"Irreligion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... matter, had of late shown much less laxity of opinion than in his younger and more argumentative days; and there was little comfort in supposing that these were not real honest doubts at all, only apologies for general carelessness and irreligion. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time when firmness included virulence, yet he imparted his kindness to those who were not supposed to favour his principles. He was an early encourager of Pope, and was, at once, the friend of Addison and of Granville. He is accused of voluptuousness and irreligion; and Pope, who says, that "if ever there was a good Christian, without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth," seems not able to deny what he is angry to hear, and ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... because we will not own it to ourselves; the satisfaction of seeing all our favourite and selfish ideas dressed up in a garb so becoming, that we persuade ourselves that our false pride is proper dignity, our ferocity courage, our cowardice prudence, our irreligion liberality, and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... here that John Wesley prescribed at this period for madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month—a regimen which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... his country for gold to England's hereditary foe, whose army he had engaged to come and crush the last remnants of national freedom, should his Protestant people dare to resist the monarch's traitorous proceedings. The profligacy and irreligion of the court was widely imitated by all classes, till patriots, watching with gloomy forebodings the downward progress of their country, began to despair of her future fate. Such was the state of things when, on the morning of the 14th of August, 1670, several sedate, grave-looking persons were ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... The suspicions of his irreligion proceeded, in a great measure, from his dread of hypocrisy; instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was. He went in London to early prayers, lest he should be seen at church; he read prayers to his servants every morning ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... moral world. Why is God to be excluded from this superior creation, but because men "do not like to retain him in their knowledge," and because corrupted reason would deify itself and dethrone the Almighty?—And here we have the characteristic distinction between religion and irreligion. The former assigns God as the cause and agent in every thing, born interior and exterior to us. It places him upon the throne, subordinates every thing to his will, attributes every thing to his ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... the practice of artificial birth control, or, as seems to be possible, a general lowering of fertility, birth-rates are more dependent on morals and religion than on race and country. During the past century irreligion spread throughout France, and the birth-rate fell from 32.2, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, to 20.6, during the first ten years of the twentieth century. In America, amongst the descendants of the New England Puritans a decay of religion and morals has also been ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... times of danger, can with safety and security overleap, for the moment, the mere forms of law, in order to secure its beneficial results. They seem to resemble each other; but are as wide apart as irreligion and that highest religious life which, transcending all external observances, seems to the mere religious formalist ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... no one think that irreligion is advocated in this book. With respect to religious tenets I wish to observe that I am a member of the Church of England, into whose communion I was baptized, and to which my forefathers belonged. Its being the religion in which I was ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... fraud in all its shapes, and some species of lying, are manifestly, and in an eminent degree, injurious to social happiness. How different accordingly, in the moral scale, is the place they hold, from that which is assigned to idolatry, to general irreligion, to swearing, drinking, fornication, lasciviousness, sensuality, excessive dissipation; and in particular circumstances, to pride, wrath, ...
— 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
... fashionable irreligion which prevailed in the age of the Antonines, both the interest of the priests and the credulity of the people were sufficiently respected. In their writings and conversation, the philosophers of antiquity asserted the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... passion of the preacher's convictions and the energy of his utterance. On had gone the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous assertions of God's mind and purposes. The lash that was wielded was far-reaching; all the vices of the age—irreligion, blasphemy, drunkenness, extravagance, vainglory, loose living—fell under its sting. The condemnation was general, and each man looked to see his neighbor wince. The occurrence at the ball last night,—he was on that for final theme, was he? There was a slight movement throughout the ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... sharp-edged, risen like the all-destructive Being at the end of the Yuga. Then Brahman made over that sharp weapon to the blue-throated Rudra who has for the device on his banner the foremost of bulls, for enabling him to put down irreligion and sin. At this, the divine Rudra of immeasurable soul, praised by the great Rishis, took up that sword and assumed a different shape. Putting forth four arms, he became so tall that though standing on the earth he touched the very ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Browning as he was playing a piece of eighteenth-century Venetian music. But in the dream there is a sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy. That part of the poem is representative. It is the end of such a society as is drawn in The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church. That tomb ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sides, mingled itself with the rage of our