"Atheistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... purpose of practising pistol-shooting or sailing paper boats. No one took the slightest trouble to befriend or advise him, though he was one who responded eagerly to affectionate interest. When he published his atheistical pamphlet, which was the whim of a clever, fantastic, and isolated young man, the authorities expelled him with scorn and fury; and now that he has become a great national poet; they have commemorated him there by setting up a very beautiful figure of a drowned youth in a state of nudity, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that Bishop Cornwallis(1041) goes to Canterbury. I feared it would be ****; but it seems he had secured all the backstairs, and not the great stairs. As the last head of the church had been in the midwife line, I supposed Goody Lyttelton(1042) had hopes; and as he had been president of an atheistical club, to be Sure Warburton did not despair. I was thinking it would make a good article in the papers, that three bishops had supped with Nancy Parsons at Vauxhall, in their way to Lambeth. I am sure ****, would have been of the number; and **** who told the Duke of Newcastle, that if ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... self-willed creature succeeded, and Dora were the means of her marrying David, how would Dora's conscience stand? Here was a young man who believed in nothing, and openly said so, who took part in those terrible atheistical meetings and discussions, which, as Father Russell had solemnly said, were like a plague-centre in Manchester, drawing in and corrupting soul after soul. And Dora was to help in throwing her young cousin, while she was still almost a child with no 'Church principles' to aid and protect ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... most celebrated doctors of divinity of that time, denounced the wicked khalif, declaring that God would assuredly punish him for presumptuously interrupting the devotions of the faithful by encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical philosophy among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of the Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two stations on the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and secret staircases dismay and revolt him; he pines; he wastes away; he mutters to himself; he refuses to share our ceremonies. He has been known to frequent the company of men suspected of adherence to that new and atheistical creed which denies all our gods, and terms our oracles the inspirations of that malevolent spirit of which eastern tradition speaks. Our oracles—alas! we know ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... leave it with you; it isn't safe," said the peer. "Anything more damnably atheistical than that book of yours ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... her religion, by the testimony of Paul, with great superstition: if Alcibiades, that atheistical fellow had not showed them a pair of heels, they had shaven off his head for shaving their Mercuries, and making their gods look ridiculously upon them without beards. Nevertheless, if Paul reasoned with them, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... off, and the letter was left in the archdeacon's hand. He looked at it as though he held a basket of adders. He could not have thought worse of the document had he read it and discovered it to be licentious and atheistical. He did, moreover, what so many wise people are accustomed to do in similar circumstances; he immediately condemned the person to whom the letter was written, as though she were necessarily ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... sure opinion is, that those who prowl about Spain are not Egyptians, but swarms of wasps and atheistical wretches, without any kind of law or religion, Spaniards, who have introduced this Gypsy life or sect, and who admit into it every day all the idle and broken people of Spain. There are some foreigners who would make Spain the origin and fountain of all the Gypsies ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... the true rendering is here given; grant even that the true law of vegetal development and growth is here enunciated; what has 'star-eyed science' to do with the 'odium theologicum?'" We answer, nothing. We would bury both theological rancor and atheistical pretension in the same barrow, and agree never to "peep and botanize" over their common grave. But if a great scientific principle—one that fits into all the phenomenal facts of nature—explains them all, and is, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... attractiveness of features otherwise frank, poetic, and noble. He had seen many such men. Men in their prime who had begun life full of high faith, hope, and lofty aspiration, yet whose fair ideals once bruised in the mortar of modern atheistical opinion had perished forever, while they themselves, like golden eagles suddenly and cruelly shot while flying in mid-air, had fallen helplessly, broken-winged among the dust-heaps of the world, never to rise and soar sunwards ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... theory of memory which relates it to an imaginary rearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at every instant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible to no one who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of the uncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, as even a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something more than a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonable hypothesis that memory has to do with that principle in man which is super-physical. His memory in short, is a function ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... dogma of Predestination. If he hoped by this avowal of his design to propitiate any class of theologians, he must have been greatly disappointed; for his speculations were universally condemned by the Christian world as atheistical in their tendency. This charge has been fixed upon him, in spite of his solemn protestations against its injustice, and his earnest endeavours to reconcile his scheme of necessity with the free-agency and accountability ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... importance at this point to trace the growth and analyse the substance of Shelley's atheistical opinions. The cardinal characteristic of his nature was an implacable antagonism to shams and conventions, which passed too easily into impatient rejection of established forms as worse than useless. Born in the stronghold ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... was dawning on Robert Browning's life—the influence of the poet Shelley. Mr. Sharp writes,* and I could only state the facts in similar words, 'Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem: very scarce."' . . . 'From vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the Reverend Doctor Gaster, after clearing the husk in his throat with two or three hems, "this is a very sceptical, and, I must say, atheistical conversation, and I should have thought, out of ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... being, and the eternity of his being are assumed as known by the first inspired penman; a fact or principle not to be disputed. True, the being of God has been questioned, but only by "fools"—"brutish people;" who, by their atheistical suggestions have proclaimed to their fellows their "brutish folly." (Ps. