"Latitudinarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... having got so far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and, in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised; and its decrees were valid only so ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... dispute: and, upon the whole, he infers, that the only religion obligatory on mankind is the belief of one Supreme Being, the author of nature; and the necessity of good morals, in order to obtain his favor and protection. Such sentiments would be deemed latitudinarian, even in our time; and would not be advanced, without some precaution, in a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... or your mother. You want teaching. You are too latitudinarian. And you are too thick with the Yankees, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... demolition of its friends, his adversaries. He professed himself a great admirer of its literature, and, in the heat of controversy, he often found himself a defender of its doctrines when he had occasion to expose the fallacy of latitudinarian interpretations. For liberal Christianity he had nothing but contempt, and refuted it with a scorn which spared none of the worldly tendencies of the church in Equity. The idea that souls were to be saved by church sociables filled him with inappeasable rancor; and he maintained the ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... vanity, or betrayed by original feebleness of intellect, the harmless physiognomist at length suffered himself to announce doctrines equally hazardous to the Religion, and the Policy, of the Canton. The habits of the times were latitudinarian in religion, and revolutionary in politics. Some unlucky opinions, uttered in the folly of the hour, brought Lavater under the charge of a leaning to Rome in the one, and to France in the other; he bore up for a while against both. But ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... found Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants 'a work of the most mixed merits,' an ambiguous phrase which I take to mean not that its merits were various, but that they were much mixed with those demerits for which the puritan Cheynell baited the unlucky latitudinarian to death. About this time also he first began Father Paul's famous history of the Council of Trent, a work that always stood as high in his esteem as in Macaulay's, who liked Sarpi the best of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... winning of England to a sense of its worth. But every day the current of opinion ran more strongly against it. The army stood alone in its purpose. Papist and sceptic, mystic and ceremonialist, latitudinarian and Presbyterian, all were hostile. The very pressure of Cromwell's system gave birth to new forms of spiritual and intellectual revolt. Science, rationalism, secularism, sprang for the first time into vivid life in their protest against the forced concentration of human thought on ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... possible in some relation to the spectacles of London, which might answer to the centre. Yet how? That sounded well and metaphysical; but what did it mean if acted upon? What was the centre of London for any purpose whatever, latitudinarian or longitudinarian, literary, social, or mercantile, geographical, astronomical, or (as Mrs. Malaprop kindly suggests) diabolical? Apparently that we should stay at our inn; for in that way we seemed best to distribute our presence ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... impudence! And one thing I will tell you: that sermon originated solely with the man himself. The bishop was no more a party to it than was the dean here. You all know how grieved I am to see a bishop in this diocese holding the latitudinarian ideas by which Dr Proudie has made himself conspicuous. You all know how greatly I should distrust the opinion of such a man. But in this matter I hold him to be blameless. I believe Dr Proudie has lived too long among gentlemen to be guilty, or to instigate another ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to his Essays, certain doubts as to the meaning of eternal damnation—a doctrine which at that time enjoyed considerable popularity. The explanation was in part simple. 'It is laid to my charge,' he said, 'that I am a Latitudinarian. I have never met with a single man who, like myself, had passed a long series of years in a free intercourse with every class of society who was not more or less what is called a Latitudinarian.' In fact, he had discovered that ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... that you are seeking," said the Archbishop with asperity. "From our chairs of theology we dispense to the Church the bread of wisdom from which she draws sustenance; and you ask us to let that source of her intellectual life become infected with microbes,—at a time when latitudinarian doctrines are sapping the unity of the Church and weakening her discipline, to allow their establishment as a principle in our centers of learning and in our seats of divinity! What claim to denounce heresy and schism will be left to the Church if in her very government heretics and schismatic ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... life seems to have been an ardently speculating and talking one; by no means excessively restrained within limits; and, in the more adventurous heads like Sterling's, decidedly tending towards the latitudinarian in most things. They had among them a Debating Society called The Union; where on stated evenings was much logic, and other spiritual fencing and ingenuous collision,—probably of a really superior quality in that kind; for not a few of the then disputants have since proved themselves ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... William, "mercy on the woman who is Egerton's wife. He is the greatest latitudinarian