civil dissensions, more frantic than that, more implacable, more averse to all healing measures. The most intemperate counsels were thought the most pious, and a regard to the laws, if they opposed the suggestions of these fiery zealots, was accounted irreligion. This added new difficulties to what was before but too difficult in itself, the settling of a nation which no longer could put any confidence in its sovereign, nor lay more restraints on the royal authority ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... years later by the English poet; for who could escape the threefold danger of "ordinary law, martial law, and flat fighting." Nor was the state of religious affairs at all more promising. The Deputy describes the kingdom as "overwhelmed by the most deplorable immorality and irreligion;"[427] the Privy Council, in their deliberations, gives a similar account. "As for religion, there was but small appearance of it; the churches uncovered, and the clergy scattered."[428] An Act of Parliament was then passed to remedy ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... entertainment of the episcopal clergy, anno 1638, does now plead for their care to prevent it in time coming. (3.) Because the people under their ministry, have hitherto been, and are perishing in ignorance and irreligion; being either starved for want of faithful and spiritual instruction, or poisoned with false instruction; and therefore pity to them, and zeal to propagate the gospel, should prompt to all endeavours to purge them out. (4.) Because the settlement, purgation, and plantation ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... lives of 'Wits and Beaux' are, it is admitted, just: vice is censured; folly rebuked; ungentlemanly conduct, even in a beau of the highest polish, exposed; irreligion finds no toleration under gentle names—heartlessness no palliation from its being the way of the world. There is here no separate code allowed for men who live in the world, and for those who live out of it. The task of pourtraying such characters as the 'Wits and Beaux of Society' is a responsible ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... mentioned in these proposals, and probably may not be found in the work itself, when it appears. Hence we may reasonably infer, that the world is indebted for these discoveries to the wonderful acuteness of the Inspectorial nostrils, which can smell out irreligion and infidelity, where no such things are intended, or even dreamt of. If such, indeed, are the intentions of this proposer, he is, doubtless, greatly obliged to his good friend, the Inspector, or rather the would-be inquisitor, for discovering ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... dancing: the young man, 'too old and too young to be in love,' was to make his way as a wit. He did so, in the approved way in that day of irreligion, in a political squib. On July 14th, 1742, he writes in his Notes, 'I wrote the "Lessons for the Day;" the "Lessons for the day" being the first and second chapters of the "Book of Preferment,"' Horace was proud of this brochure, for he ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... wonder that the fair tender plant of beautiful childhood refuses to grow in such a vitiated atmosphere. Here all distinctions between good and evil are speedily lost, if they were ever known; and men, women, and children become unnatural in vice, in irreligion, in manners and appearance. Such spots as these act like cankers, yearly spreading further and further their vitiating influences, preparing for all those fearful retributions in the shape of fever and pestilence which continually come down. Yet, lamentable as the state of such a population ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... invention, and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great earnestness, "Do not my works testify to my Christianity?" I wish that these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish the memory of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... genuine Christianity. With the former, they held that some parts of the Catholic system were contrary to reason. The conclusion was obvious. Two propositions, each of which separately is compatible with the most exalted piety, formed, when held in conjunction, the ground-work of a system of irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation is affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced by logical ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... verses show tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to aver that one kind of age, one sort of 'culture' is more favourable to the occurrence of, or belief in, these phenomena than another. Accidental circumstances, an increase, or a decrease of knowledge and education, an access of religion, or of irreligion, a fashion in intellectual temperament, may bring these experiences more into notice at one moment than at another, but they are always said to recur, at uncertain intervals, and are always essentially ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Laws rest on a religious foundation; in this respect they bear the stamp of primitive legislation. They do not escape the almost inevitable consequence of making irreligion penal. If laws are based upon religion, the greatest offence against them must be irreligion. Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, ...
— Laws • Plato
... curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world,"—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... great consequence to the welfare of the community. Some of these are of indispensable consideration to the legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in that general and moral view, in which ignorance in the lower orders is beheld the cause of their vice, irreligion, and consequent misery, that the subject is attempted, imperfectly and somewhat desultorily, to be illustrated in ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justification, even though I regard it as justifiable. In my religious experience I am taking something for granted; in other words I act about it and feel about it in a manner ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Church!" exclaimed the missionary, crushing the paper in his excitement. "If the ministers of God become the creatures of the king, despotism and irreligion must inevitably ensue. How long will virtue be accounted a crime? Shall every faithful shepherd be supplanted, to make room for the wolf of lay investiture, the instrument of a lustful tyrant, raised by simony, and ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... thought him a reprobate. To his own blunt and reserved nature, the expressions, so charming to poor Miss Charlecote, had been painfully distasteful. Sentiment, profession, obtrusive reverence, and fault-finding scruples had revolted him, even when he thought it a proof of his own irreligion to be provoked. Afterwards, when both were schoolboys, Robert had yearly increased in conscientiousness under good discipline and training, but, in their holiday meetings, had found Owen's standard receding as his own advanced, and heard the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... banished from France. The national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms to heaven and dare a God, if he existed, to vindicate his insulted majesty, and crush them with his thunderbolts. Over the entrance of their grave yards was placed this inscription, "DEATH AN ETERNAL ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... many who are not justly chargeable with it—a fault which should be most carefully avoided;[3] and equally liable, on the other hand, to the danger of overlooking the wide gulf which separates Religion from Irreligion, and Theism from Atheism. There is much room for the exercise both of Christian candor and of critical discrimination, in forming our estimate of the characters of men from the opinions which they hold, when these opinions relate not to the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... of the snake to Zion,—that is until this snake will include within the sphere of its circle the whole of Europe, and through Europe the whole world. First of all they are endeavoring to introduce everywhere irreligion and moral decadence, utilizing all forces they have won economically in order to drag the other continents into the sphere of their cycle. As the return of the head of the snake could be accomplished only over the razed ruins ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... the youth of China.'' A single mission institution, like the Shantung Protestant University, with its union of the best educational methods and the highest ideals of Christian character, will do more for the real enlightenment of China than a dozen provincial colleges where gambling, irreligion and opium smoking are freely tolerated and a failure to worship the tablet of Confucius is deemed the only ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... doors, before our gratitude becomes animated with its highest energies. If Providence were to unfold to us all the horrours which we have escaped; if all the blood which would have followed the assassin's dagger were to roll in reeking streams before us; if the full display of irreligion, flight, massacre, confiscation, imprisonment and famine, which would have graced a revolutionary triumph in these realms, were to be unbarred to our view, how should we recoil from the ghastly spectacle! With what emotions of admiration ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... their triumphs and vicissitudes, their history the history of God. The city was of their building, at once a lasting testimony of their crimes and devotion, their weakness and genius, their religion and their irreligion. Though he had seen Rome to familiarity, he was gratified. The sight filled a measure of pride which would have made him drunk with vainglory but for the thought, princely as the property was, it did not any longer belong to his countrymen; the worship in the Temple was by permission of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... ferocious sermon, however, and the wincing Pepperalls felt that it was aimed directly at them. When Doctor Brearley denounced modern parents for their own godlessness and the irreligion of their homes, William took the blame to himself. On his way home he announced his determination to resume the long-neglected family custom of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... retrospect we must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a personal adherence to Christianity. But their identification with Christianity, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Father Shinnors, 'increased her membership in the ratio that the population of the United States has increased? No. There are many converts, but there are many more apostates. Large numbers lapse into indifferentism and irreligion. There should be in America about 20,000,000 Catholics; there are scarcely 10,000,000. There are reasons to fear that the great majority of the apostates are of Irish extraction, and not a few of them of ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... dominions, once hostile to its own. By slow degrees England has arisen, first to the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the question whether ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the hospitality of the Emperor that they had things as English as possible at the Palace-even providing an English chaplain for Sunday morning. In the afternoon, however, he backslid into French irreligion and natural depravity, and they all went to enjoy the fresh air, the sight of the trees, the flowers and the children in the Bois de Boulogne. The next day they went into the city to the Exposition des Beaux Arts, and to the Elysee for lunch and a reception—then they ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... the unreasonableness of my sorrow, and innumerable protestations of everlasting regard, he at last found that I was more affected with the loss of my innocence, than the danger of my fame, and that he might not be disturbed by my remorse, began to lull my conscience with the opiates of irreligion. His arguments were such as my course of life has since exposed me often to the necessity of hearing, vulgar, empty, and fallacious; yet they at first confounded me by their novelty, filled me with doubt and perplexity, and interrupted that peace which I began to feel from the sincerity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the Society were called by the Indians, as well as by the Portuguese. Father Gomez, who was sent to the king of Tanor, told him positively, that God would be served in spirit and in truth; that dissembling in religion was worse than, irreligion; and that Jesus would disown before his angels, those who disowned him before me. The king, who preferred his salvation before his crown, believed Gomez, and resolved to declare himself solemnly a Christian, as soon as he had made a treaty with his enemies. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the defeat of good, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the dreary, hopeless irreligion—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... be met by saying that its chief influence was exerted on those whose habits of dissipation, immorality, and irreligion kept, them aloof from the religious instruction of the priest. But to those who know the Irish heart, it is not necessary to say that many a man addicted to drink is far from being free from the impressions of religion, or uninfluenced by many a generous ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... him from kindling in the general flame, checked its progress among his subjects: and as he is accused of open profaneness [y], and was endued with a sharp wit [z], it is likely that he made the romantic chivalry of the crusaders the object of his perpetual raillery. As an instance of his irreligion, we are told, that he once accepted of sixty marks from a Jew, whose son had been converted to Christianity, and who engaged him by that present to assist him in bringing back the youth to Judaism. William employed both menaces and persuasion for that purpose; ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... with theology. He chose, of course, the a-posteriori argument, and was brief, perhaps eloquent. Some passages of his discourse might pass unchallenged in the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these - and fewer women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called 'the public,' God save me from such irreligion! - that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... another most interesting feature in the policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... thinker of eminence may be led away by an ambiguity of language, is afforded by this very case. I refer to the famous argument by which Bishop Berkeley flattered himself that he had forever put an end to "skepticism, atheism, and irreligion." It is briefly as follows: I thought of a thing yesterday; I ceased to think of it; I think of it again to-day. I had, therefore, in my mind yesterday an idea of the object; I have also an idea of it to-day; this idea is evidently not another, but the very same idea. Yet an intervening time ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... which if a Man should take a View of, it would perhaps, be one of the most Melancholy Prospects that ever he beheld. To look into our Modern Plays, and there to see the Differences of Good and Evil confounded, Prophaneness, Irreligion, and Unlawful Love, made the masterly Stroaks of the fine Gentleman; Swearing, Cursing, and Blaspheming, the Graces of his Conversation; and Unchristian Revenge, to consummate the Character of the Hero; Sharpness and Poignancy of Wit exerted with the greatest Vigor against ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... Europe; and so strong were they, that his life was continually in danger. Lord Brougham, in his "Men of Letters of the Time of George III.." says:—"Voltaire's name is so intimately connected in the minds of all men with Infidelity, in the minds of most men with irreligion, and, in the minds of all who are not well-informed, with these qualities alone, that whoever undertakes to write his life and examine his claims to the vast reputation which all the hostile feelings excited by him against himself have never been able ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... foreign nations; the fanatics going straightforward and openly, the politicians by the surer mode of zigzag. In the course of events, this, among other causes, produced fierce and bloody contentions between them. But at the bottom they thoroughly agreed in all the objects of ambition and irreligion, and substantially in all the means of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices,—and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... wrote, "permitted the thoughts agitating its spirit to be recognized. We were following the King at a slight distance and could judge very well of it. It was easy to read in all eyes that the people were hurt at seeing the King humbly following the priests. There was in that not so much irreligion as jealousy and animosity toward the role played ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... painters had become sad and proud, instead of happy and humble;—its domestic peace was darkened by irreligion, its national action fevered by pride. And for sign of its Love, the Hymen, whose statue this fair English girl, according to Reynolds' thought, has to decorate (S. 43), is blind, and holds ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... spirit, but unhappily the accompanying symptoms are not so encouraging. With contempt for its ministers, has come disregard for the ordinances of the Church, the services of which are but scantily attended. Yet notwithstanding the irreligion which is spreading fast throughout the land, little tolerance is shown for adherents to other than the Greek Church. For example, Catholics are compelled to close their shops on the Greek feasts, of which there are not ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... of the word "wherefore," as connected with the passage in the Psalm, "Wherefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee," for their own purposes, let these novices in Scripture and masters in irreligion know that, as before, the word "wherefore" does not imply reward of virtue or conduct in the Word, but the reason why he came down to us, and of the Spirit's anointing, which took place in him for our sakes. For he says not, "Wherefore he anointed thee in order ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... our faith in the principles of spiritual life—may yet, as it becomes aware of its own nature and the might which dwells in it, find beauty and goodness, nay, God himself, in the world. We should at least hesitate to condemn man to choose between irreflective ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle. Poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have something to tell the world that science, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... in his parish, refused to provide for a priest of their own, and Abbe Godard, in order to perform Mass, had to walk each Sunday the three kilometres which separated the two communes. He was a short, stout man of hasty temper, who was disgusted with the indifference and irreligion of his parishioners, and his services were the shortest and baldest possible. In spite of his temper, he had, however, a passion for the miserable, and to these he gave everything—his money, his linen, almost the clothes off his back. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... Chronicles. It requires but a slight acquaintance with these compositions to enable the reader to recognize in the Galdrakinna of the Scalds the Stryga or witch-woman of more classical climates. In the northern ideas of witches there was no irreligion concerned with their lore. On the contrary, the possession of magical knowledge was an especial attribute of Odin himself; and to intrude themselves upon a deity, and compel him to instruct them in what they desired to know, was accounted ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... the strange contraries of being an ardent admirer of the virtues of classic times, while he was cheating at chuck and all-fours; and though he affected every species of irreligion, was, in fact, afraid ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... irreligion through its abuses. I have often thought it a misfortune that we Americans are under the necessity of meeting the infidel literature of the old world, for the simple reason that it is evolved out of the circumstances ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... men cannot bear to be deprived long together of anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by fanaticism, and fanaticism ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... child that is the wondrous heritage of woman; none the less religious in that it apes no show of religion. We see the age of free thought stating the innate religion of free thought; as Renaissance Italy painted paganism in religious disguise with the innate irreligion of ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... would brand them as apostates if they meant what they said. This or that one, in the midst of an orgy of sin, or after long practical irreligion, in order to strangle remorse that arises at an inopportune moment, may seem to form a judgment of apostasy. This is treading on exceedingly thin glass. But it is not always properly defection from faith. Apostasy kills faith as surely ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... in France but through sentiments due to Catholicism, and none of you are Catholics! Here am I, a priest, obliged to leave my own ground and argue with arguers. How can you expect the masses to become religious and obedient when they see irreligion and want of discipline above them? All peoples united by any faith whatever will inevitably get the better of peoples without any faith at all. The law of public interest, which gives birth to patriotism, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... agency is allied with them. After much sad brooding, I cannot but conclude that a fervent religious faith is the only thing that will give complete security; and it will be a bitter day for England and the world if ever flippancy and irreligion become general. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... which may serve to the future elaboration of both. You will find deposited in it the rough materials, which some abler hands will perhaps one day employ in constructing an edifice, in which our youth may find a safe refuge from the storms of doubt, unbelief, and irreligion. I have purposed to avoid all exuberant ornaments of style, all pompous parade of erudition, and contented myself with a plain diction, and a strict laconism. I have not quoted authors who preceded me in the same field; I have not called up for ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the service of a ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is exchanged for learning, obstinacy for docility, and precipitation for patience, rashness for prudence, lying for truth, cowardice for bravery, and avarice for generosity, tyranny for justice, irreligion for piety, deceitfulness for sincerity, hatred for affection, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... was violent; those passages, which, while they stood single, had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horror. The wise and the pious caught the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly taught ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... he discovered that in his first violent rejection of everything old and established he cast from him much that he afterwards missed. He might tell to what extent he later retraced his steps, seeking to recover what he had learned to value anew; how it fared with his avowed irreligion when put to the extreme test; to what, in short, his emancipation amounted. And he, like myself, would speak for thousands. My grandchildren, for all I know, may have a graver task than I have set them. Perhaps they may have to testify that the faith of Israel is a heritage that no heir in ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Felix, not irreligion, but indifference to matters of religion. Like most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great naturalists, he had subjected religion to reason; he recognized a problem in it as insoluble as the squaring of the circle. Deist "in petto," he lived in the religion ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... reasons but little, sometimes leads to irreligion, the man of pure morals may have very good motives for examining his religion, and banishing it from his mind. Religious terrors, too weak to impose upon the wicked in whom vice is deeply rooted, afflict, torment and overwhelm restless imaginations. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... his restless ambition, only one conclusion can be drawn from this silence. He could not categorically deny Cartwright's accusation and at the same time satisfy his own unsparing conception of honesty. That there was no real truth in the charge of irreligion, the allusions in the Speed letters abundantly prove. The tone is too sincere to be doubted; nevertheless, they give no clue to his theology. And for men like Cartwright, religion was tied up hand and foot in theology. Here was where Lincoln had parted company from his mother's world, and from ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Lucretius' irreligion is too strong, For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food; I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong, Although no doubt his real intent was good, For speaking out so plainly in his song, So much indeed as to be downright rude; And then what proper person can be partial To ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... etc., and all to discover what had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed—the great parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... its punishment.[269] It was doubtless largely as a religious offense that the Code Napoleon omitted to punish it. The French law makes a clear and logical distinction between crime on the one hand, vice and irreligion on the other, only concerning itself with the former. Homosexual practices in private, between two consenting adult parties, whether men or women, are absolutely unpunished by the Code Napoleon and by French law of today. Only under three conditions ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... concluded. There is a means of producing effect which the ordinary preachers frequently have recourse to, namely, the square cap they wear on their head, which they take off, and put on again with inconceivable rapidity. One of them imputed to Voltaire, and particularly to Rousseau, the irreligion of the age. He threw his cap into the middle of the pulpit, charging it to represent Jean Jacques, and in this quality he harangued it, saying; "Well, philosopher of Geneva, what have you to object to my arguments?" He was silent for some minutes as if he waited for a ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... face. Nor is it confined to those who are its direct victims. Those who still cling, and cling firmly, to belief are in an indirect way touched by it. Religion cannot fail to be changed by the neighbourhood of irreligion. If it is persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled. Believers and unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life. They are ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... The Rev. John Miller, in 1695, speaks of "the wickedness and irreligion of the inhabitants, which abounds in all parts of the province, and appears in so many shapes, constituting so many sorts of sin, that I can scarce tell which to begin withal." The reverend gentleman ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... chapters of the celebrated Cyril, and the epistle which was said to have been written by Ibas to Maris the Persian—without alteration this synod renews in all points the ancient decrees of religion, chasing away the impious doctrines of irreligion. And this our holy and ecumenical synod, inspired of God, has set its seal to the creed of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, and again religiously confirmed by the one hundred and fifty, which also the other holy synods gladly ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and boldly. He takes the position that such a view of religion is unworthy of a reasonable ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... appears to consist in a worship of the great and wise and good among the dead. I have already spoken of many Gipsies reminding me, by their entirely unconscious ungodliness, of thorough Hegelians. I may now add, that, like the Positivists, they seem to correct their irreligion through the influence of love; and by a strange custom, which is, in spirit and fact, nothing less than adoring the departed and offering to ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... were loose, exceedingly so; and if the audience could learn something of human nature there, it was only the debasing side of it. It is generally true that actors lend their influence to intemperance, licentiousness, and irreligion. They do not patronize Sabbath schools, churches, and other Christian institutions, but they patronize bars, gambling saloons, and houses of ill-fame. Many of those men even who go to the theatre, would be quite unwilling to introduce actors to the society of their sons ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... achievements, ruthless causes, the triumph of evil, the defeat of good, the depth and intensity and prevalence of sin, the all-degrading idolatries, the all-defiling corruptions, the monstrous superstitions, the dreary irreligion—is not the whole a picture dreadful to look upon, capricious as chance, rigid as fate, pale as malady, dark as doom? How shall we face this fact, witnessed to by innumerable men in all ages and times, as the natural lot of their kind? Much more so when suffering falls upon ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... 1000. So that if it were not for this fall in illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise in the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent persons therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and so forth, either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge beyond my ken. England is, as a matter of fact, becoming not only more hygienic and rational, but more moral and more temperate. The highly moral, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... human affairs: ix. 1, 11, 'cum rerum humanarum maximum momentum sit, quam propitiis rem, quam adversis agant dis.' Superior to the gods is necessitas (ix. 4, 16), and fortuna is also powerful (ix. 17, 3; v. 37, 1). He condemns the irreligion of his own day (x. 40, 10, 'iuvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus'), cf. iii. 20, 5; viii. 11, 1. He retains the old belief in prodigies and portents, every war being introduced by a list of them, but recognizes ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... thought it a hard saying of an ardent salvationist lad, who told me of a transport sergeant's prayers one night in a ditch by a shrapnelled roadside, and of the same sergeant's reversion to apparent irreligion on return to safety. "I call it," said the boy, "cowardice." But what I do say about it is, firstly, that religion thus mainly associated with danger, is not the Christian religion, and secondly, that many of the best men of all ranks have little to do with it, or ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... link the salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental, to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact. This would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over religion. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... earthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter. It is noticeable that Xenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of the best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the charge of irreligion,—Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life and death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed the idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle, superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its servant ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... committed, especially if unsuccessful, or the sorrows that had fallen upon him, would have sufficed to reduce nine-tenths of ordinary men to a condition of humble supplication. For, generally speaking, irreligion, or rather forgetfulness of God, is a plant of no deep growth in the human heart, since its roots are turned by the rock of that innate knowledge of a higher Power that forms the foundation of every soul, and on which we are glad enough to set our feet when the storms of trouble and emergency ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... peculiar concern with them is new. The Karshish, the Clean, and the Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No single poem written before 1850 shows ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... refused to "fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was {444} stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community. If there is one thing that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... effect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none, which ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of skill, industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success in life to something out of joint in the thoughts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... popular consent is indispensable, and will be impossible until the statesman can appeal to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... and outrages every decent Englishman's sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell's iron rule, the rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should have ended in such foolish subservience to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... smile of calm superiority at this vehement outburst of natural irreligion. 'You must certainly be bored to death with it all, Selah,' he said, laughingly. 'What a funny sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Mulock's (his name always reminds me of Muley Moloch of Morocco) 'Atheism answered,' in which there is a long eulogium of my poesy, and a great 'compatimento' for my misery. I never could understand what they mean by accusing me of irreligion. However, they may have it their own way. This gentleman seems to be my great admirer, so I take what he says in good part, as he evidently intends kindness, to which I can't accuse myself of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... him for us?) to be the great supporter of the British Monarchy and Church during the last age—better than whole benches of bishops, better than Pitts, Norths, and the great Burke himself. Johnson had the ear of the nation: his immense authority reconciled it to loyalty, and shamed it out of irreligion. When George III talked with him, and the people heard the great author's good opinion of the sovereign, whole generations rallied to the king. Johnson was revered as a sort of oracle; and the oracle declared ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... indifferent spiritual Concernments, as well as in temporal Affairs, which might be done without deviating in the least from the Principles and Practice of the Establish'd Church of England; and instead of encouraging Dissentions, or Heresy, or Schism, or Irreligion, would be a sure Means always to prevent them, were such small Alterations regularly established in some Things indifferent, as might best agree with the Conveniency and Nature of the Colony: for it is ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees,' 'Contributions to a Classification of British Crustacea,' 'On Man as the Image ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... on to the Encyclopedie,[458] commenced in 1751; the work which has, in many minds, connected the word encyclopaedist with that of infidel. Readers of our day are surprised when they look into this work, and wonder what has become of all the irreligion. The truth is, that the work—though denounced ab ovo[459] on account of the character of its supporters—was neither adapted, nor intended, to excite any particular remark on the subject: no work of which D'Alembert[460] was co-editor would have been started ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of that time, were sure to be singled out for personal attack. They were also made to feel the chilling effects of social exclusiveness. The cry against them was that of ignorance, irreverence, irreligion, republicanism, disloyalty, etc. These charges were repeated in every form; and that, too, by a section both of the official and religious press, a portion of which was edited with singular ability; a press which prided itself on its intelligence, its ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... which agree with religion in giving worship to God; secondly, we shall treat of those vices which are manifestly contrary to religion, through showing contempt of those things that pertain to the worship of God. The former come under the head of superstition, the latter under that of irreligion. Accordingly we must consider in the first place, superstition and its parts, and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... republican government. The Old and New Testaments were publicly burnt, as prohibited books. Nor was it to Christianity that their hatred was confined; the