voice quivered with passion, 'what I am afraid of is this. This ghastly carnage will drag on, with all its horrors; homes will ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... peace; I will yield the Torah to a nation that dwells in peace and amity." [178] This decision of God, now to give them the Torah, also shows how mighty is the influence of penance. For they had been sinful upon their arrival at Mount Sinai, continuing to tempt God and doubting His omnipotence. After a short time, however, they changed in spirit; and hardly had they reformed, when God found them worthy of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Rebellion rising, saw in whom, how spred Among the sons of Morn, what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high Decree; And smiling to his onely Son thus said. Son, thou in whom my glory I behold In full resplendence, Heir of all my might, Neerly it now concernes us to be sure Of our Omnipotence, and with what Arms We mean to hold what anciently we claim 720 Of Deitie or Empire, such a foe Is rising, who intends to erect his Throne Equal to ours, throughout the spacious North; Nor so content, hath in his thought to trie In battel, what our Power ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... kindly, but implacable; beneficent, a bestower of all gifts upon the faithful, a bestower of very terrible gifts upon those that flout him; and I who speak to you have seen my own contentment blighted, by just such flippant jesting with Love's omnipotence, before the edge of my first razor had been dulled. 'Tis true, I have lived since in indifferent comfort; yet it is but a dreary banquet where there is no platter laid for Love, and within the chambers of my heart—dust-gathering now, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... himself marvelling as he regarded her; what a life was hers! Compare it with that of some little work-girl in Lambeth, such as he saw in the street—what spaces between those two worlds! Was it possible that this dainty creation, this thing of material omnipotence, would suffer decay of her sweetness and in the end die? The reason took her side and revolted against law; it would be an outrage if time or ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... and Glory is in mourning. We struggle here against the oppression of the gods, and the longings of the nations are for us.... Adversity was wanting to my career. If I had died on the throne amidst the clouds of my omnipotence, I should have remained a problem for many men: to-day, thanks to misfortune, they can judge of me naked ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Master taught the omnipotence of God, whose ways he declared as high above the blind grovelings of man as the dome of heaven swings above earth. But how long, gentle Master, shall such as this be declared thy Father's ways? How long shall superstition and idolatry retain the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... not matter to me," said Triplet, with some hauteur, and assuming poetic omnipotence. "Only, when one knows the subject, one can sometimes make the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... or two trials that the interested parties raised rapidly on anything I desired. I used to send Gusta and John, nicknamed very properly "Omniscience and Omnipotence," which names did equally well when reversed (like a paper cuff), and they, less verdant than their mistress, would return with an amazing array of stuff. We now have everything but a second-hand pulpit, a wooden leg, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... old man, shorn of his omnipotence, who had outlived his fame and his worshippers, was dying in his great palace at Versailles; his only solace the austere woman who had inspired the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who upon the death of his unhappy queen he had privately made his ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... "The signs, assuredly. Yet, omnipotence, without your express command the specific detail would be elusive ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... making there what living soil it pleases, seems not so strange as that other conceit—that science is now-a-days so expert that, in consumptive cases, as yours, it can, by prescription of the inhalation of certain vapors, achieve the sublimest act of omnipotence, breathing into all but lifeless dust the breath of life. For did you not tell me, my poor sir, that by order of the great chemist in Baltimore, for three weeks you were never driven out without a respirator, and for a given time of every day sat bolstered up in a sort of gasometer, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville |