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... and moral attributes of the slanderer are of the most depraved and unhappy character. He is envious, selfish, jealous, vain, malignant, unbelieving, uncharitable, thoughtless, atheistical. St. James says that "his tongue is ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... half nonsense half knavery, as "The White King's Prophecy," "Supernatural Light," "The Starry Messenger," and "Annus Tenebrosus, or the Black Year." The rogue's starry mantle descended on his adopted son, a tailor, whom he named Merlin, junior. The credulity of the atheistical times of Charles II. is only equalled by that ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... in death. Humanity's heresiarchs are lordlier than inhumanity's priests. The soul's image-breaking is diviner than the prelate's worship. Knowledge distances faith. Human solidity more than makes good the Catholic's Communion. The revelation of universal law makes the belief in miracle seem atheistical; and the irresistible grace of the spirit that lives, and moves, and discloses its being in humanity, sweeps past the dispensations of Catholic and Protestant Christendom, as the eagle distances ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... myself went to pay our respects to the Gran Capitano of the Holy League, and we left our cards. He is, I hear, very confident of the result of the campaign, and no doubt he has for him the prayers of all the pious in England against those atheistical fellows the French; and these prayers will surely elicit a "host of angels" to come down to aid in the destruction of the Pandemonium of Paris where Satan's lieutenant sits enthroned. The reflecting people here are astonished that Napoleon ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... perverted, that scenes of treachery, cruelty and blood were regarded with indifference, and sometimes excited the most unbounded applause in the spectators. Such a change had been effected in the French character, by the propagation of Infidel and Atheistical opinions, "that from being one of the most light hearted and kind tempered of nations," says Scott, "the French seemed upon the revolution to have been animated, not merely with the courage, but with the rabid fury of wild beasts." ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that of so many conquerors, tyrants, persecutors, of ambitious and perverse courtiers, who, without being atheists, but who, being very often religious, do not cease to make humanity groan under the weight of their crimes? Can an atheistical king inflict more evil on the world than a Louis XI., a Philip II., a Richelieu, who have all allied religion with crime? Nothing is rarer than atheistical princes, and nothing more common than very bad ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... liberality; which they returned by endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... graciously permitted Americans to make homes in their country; now they wanted not only to build heretic churches and sell heretic bibles, but also to govern Texas after their own fashion." From a Mexican point of view the American settlers were a godless, atheistical, quarrelsome set of ingrates. For eaten bread is soon forgotten, and Mexicans disliked to remember that their own independence had been won by the aid of the very men they were now trying to ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... make the end sanctify the means. They were willing to enslave others, that they might secure their own freedom. They did this deed deliberately, with their eyes open, with all the facts and consequences arising therefrom before them, in violation of all their heaven-attested declarations, and in atheistical distrust of the overruling power of God. "The Eastern States were very willing to indulge the Southern States" in the unrestricted prosecution of their piratical traffic, provided in return they could be gratified by no restriction on being laid on navigation acts!!—Had ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... learning, and taste to themselves or their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste, than to morals and true philosophy. Those atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... ourselves to facts, we shall soon be led on to the second reflection which I have promised—viz., that, not only are things not better abroad, but they might be worse at home. We have, it is true, a Protestant literature; but then it is neither atheistical nor immoral; and, in the case of at least half a dozen of its highest and most influential departments, and of the most popular of its authors, it comes to us with very considerable alleviations. For instance, there surely is a call on us for thankfulness that ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... if resistance were made, he struck, and always with the point, never the hilt. In most cases, being well known throughout the Papal States as a free-handed person, nobody tried to thwart him; some yielding through fear, others from motives of interest. Impious, sacrilegious, and atheistical, he never entered a church except to profane its sanctity. It was said of him that he had a morbid appetite for novelties in crime, and that there was no outrage he would not commit if he hoped by so doing to enjoy a ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... vigour. Perhaps it will be said that all this is merely figurative language. Figurative language is very much misplaced in strict philosophical investigations; and these particular figures, which might be quite consistent with the atheistical philosophy of Lucretius, sound ill in the mouth of a pious Christian, which Mr. Coleridge undoubtedly was. He probably adopted them unconsciously from Bacon; but Bacon's use of the word Nature ought rather to have served as a warning than an example; ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the poetical young gentleman laughs a laugh belonging only to poets and Mr. O. Smith of the Adelphi Theatre, and sits down, pen in hand, to throw off a page or two of verse in the biting, semi-atheistical demoniac style, which, like the poetical young gentleman himself, is full of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the cause of morality has, till lately, been upheld in these Eastern States. It was but the other day that a man was discharged from prison, who had been confined for disseminating atheistical doctrines. It was, however, said at the time, that that was the last attempt that would ever be made by the authorities to imprison a man for liberty of conscience; and I believe that such ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... in Venice Wonderful labors amid dissipation The Countess Guiccioli Two sides to Byron's character His power and fertility Inexcusable immorality; "Don Juan" "Manfred" and "Cain" not irreligious but dramatic Byron not atheistical but morbid Many noble traits and actions Generosity and fidelity in friendship Eulogies by Scott and Moore Byron's interest in the Greek Revolution Devotes himself to that cause Raises L10,000 and embarks for Greece Collects troops ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... them; and retreating into the midst of the room, they fearfully looked toward the tremendous figure above, which, like a supernatural being, seemed indeed come to rain fire upon their guilty heads. Some shook with superstitious dread; others, driven to atheistical despair, with horrible execrations, again strove to force a passage through the doors. A second glance told De Valence whose was the hand which had launched the thunderbolt at his feet; and, turning to Sir Richard Arnuf, he cried, in a voice of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... erroneous, false, seditious, detestable in itself? And whether such a government as this ought to be embraced, much less established among us (the sad effects whereof we have already experimentally felt by the late dangerous increase of many Anabaptistical, Antinomian, Heretical, Atheistical opinions, as of The Soul's Mortality, Divorce at Pleasure, &c., lately broached, preached, printed in this famous city; which I hope our Grand Council will speedily and carefully suppress), &c." Here, and by no less a man than Prynne, Milton's Divorce Doctrine is ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... baby! You wicked, horrible, sacrilegious girl!" Brinnaria stormed. "You irreligious, atheistical, blasphemous wretch! To save your hide you'd desecrate the temple, pollute the Altar, anger Vesta, make all our prayers in vain, bring down curses without count on Rome and all of us. Be silent! Don't you dare to speak another word! Off to bed ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... perhaps, be confessed that he was prejudiced against all Americans, looking upon Washington much as he did upon Jack Cade or Wat Tyler; and he pictured to himself all American women as being loud, masculine, and atheistical. But it certainly did seem that in this instance Mrs Hurtle was endeavouring to do a good turn from pure charity. 'She is a lady,' Crumb began to explain, 'who do be living with Mrs Pipkin; and she is a lady ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... subjected—when we consider not only what it has done, but what it is destined yet to do for her advancement,—it is impossible not to shrink from the presence of an impious, and above all an unprincipled atheistical female, as from an ungrateful and ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... only fourteen when Shelley first came into his literary life. The story has often been told of how the young Robert, passing a bookstall one day spied in a box of second-hand volumes, a shabby little edition of Shelley advertised "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poems: very scarce." It seems almost incredible to us now that the name was an absolutely new one to him, and that only by questioning the bookseller did he learn that Shelley had written a number of volumes of poetry and that he was now dead. This accident was sufficient to inspire ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... continent, the wise and the foolish, speak the same language. Go, says he, to the utmost bounds of the ocean, and you find God there. But if there hath been, says he, since the existence of time, two or three atheistical, vile, senseless individuals, whose eyes and ears deceive them, and who are maimed in their very soul, an irrational and barren species, as monstrous as a lion without courage, an ox without horns, or a bird ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Darwin is an atheist; though I cannot but regard his materialism as atheistical. I think it untrue, because opposed to the obvious course of nature, and the very opposite of inductive truth. And ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... apply mainly to the philosophical and theological objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by the American reviewers. The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections—as well he may, since he records his belief in "a continuous creative operation," ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Great Renunciation!" she said; "How God Himself took human form, and came to this low little earth to prove how nobly we should live and die! But in our day,—we with our preachers and teachers, our press and our parliamentary orators,—our atheistical statesmen on all hands, have come upon the Great Obliteration!—the Obliteration of God altogether in our ways of life! We push Him out, as if He were not. He is not in our Churches—He is not in our Laws—He is not in our Commerce. Only when we are ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself banished the territory for a discourse begun with his confessing not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR WHETHER NOT. And against defaming, it was decreed that none ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... to reason with his friend upon his own atheistical principles, explaining to him that he had adopted this plan with a design to show him the fallacy of ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... favourite accusation of the Tories against the Whigs that they favoured the Deists. 'We' (Tories), writes Swift, 'accuse them [the Whigs] of the public encouragement and patronage to Tindal, Toland, and other atheistical writers.'[189] And yet we find the gentle Addison, Whig as he was, suggesting in the most popular of periodicals, corporal punishment as a suitable one for the Freethinker;[190] Steele, a Whig and the most merciful of men, advocating in yet stronger terms a similar mode of treatment;[191] ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... attention of the House (February 4, 1790) to the dangers of the revolution, by which the French had shown themselves "the ablest architects of ruin," pulling down all their domestic institutions, making "a digest of anarchy" called "the rights of men," and establishing a ferocious, tyrannical, and atheistical democracy. It might be said that they had done service to England, a rival, by reducing their country to impotence and expunging it out of the system of Europe; but, by the vicinity of the two countries, their present distemper might prove more contagious than ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... solve the riddle, but during the years 1902-1914 he has heard members of all non-Socialist German parties assert that the German Socialists do not recognize any religious oath, and sections of the Socialists admit this position. As a party they are professedly atheistic; therefore when the might of the German State compels them to take an oath—they take it ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Anarchy, which is always atheistic, holds its converse in the places of evil which this book's message would close forever; the foes of that civilization builded on its laws and stimulated by its hopes asks us to condemn it as worthy only of caricature, vituperation, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... he fell. He lost his hold of the great things of life, he forgot the stars, he forgot his love, and what wonder that his art sickened also. For a few months life was but a feverish clutch after varied sensation, especially the dear tickle of applause; he caught the facile atheistic flippancy of that poor creature, the 'modern young man,' all-knowing and all-foolish, and he came very near losing his soul in the nightmare. But he had too much ballast in him to go quite under, and at last strength came, and he shook the weakness ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... at Paris does not recall the burst of enthusiasm that stirred the surface? Trochu became once more popular; even the Communistic or atheistic journals refrained from complaining that he attended mass, and invited his countrymen to trust in God. Ducrot was more than popular—he ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hereditary aristocracy who claim to direct the thought of India whatever forms it may take. All who admit this claim and accord a nominal recognition to the authority of the Veda are within the spacious fold or menagerie. Neither the devil-worshipping aboriginee nor the atheistic philosopher is excommunicated, though neither may be relished ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... primordial cell, and that all things have been worked out without any superintending agency other than the forces resident in matter. Every operation of God is ruled out, or deemed unnecessary. This is sometimes called atheistic evolution. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... of bigotry, in former times, jealously watched every innovation. Telescopes and microscopes were denounced as atheistic, winnowing machines were denounced in Scotland as impious, and even forks when first introduced were denounced by preachers as "an insult on Providence not to eat our meat ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... is due to the hot weather and people going out of town, but I think it is owing to the spread of unbelief. We are living in terrible times, Mr Lorton. It seems to me that every one is becoming more atheistic and wicked every day. I don't know what we shall come to, unless we have another deluge, or something of that sort, to ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... anywhere under God's Heaven supporting itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so; it is made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step; but marches—whither we know! In these last two centuries of Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith, Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what of 'firm earth' there was for us to march on;—and are now, very ominously, shuddering, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there should ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall - a mere bag's end, as the French say - or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Racial Progress, who is not a Doctor of Medicine but of Philosophy, and Dr. Binnie Dunlop, who is a Bachelor of Medicine: and when birth controllers fall out we may humbly hope that truth will prevail. Dr. Stopes maintains that artificial birth control was not an atheistic movement, whereas Dr. Binnie Dunlop contends that the pioneers of the movement were Atheists. The beginning of the trouble was a letter written by Dr. Stopes to the British Medical Journal, in which she made the ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... and with our fathers' religion, Christian virtue. These principles now only exist partially, instead of inspiring the masses, for these ideas never perish altogether. At present, to support society we have nothing but selfishness."[] Elsewhere, he laments the atheistic government, and the increase of incredulity; and longs for Christian institutions, and a strong hierarchy, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more. I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and classical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... right, we learn the will of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the Universe; and when we feel disinterested love, we should know that we partake the feeling of the Infinite God. Then, when we reverence the mighty cosmic force, it will not be a blind Fate in an Atheistic or Pantheistic world, but the Infinite God, that we shall confront and feel and know. Then we shall be mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of His sentiments, and our own existence will be in the infinite ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... brother took pleasure in visiting his friend there, learnt something of the ways of the district, and gave a lecture to a Limehouse audience. He attended a coffee-house discussion upon the existence of God, and exposed the inconclusiveness of the atheistic conclusions. On another occasion he went with 'Tom,' now Judge Hughes, to support Mr. Davies, who addressed a crowd in Leman Street one Sunday night. Hughes endeavoured to suppress a boy who was disposed for mischief. The boy threw himself on the ground, with Hughes holding him down. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Ripley had once reproved me for declaring that Lewes had really a claim to be an original philosopher or thinker; for Boston intellect always frowned on him after Margaret Fuller condemned him as "frivolous and atheistic." I remember that Tom Powell had told me how he had dined somewhere in London, where there was a man present who had really been a cannibal, owing to dire stress of shipwreck, and how Lewes, who was ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is that the character of Bois Guilbert as drawn by Scott—his habitual oath 'by earth and sea and sky!' his scorn of 'the doting scruples which fetter our free-born reason,' and his atheistic faith that to die is to be 'dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed,' are all wonderful indications of insight into a type of mind differing inconceivably from the mere ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... so unique a view met with very scant favor. Astronomers at that time saw little to justify it; and the non-scientific world rejected it with fervor as being "atheistic and heretical," because its acceptance would seem to imply that the universe is not a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Reasonableness of Men's having a Religion, or Worship of God;' yet, such was his inconsistency, that in spite of these works, and of one styled a 'Demonstration of the Deity,' written a short time before his death, he assisted Lord Rochester in his atheistic poem upon 'Nothing.' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... reached by one with the aid of knowledge, and that other place which is reached with the aid of acts. The difference between these two places is as great as the limitless sky. The question that thou hast asked me has given me such pain as an atheistic discourse gives to a man of faith. These are the two paths upon which the Vedas are established; the duties (acts) indicated by Pravritti, and those based on Nivritti that have been treated of so excellently.