Jews were involved in this comprehensive plan. Their ornaments of public worship were plundered, and their vows of irreligion were recorded with enthusiasm. The existence of a future state was openly denied, and modes of burial were devised, for the express purpose of representing to the popular mind, that death was nothing more than an everlasting sleep; and, to complete the whole project, doctrines ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Politicians are but too apt to use it as a cloak for their personal ends. Absalom talking about his vow is a spectacle that might have made the most unsuspecting sure that there was something in the wind. Such a use of religious observances shows more than anything else could do, the utter irreligion of the man who can make it. A son rebelling against his father is an ugly sight, but rebellion disguised as religion adds to the ugliness. David suspects nothing; or, if he does, is too broken to resist, and, perhaps glad at any sign of grace in his son, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... overruled; he knows that until he can discount or conciliate that which commands his fortunes his condition is precarious and miserable. And through his eagerness to save himself he leaps to conclusions that are uncritical and premature. Irreligion, on the other hand, flourishes among those who are more snugly intrenched {215} within the cities of man. It is a product of civilization. Comfortably housed as he is, and enjoying an artificial illumination behind drawn blinds, the irreligious man has the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... that the French nation, just recovering from a debauch of irreligion and anarchy, should begin insensibly to yield to the charms of a wooer so seductive? For some time past the soldiers, as the Milan newspapers declared, had been a pack of tatterdemalions ever flying before the arms of his Majesty ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... demonstrated, the purposes of even this life, viewing the whole, are subverted by practical rules built upon this ignoble base, I may be allowed to doubt whether woman was created for man: and though the cry of irreligion, or even atheism be raised against me, I will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses's beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I could not believe what my reason told me was derogatory ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... omnipotence[7]; but it is highly probable Sir Walter's opinions might be misrepresented by his enemies, or wrong conclusions drawn from those which he maintained; and it would be a shocking injustice to the memory of so great a man to suspect him of irreligion, whose writings contain not the least trace of it, and whose History of the World in particular breathes a strong spirit of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the latter; for if the Maxims, that were most instrumental in bringing about the Reformation, had been continued, they certainly would have prevented, at least in a great Measure, not only this Evil, but likewise another, which is worse, I mean the Growth of Irreligion and Impiety: Nay, I don't question but the same Maxims, if they were to be tried again ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... handsome in my daughter's eyes; but I say virtue is within the man, not upon his skin. He fascinates my younger sons with his philosophy and his tea-house oratory. I do not like philosophy, it is all marked with the stamp of infidelity and irreligion. It is rarely that a man devotes himself to it with-out robbing himself of his faith, and casting off the restraints of his religion; or, if they do not lose it utterly, they so adulterate it with their philosophy ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the public. We want such men to rescue this enlightened age from general irreligion." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... was having the feathers that were not falling. He did use something. He saw the difference when it was a turkey. He needed all that inclination. He said some were useful. He did not mind irreligion. He ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... Jarach, in the Kurin district of Daghestan. He professed to have learnt it from Hadis-Ismail, an Alim of Kurdomir, highly famed for wisdom and sanctity. It laid bare the degradation into which his countrymen had sunk by irreligion and by the jealousy of sect; their danger, in consequence, from enemies of the true faith; and urged the necessity of reform in creed and practice, in order to regain the invincible character promised by the Prophet to believers. The theoretical part of the reformed doctrine seems ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... this frightful gravity of the German mind that has made them mad. They haven't learned to play; they haven't learned to laugh at themselves. Their sombre religion has passed into a sombre irreligion. They have grown gross without growing light-hearted. The spiritual battle song of Luther has become a material battle song, and "the safe stronghold" is no longer the City of God but the City of Krupp. They have neither the splendid intellectual ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... astrologers, and prophetic almanack-makers, called philomaths—then numerous, but now only represented by Zadkiel. This Essay was one of those, which gave rise to "The Tatler." He wrote about the same time, "An argument against Christianity"—an ironical way of rebuking the irreligion of the time— ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... conversation was ever egotistical in the extreme: the bold assertion that his Lacon was the most clever work in the English language, was ever on his lips, and I regret to add, obscenity and irreligion too often supplied the place of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... to be reckoned the contemptuous and merely destructive attitude towards Buddhism, with which some—let us hope they are the very few—would think to serve the cause of Jesus Christ. "Depend upon it," it was said to me, "it is irreligion that commonly succeeds to the vacant place, not Christianity. Carlyle was right when he said, 'Better even to believe a lie than to believe nothing.' " And Buddhism is ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A. |