amongst the ladies, of any man in England—nothing—no, nothing would tempt me to let such a man marry a sister ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... a boy has to do, is to learn implicit obedience to rules. The first thing in importance for a man to learn is, to sever himself from maxims, rules, laws. Why? That he may become an Antinomian, or a Latitudinarian? No. He is severed from submission to the maxim because he has got allegiance to the principle. He is free from the rule and the law because he has got the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of Laud's special patronage. This naturally secured to him the favour of Clarendon, and, as a fact, Clarendon informs us that he had placed Croft under heavy obligations. But the friendship had not continued. In later years Croft showed latitudinarian tendencies in his writings, which may have been apparent in his conversation at an earlier date, and may well have alienated Clarendon. The fact, however, that Croft belonged to a family of high rank ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... means a latitudinarian. No one felt greater decision than he did for the truths of our holy faith. When his Lord's design in Christianity was, as he thought, perverted by a beneficed clergyman, then he sent forth from his prison an answer ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... not to be a pirate, but a pious sea-rover, who, with a crew of saints, or at least uncommonly fine fellows, who could be very manly and jolly, and yet all be good Christians, of a somewhat vague and latitudinarian cast of doctrine (for my own was becoming rapidly so), set forth under the red-cross flag to colonize and convert one of my old paradises, a South ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... became a dignified and high-church clerk; if thou art in thy grave the better for thee; thou wert fitted to adore a bygone time, when loyalty was in vogue, and smiling content lay like a sunbeam upon the land, but thou wouldst be sadly out of place in these days of cold philosophic latitudinarian doctrine, universal tolerism, and half-concealed rebellion—rare times, no doubt, for papists and dissenters, but which would assuredly have broken the heart of the loyal soldier of George the Third, and the dignified high-church clerk of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... had served with the late Sir Richard under Montrose, and stunned the family nightly with his exploits at Kilsythe and Tippermoor, and who was the only man in the party that had the smallest zeal for the work in hand. In this manner, and by recruiting one or two latitudinarian poachers and black-fishers, Mr Harrison completed the quota of men which fell to the share of Lady Margaret Bellenden, as life-rentrix of the barony of Tillietudlem and others. But when the steward, on the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... individuals than the two states which they connect. That this would be the case in a flora where things are put as they naturally should be, I do not much doubt; and the wider are your views about species (say, for instance, with Dr. Hooker's very latitudinarian notions) the more plainly would this appear. But practically two things stand hugely in the way of any application of the fact or principle, if such it be. 1. Our choice of what to take as the typical forms very often is not free. We take, e.g., for one of them the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... differ utterly upon every other topic. Some are abolitionists, others hostile to the equality of races. Some are evangelical Christians; others Catholics, Unitarians, Spiritualists, or Quakers. Some hold the most rigid theories with regard to marriage and divorce; others are latitudinarian on these questions. In short, people of the most opposite views agree in desiring to establish woman suffrage, while they anticipate very different results from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... be considered by many good Christians as sinfully "latitudinarian;" but to all who think so we would suggest the following simple experiment. When they have perused with care and reflection those portions of the Epistles of St Paul, and those incidents in his ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... a fact whose assertion, it must be allowed, may appear somewhat paradoxical even to those who are acquainted, though superficially, with Hibernian composition. The rhymes are, it must be granted, in the generality of such productions, very latitudinarian indeed, and as a veteran votary of the muse once assured me, depend wholly upon the wowls (vowels), as may be seen in the following stanza of the famous ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... he would find admission to some of the most orthodox synods of our own day; he was comparatively free from the latitudinarian tendencies which had been brought over from Germany during the ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... ingesta. The presence of a boiled egg on their breakfast-tables would cause some of the more sensitive of these New England Brahmins to betake themselves to their beds for the rest of the day. They kept themselves in a semi-famished state on principle. One of the most liberal and latitudinarian of the sect wrote, in 1835,—"For two years past I have abstained from the use of all the diffusible stimulants, using no animal food, either flesh, fish, or fowl, nor any alcoholic or vinous spirits, no form of ale, beer, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... politics a Tory, in religion ultra-orthodox,' Herbert. 'He has nothing about him of the latitudinarian; and yet he is the most amiable man with whom I am acquainted. Nature has given him a kind and charitable heart, which even his opinions have not succeeded ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... future of this portion of our country is veiled in the deepest obscurity. Here we shall have the free-thinking German, the bigoted Roman Catholic, the atheistic Frenchman, and the latitudinarian Yankee, in one grand heterogeneous conglomeration of nations and ideas such as the world has never seen. Whether these diverse peculiarities will by close contact and mutual attrition, by the advancing light of education and refinement as well as by the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bishop, and driven out of his country; and whose name after his death has been dishonourably mentioned, both by Councils and Fathers. He surely was not in the episcopal conspiracy, at least; and perchance may give the latitudinarian, the anabaptist, the Erastian, and the utilitarian, some countenance. Far from it; he is as high and as keen, as removed from softness and mawkishness, as ascetic and as reverential, as any bishop among them. He is as superstitious (as men now talk), as fanatical, as formal, as Athanasius ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... means have concurred in the above estimate of his political knowledge, and thought himself as well informed as another. He used to speak with the greatest gravity about our constitution as the pride and envy of the world, though he surprised you as much by the latitudinarian reforms, which he was eager to press forward, as by the most singular old Tory opinions which he advocated on other occasions. He was for having every man to vote; every poor man to labour short time and get high wages; ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Scotchman with the old Hebrew fervor and sublimity, who accepted the extremest tenets of his creed with a deep religious faith, and scorned to trim or moderate them in order to suit what he called "a sinfu' latitudinarian age." ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... science and Christian faith; and this accounts not only for their praise of "reason," but for the happy optimism which appears everywhere in their writings. The luxurious and indolent Restoration clergy, whose lives were shamed by the simplicity and spirituality of the Platonists, invented the word "Latitudinarian" to throw at them, "a long nickname which they have taught their tongues to pronounce as roundly as if it were shorter than it is by four or five syllables"; but they could not deny that their enemies were loyal sons of the Church of England.[359] What the Platonists meant by making reason ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... legislation—Spain is the land of restrictions and prohibitions; and that the principle of protection in behalf, not of nascent, but of comparatively ancient and still unestablished interests, is recognized, and carried out in the most latitudinarian sense of absolute interdict or extravagant impost. Secondly, that under such a system, Spain has continued the exceptional case of a non or scarcely progressing European state; that the maintenance and enhancement of fiscal rigours and manufacturing monopoly, jealously fenced round with a legislative ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... "Platitudinarian; latitudinarian; attitudinarian," came the answer, with a chuckle, then, turning to Filmer, who had stepped over to hear the joke, he added, "What do you think of my boat?" and pointed to a slim, black, two-masted steam-yacht that lay ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... return the parson was equally disposed to make a little merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and the company laughed with us both." It would be absurd, of course, to identify Sterne's latitudinarian bonhomie with the higher order of tolerance; but many a more confirmed and notorious Gallio than the clerical humourist would have assumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a presence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate of Sterne's dignity, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... passes over the Rocky Mountains were in this region. Gadsden returned in the autumn successful. For $10,000,000 he had secured 50,000 square miles of territory, and the way was open for the Government to lay its plans for the greatest undertaking ever proposed by the most latitudinarian politicians. Davis, hitherto an extreme States-rights leader and disciple of Calhoun, worked out the program. The constitutional authority for building a Pacific railroad was deduced from the "war powers" of the Federal Government, and, though it was not definitely stated that the road should pass ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... generation which was passing away; but his words touched a responsive chord in the breast of President Madison. On March 3, 1817, as he was about to leave office, he sent to Congress a message vetoing the Internal Improvements Bill and warning his party associates of the danger of latitudinarian views of the Constitution. This message was Madison's farewell address. It was thoroughly characteristic of the man and ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... men as contemporaries; was a man of liberal views and sympathies, and much regarded for his sagacity and his skill in dialectics; his post as archbishop was no enviable one; is best known by his "Logic," for a time the standard work of the subject; he opposed the Tractarian movement, but was too latitudinarian ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this time, or the king and parliament conjunctly, acted from the above latitudinarian principle, is further evident, from their establishing and consenting to the establishment of these two different and opposite forms of church government, Presbytery in Scotland, and Prelacy in England and Ireland, and both of them considered as agreeable to the word of God, and ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... change in my views upon this interesting subject, it is nevertheless regretted that the suggestions made by me in my annual messages of 1829 and 1830 have been greatly misunderstood. At that time the great struggle was begun against that latitudinarian construction of the Constitution which authorizes the unlimited appropriation of the revenues of the Union to internal improvements within the States, tending to invest in the hands and place under the control of the General Government all the principal roads ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... beginning to draw in his horns. Every curate who finds himself unable to believe in the Virgin Birth, so it said, feels himself entitled to a living in the diocese of Durham. They flee from the intolerant zealotry of the sacerdotal south to the genial modernism of the latitudinarian north. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... of Religious Liberalism, it has often been exemplified in our own country by those who, averse from definite articles of faith, and prone to latitudinarian license, have studiously set themselves to disparage the importance of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, and even to obliterate the distinction between the various forms of Religion, natural and revealed, by representing them all as ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Yorker, printed by H. Greeley and Company. I learn that Horace Greeley is his full name, and he comes in for a berating at the hands of a man with one of the characteristic goatees that I first observed at Castle Garden. The Whigs! I had always associated this party with latitudinarian principles. Now I hear it called a centralist party, a monarchist party. A voluble man, who chews tobacco, curses it as a mask for the old Federalist party, which tried to corrupt America with the British system, after it had failed as a combination of Loyalists to keep America under ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Review, let me own, knew more of Mr. Deutsch than I, a simple acquaintance, could know; but perhaps he does not know all, and if he did he probably would not publish his knowledge. The truth is that Mr. Deutsch was, during his younger years, a liberal, nay, a latitudinarian in religion, differing little from the so-styled "Christian Unitarian." But when failing health drove him to Egypt and his hour drew nigh he became (and all honour to him!) the scrupulous and even fanatical Hebrew of the Hebrews; he consorted mainly with the followers and divines of his own ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... incline to encourage the communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there also are of slightly latitudinarian propensities, to whom the aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was minimised; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were countersigned ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... apt to be so in this life, I think. While we are coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labelling his opinions—'he is Evangelical and narrow', or 'Latitudinarian and Pantheistic' or 'Anglican and supercilious'—that man, in his solitude, is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word, and do the ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... idea of universal depravity had been ignored,—as it sometimes is in these latitudinarian days,—or the notion of any available or worthy Christian culture, as distinct from a direct and clearly defined agency, both as to time and force, of the Spirit, had been entertained, he would have lost half of the elements by which his arguments gained logical sequence. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... tell you: that sermon originated solely with the man himself. The bishop was no more a party to it than was the dean here. You all know how grieved I am to see a bishop in this diocese holding the latitudinarian ideas by which Dr. Proudie has made himself conspicuous. You all know how greatly I should distrust the opinion of such a man. But in this matter I hold him to be blameless. I believe Dr. Proudie has lived too long among gentlemen to be guilty, or to instigate another ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... gentlefolk, apt of speech. The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat of a freethinker; at the least a latitudinarian: he was a man, besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had discovered by unmistakable signs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one with the Dean of Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible; availing themselves for this [xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans: "Come all of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment." ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... Clarke. I see the threads that are used in the weaving of you. Your father looks to your spiritual wants. Your mother concerns herself with the material. Yet the old carpenter's preaching is, methinks, more to your taste. You are a rank latitudinarian, man. Sir Stephen would cry fie upon you, and Joshua Pettigrue abjure you! Well, out with the light, for we should both be stirring at cock-crow. That is ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Comprehensive Scheme, so terrified was he at the dominance of the Roman Church in the Second James's reign: however, William's accession, and his becoming a nonjuror, crossed his design. In 1689, Tillotson, Burnet, and a number of William's "Latitudinarian" clergy made a bold push for it. A Comprehension Bill actually passed the House of Lords, but was thrown out by the Commons and Convocation. From William's time toleration and encouragement were extended to all save "Popish Recusants;" so that there were a large number in the Church ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various |