[980] ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and threatened me with hell flames and utter extinction. I held my ground against them all obstinately enough, though my argument was exceedingly lame. I glibly repeated phrases I had heard my father use, but I had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. I had been surprised into this dispute. I had no spontaneous interest in the subject; my mind was occupied with other things. But as the number of my opponents grew, and I saw how unanimously they condemned ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the "Alliance de la Democratic Socialiste," formed by Bakunin, with its headquarters at Geneva, almost as vigorously for its atheistic plank as for its denial of political methods. The first plank in the programme of the "Alliance" was ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Treatise on the Origin of Species, upon its Natural Theology" ("Amer. Journ. Sci." Volume XXX, page 226, 1860). Reprinted in "Darwiniana," 1876, page 62. The article begins with the following question: "First Reader—Is Darwin's theory atheistic or pantheistic? Or does it tend to atheism or pantheism?" The discussion is closed by the Second Reader, who thus sums up his views: "Wherefore we may insist that, for all that yet appears, the argument for design, as presented by ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the sorrows of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the economical theories of Dr. Quesnay and old Marquis Mirabeau,—that stern father of him who, both in his intellectual power ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... any of the clubs, as he could not afford it. He seldom appeared in debates or the moot courts, for he was so shabbily dressed he felt he would not be welcome. It was undoubtedly these humiliating experiences, combined with certain of his studies and reading, that caused him to drift into an atheistic train of thought. Working hard, living poor, desiring so much, yet on all sides he saw boys with all the opportunities he longed for, utterly indifferent to them. He saw boys spending in riotous dissipation the money that would have meant so much to him. He saw them recklessly ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... the ancients could not calculate. The learned Dr. James, who has denounced the invention of the Indexes, confesses, however, that it was not unuseful when it restrained the publications of atheistic and immoral works. But it is our lot to bear with all the consequent evils, that we may preserve the good inviolate; since, as the profound Hume has declared, "The LIBERTY OF BRITAIN IS GONE FOR EVER, when ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... speculators, in his inquiry concerning the Human Understanding, introduces, as is well known, Epicurus, that is, a teacher of atheism, delivering an harangue to the Athenian people, not indeed in defence, but in extenuation of that opinion. His object is to show that, whereas the atheistic view is nothing else than the repudiation of theory, and an accurate representation of phenomenon and fact, it cannot be dangerous, unless phenomenon and fact be dangerous. Epicurus is made to say, that the paralogism of philosophy has ever been that of arguing from Nature ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... witness is Nicholas Saunderson, a blind man with a talent for mathematics, who between 1711 and 1739 was a professor at the University of Cambridge. Diderot quotes at some length the atheistic opinions of Saunderson, giving as his authority the Life of the latter by "Dr. Inchlif." No such book ever existed, and the opinions are the product of Diderot's own reasoning. When an author treats us in this way our confidence in his facts is hopelessly lost. His reasons, however, remain, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... has been called atheistic, because it is silent about the presence of a personal first Cause. It might be more truly denominated Pantheistic, not in the vague sense in which that term is applied to denote the belief in a Deity as an anima mundi, like that explained in reference to the Averroists,(339) but to imply ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... official at the one extreme and popular at the other; but there is no intermediate religion to speak of—and what we should call cultured people, scientific men, the professorial class, are largely atheistic. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... an absolute sense, while they do not exclude such reasoning in a relative sense, if there yet remain any theistic deductions which may properly be drawn from experience, these may now be adduced to balance the atheistic deductions from the persistence of force. For although the latter deductions have clearly shown the existence of Deity to be superfluous in a scientific sense, the formal considerations in question have no less clearly opened up beyond the sphere of science a possible ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... expressed in these compositions will appear to the Western reader, at first view, unmistakably atheistic. Yet they are really compatible with the sincerest and deepest faith. It is the use of the English word "soul," not understood at all as we understand it, which creates the false impression. "Soul," in the sense ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... even misleading. Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms—now appearing as a system of the baldest atheism, and now presenting an approximate theism. Gautama was certainly atheistic, and he virtually denied the existence of the human soul. But in the northern development of his system, theistic conceptions sprang up. A sort of trinity had appeared by the seventh century A.D., and by the tenth century a supreme and celestial ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... be said, as it continually is, that the law, in this sense, would be atheistic, individual, and heartless, and that it would make mankind wear its own image. This is an absurd conclusion, quite worthy of the governmental infatuation which sees mankind ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... the transcendental conception of a necessary being, to eliminate all phenomenal elements (anthropomorphism in its most extended signification), and at the same time to overflow all contradictory assertions—be they atheistic, deistic, or anthropomorphic. This is of course very easy; as the same arguments which demonstrated the inability of human reason to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being must be alike sufficient to prove the invalidity ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius—she a poet; he a bleached man, with goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth, who was Puritanically, ethically, gloomily, religiously atheistic. Items in the room were a young man who taught in Mr. Jeney's Select School and an Established Church mission worker from Whitechapel, who loved to ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not right, he would argue, but certainly not the anti-church ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in everything and everybody, except Mrs. Asbury. Emerson's atheistic fatalism is enough to unhinge human reason; he is a great and, I believe, an honest thinker, and of his genius I have the profoundest admiration. An intellectual Titan, he wages a desperate war with received creeds, and, rising on the ruins of systems, struggles to scale the battlements ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Russians,—all nations had boots at the service of poor Master Boney. How Pitt used to defy him! How good old George, King of Brobdingnag, laughed at Gulliver-Boney, sailing about in his tank to make sport for their Majesties! This little fiend, this beggar's brat, cowardly, murderous, and atheistic as he was (we remember, in those old portfolios, pictures representing Boney and his family in rags, gnawing raw bones in a Corsican hut; Boney murdering the sick at Jaffa; Boney with a hookah and a large turban, ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the S[a]nkhyas;[29] but in general one may say that the Upanishads are simply pantheistic, only the absorption into a world-soul is as yet scarcely formulated. On the other hand, some of the older Upanishads show traces of an atheistic and materialistic (asad) philosophy, which is swallowed up in the growing inclination to personify the creative principle, and ultimately is lost in the erection of a personal Lord, as in the latest Upanishads. This tendency to personify, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... think of Browning as the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in short, born in the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... somatist^, theophobist^. V. be irreligious &c adj.; disbelieve, lack faith; doubt, question &c 485. dechristianize^. Adj. irreligious; indevout^; undevout^; devoutless^, godless, graceless; ungodly, unholy, unsanctified^, unhallowed; atheistic, without God. skeptical, freethinking; unbelieving, unconverted; incredulous, faithless, lacking faith; deistical; unchristian, antichristian^. worldly, mundane, earthly, carnal; worldly minded &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... agnosticism are opposed to Christian Science, as they are to ordinary re- 139:30 ligion; but it does not follow that the profane or atheistic invalid cannot be healed by Chris- tian Science. The moral condition of such a man de- 140:1 mands the remedy of Truth more than it is needed in most cases; and Science is more than usually effectual in the 140:3 treatment ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... these things to our young philosopher; for had he done so, Khalid, now become edacious, would not have experienced those dyspeptic pangs which almost crushed the soul-fetus in him. For we are told that he is as sedulous in attending these atheistic lectures as he is in flocking with his fellow citizens to hear and cheer the idols of the stump. Once he took Shakib to the Temple of Atheism, but the Poet seems to prefer his Al-Mutanabby. In relating of Khalid's waywardness ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... that he is a Protestant, William is impressed by the greatness of the role that Leo XIII might play in Christianity; and, therefore, brings all the influences at his command to bear upon him. Through all his official and officious agents he tells him that atheistic France, in the hands of laymen, can no longer be the eldest daughter of the Church; that the Holy Father is the Head of Christianity throughout the world, and that in the East and Far East he should make use of those who are most Christian; ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... which he had not even heard much. We may be sure that to Chopin to whom discussions of any kind were distasteful, those of a circle in which, as in that of George Sand, democratic and socialistic, theistic and atheistic views prevailed, were particularly so. For, notwithstanding his bourgeois birth, his sympathies were with the aristocracy; and notwithstanding his neglect of ritual observances, his attachment to the Church of Rome remained unbroken. Chopin does not ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... indeed true. We are all aware of the fact that there are various kinds, shapes, and colors of evolution, from theistic to atheistic; but the fact still remains that every theory is still evolution, and that any theory of evolution whatsoever, if it means anything at all, means steady progress from lower to higher. Progress is certainly the one thought that is vital ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... principles, and to help on the general cause of truth, I must say that he strikes me as a very unreasonable man in much of his behavior. Our puritan fathers did not come to this wilderness with French, atheistic, idolatrous love for a goddess of liberty. They came here, it is true, for liberty of conscience and freedom to worship God. With a great sum they purchased this freedom. But infidels could as well claim to be absolved by the laws from all recognition of God, under ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... belief, in no sense atheistic. Among his latest words were, "I die worshipping God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition." Despite the admiration of the people, the powers of the state could not ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... better go, my dear!' said her husband sardonically. 'I cannot imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic slum on Easter Eve.' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for the third time. Again he presented himself at the House, and on refusal to administer the oath he administered it himself. He was arrested for blasphemy, and charges of circulating atheistic literature were brought in various courts. The endeavor was to enmesh him in legal coils and break his spirit. Where then was the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... parallel it by a greater absurdity of Nature" (it is not commonly stated in this way), to have any difficulties about miracles. I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... recitato da sofia, udito da saulino, registrato dal nolano, divisa in tre dialogi, subdivisi in tre parti. In Parigi, 1584, in-8.] This was an allegory in which he combated superstition and satirised the errors of Rome. But in this work Bruno fell into grievous errors and dangerous atheistic deceits. He scoffed at the worship of God, declared that the books of the sacred canon were merely dreams, that Moses worked his wonders by magical art, and blasphemed the Saviour. Bruno furnished ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... painfully religious aunt in Cedar Point. All Jennie's sisters, even the one from Vermont, were to be there and Jennie did want to go to visit with the girls. She and Frank had never been invited to any semi-religious festival by this aunt, owing to Frank's atheistic tendencies. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... you here and there... When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star Enchants the mental prig you are... A radical comes down and shocks The atheistic orthodox? You're representing Common Sense, Mouth open, in the audience. And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth (Including Kant and General Booth...) And ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... righteousness in it. I believe in Jesus Christ. To my mind, Christianity stands to-day very much as it did nearly two thousand years ago, when Jesus hung upon the cross between two thieves. The anarchy which, atheistic and reckless, would destroy all law and all property, is one of the thieves, and the devotee of the gold god of our time, who clutches his money-bags and says, "I have a right to get all the money I can, and do with it what I please," ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... gallery, the monk is arrested as a wandering lunatic and taken off to an asylum. Meanwhile, a great deal of excitement is agitating Ludgate Hill, where an atheistic editor runs a paper that propounds (with all the usual insults at Christ, which culminate in an attack on the method of the birth of Christ) the creed of atheism. A particularly slanderous attack on the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... on the part of Roman Catholicism, as to religious teaching in the schools. One County Inspector writes, that the Roman Catholic priest, in a separate school which the Inspector visited, said, "Your schools are atheistic. You don't acknowledge God." The same charge has been often repeated by the same authority against the public schools. While I have provided and contended for full provision by which the Roman Catholics could teach ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... knowing it, they contrive to mix up, with skill worthy of better employment, a very novel and amusing species of philosophical hodge-podge. Their Reverend leader or 'Shepherd' was wont to rail most furiously against dogmatists, especially those of the Atheistic sort; but his own dogmatism is at least a match for theirs. He did more than dogmatize when combatting Materialism, he from ignorance or design, libelled it by putting, according to a custom 'more honoured in the breach than the observance,' ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Asiatic nations are to be found accounts of the Creation, and of multitudes of gods, good and evil, all quite as pronounced as those that are derived from the Grecian myths; and while the wildest and grossest of superstitious fancies have prevailed among the common people, skepticism and atheistic doubt are known to have been nearly universal among the learned. The poem which we give in this connection, therefore, though professedly a Hindu creation, may be accepted not only as portraying Hindu doubt and despondency, but ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... of both Buddhists and Brahmans. The Brahmans began persecuting and banishing the Buddhists precisely because they had begun a crusade against idol-worship. The few Buddhist communities who remained in India and deserted the pure, though, maybe—for a shallow observer—somewhat atheistic teachings of Gautama Siddhartha, never joined Brahmanism, but coalesced with the Jainas, and gradually became absorbed in them. Then why not suppose that if, amongst hundreds of Brahmanical gods, we find one statue of Buddha, it only shows that the masses of half-converts ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... to say that the theory in itself is perfectly compatible with an atheistic view of the universe. That is true; but it is equally true of physical theories generally. Indeed, it is more true of the theory of gravitation, and of the nebular hypothesis, than of the hypothesis in question. The latter merely takes up a particular, proximate cause, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... air among gypsies. With the popish emissary it is otherwise: his portrait is the creation of Borrow's most studied hatred. Yet it must be admitted that the man in black is a triumph of complex characterisation. A joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine, sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in ear. For the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... have to go back to another, that which we go back from is not the cause, but that which we go back to is. The very idea of cause, as I have said, implies a stop; and wherever we stop is the cause.... A true cause is a First Cause.... The atheistic idea thus does not correspond to the idea of reason. The atheist appears to acknowledge the necessity of a cause, and appears to provide for it; but when we come to his scheme it fails exactly in that part of the idea which clenches it, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... of the past and the good works of the future. He links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic. He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century the original river of Merry England. And although this Hard Times is, as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in it perhaps than in any of the others of the abandon ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... little he himself understands of the material creation which he affirms to be the only one.... The Christian and Biblical conception of the universe is more logical, more harmonious, more in accordance with facts, therefore, more scientific than all philosophies, all systems, materialistic and atheistic. Contents ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... whom the materials are derived, will tolerate for a moment the theory that this mystical literature of the Jewish nation is capable of a diabolical interpretation. In particular it lends itself to the crude Manichaean system attributed to Albert Pike about as much and as little as it does to atheistic materialism. The reading of Mgr. Meurin may be compared with that of Mirandola, who discovered, not dualism, but the Christian mystery of the Trinity contained indubitably therein, who regarded it with more reason as the bridge by which the Jew might ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... adequate to the education of all the children in the rudimentary branches within their respective limits, irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes, or any part thereof, either by legislative, municipal, or other authority, for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... man he was: truly was he a "moral phenomenon." You see a man of strong animal propensities, but with a lofty soul, appearing in a wicked and materialistic—and possibly atheistic—age, overturning all previous systems of philosophy, and inculcating a new and higher law of morals. You see him spending his whole life,—and a long life,—in disinterested teachings and labors; teaching without pay, attaching himself to youth, working in poverty and discomfort, indifferent to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... As in Venice, it is become mostly an engine of state,—which, indeed, to a degree, it has always been in Spain. It wars no longer with Jews and heretics: it has no such war to carry on. Its great object is, to keep atheistic and republican doctrines from making their way in that kingdom. No French book upon any subject can enter there which does not contain such matter. In Spain, the clergy are of moment from their influence, but at the same time with the envy and jealousy that attend great ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to the barons, was that which chiefly made rustic slavery untenable in its coarsest form; for a "villain" who escaped into the free cities could not be recovered. In later times, the first public act against slavery came from republican France, in the madness of atheistic enthusiasm; when she declared black and white men to be equally free, and liberated the negroes of St. Domingo. In Britain, the battle of social freedom has been fought chiefly by that religious sect which rests least on the letter of Scripture. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... often beset by atheistic doubts. Yet a torturing surmise sometimes haunts me: may not untapped soul possibilities exist? Is man not missing his real destiny if he fails ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... fall on him and the Castle. His exertions increased his illness. There had been a final quarrel with the dying Lethington, who complained that Knox, in sermons and otherwise, charged him with saying there is "neither heaven nor hell," an atheistic position of which (see his eloquent prayer before Corrichie fight, wherein Huntly died {272a}) he was incapable. On the 16th he told "the Kirk" that Lethington's conduct proved that he really did disbelieve in God, and a future of rewards ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... Mably his admiration of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, and would reproduce them in France; others had borrowed from Raynal the revolutionary torch which he had lighted for the destruction of all institutions; others, educated in the atheistic fanaticism of Diderot, trembled with rage at the very name of a priest or religion; and thus the Revolution was gradually handed over to the guidance of passion and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the Christian Inquirer and The Independent, for instance—which have been so fully initiated into the secrets of universal truth as to regard all inquiry into such subjects either as too vulgar for a Christian gentleman, comme il faut, or as giving a "sanction to the atheistic delusion that there may be a spiritual or supernatural agency" in manifestations which are not accounted for by the New-England Primer. Mrs. Crowe, on the contrary, supposes that there may be something worthy of philosophical investigation in those singular phenomena, which, surpassing ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... a really great poem on these terms, though deprived of the concrete imagery of a Dante or a Milton. If he had fairly grasped some definite conception of the universe, whether pantheistic or atheistic, optimist or pessimist, proclaiming a solution of the mystery, or declaring all solutions to be impossible, he might have given forcible expression to the corresponding emotions. He might have uttered the melancholy ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion 'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same time ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... situation. The Plutocracy accepted the challenge. It was the Plutocracy, weighing and balancing, that defeated us by dividing our strength. It was the Plutocracy, through its secret agents, that raised the cry that socialism was sacrilegious and atheistic; it was the Plutocracy that whipped the churches, and especially the Catholic Church, into line, and robbed us of a portion of the labor vote. And it was the Plutocracy, through its secret agents of course, that ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... at the same time as that of Demeter, the poet addresses him thus:—"Other gods are either far away, or they have no ears, or they exist not, or have no care for us. But we see thee, a present deity, not of wood or stone, but real; therefore we pray to thee." It is true that such materialistic and atheistic expressions were probably reprobated by many at the time, as well as by later writers; but the mere possibility of their public enunciation shows how far the Athenians had gone from their old ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... nihilist, agnostic, somatist[obs3], theophobist[obs3]. V. be irreligious &c. adj.; disbelieve, lack faith; doubt, question &c. 485. dechristianize[obs3]. Adj. irreligious; indevout[obs3]; undevout[obs3]; devoutless[obs3], godless, graceless; ungodly, unholy, unsanctified[obs3], unhallowed; atheistic, without God. skeptical, freethinking; unbelieving, unconverted; incredulous, faithless, lacking faith; deistical; unchristian, antichristian[obs3]. worldly, mundane, earthly, carnal; worldly &c. minded. Adv. irreligiously ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... point of view. He cannot admit as a possibility the renovation of European society upon more liberal principles, and considers it as the complete dissolution of European civilization which will, like Asia, soon present but the ashes of a burnt-out flame. This is most atheistic, godless, and un-christian doctrine, and he cannot himself believe it. The art of printing and the rapid dissemination of thought changes all these ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... maintained by Mr. Agassiz, that life has not grown out of the necessary action of the physical laws. If we accept the customary definitions of the physical laws, we accede most cordially to his proposition. As opposed to the fancies of Epicurus and his poet, Lucretius, or to modern atheistic doctrines of similar character, we have no qualification or condition to suggest which might change its force or significance. When we remember that the genius of such a man as Laplace shared the farthest flight of star-eyed science only to "waft us back the tidings of despair," we are thankful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... in principle between such a declaration as this and the attempt of the third Napoleon to establish an empire in Mexico by arms? In the one case we have a proselytising, atheistic Republic bent on abolishing the religion of an unquestionable majority of the French people; in the other, we have a proselytising emperor bent on organizing empire in Mexico. In the light of the doctrine ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... masses still remain, and must ever remain, submissive under the yoke of old, dead religions, and under the tyranny of instincts. There will still be seen very much the same condition of things as at present in Paris; a society the brain of which is atheistic, and the heart religious. And at bottom there will be no more belief in Christ than in Jupiter; nevertheless, churches will continue to be built mechanically. There are no longer even Deists; for the old chimera ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... looking for some explanation of animal origin on natural grounds; and was derided quite as much as Lamarck's work by the adherents to the old traditional belief. Scouted by the great majority of naturalists, who still clung with tenacity to the notions of their predecessors, stigmatized as atheistic and abominable by theologians, it was first read with eagerness, and then put aside; and though it went through many editions, it is now almost forgotten. But this book was the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... The theistical sect seems to prevail in Nepaul, and the atheistical to subsist in perfection in Ceylon."—History of India, vol. i. pt. ii. ch. 4. An able writer in the fourth volume of the Calcutta Review has also controverted the assertion of its atheistic complexion; but whatever truth may be developed in his views, their application is confined to Buddhism in Hindustan and Nepal, and is utterly at variance with the practice and received ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... these problems is the best and highest contribution that they can make to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a brewery or a bank. A whole-hearted Christian life which ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... has its origin in the political situation. The Charter proclaimed the reign of Money, and success has become the supreme consideration of an atheistic age. And, indeed, the corruption of the higher ranks is infinitely more hideous, in spite of the dazzling display and specious arguments of wealth, than that ignoble and more personal corruption of the inferior classes, of which certain details lend a ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... earth had a beginning, and that a time was when they were not, will be best appreciated by those who know how much, and, it must be added, how unsuccessfully, writers on the evidences have labored to convict of an absurdity, on this special head, the atheistic assertors of an infinite series of beings. Even Robert Hall (in his famous Sermon on Modern Infidelity) could but play, when he attempted grappling with the subject, upon the words time and eternity, and strangely argue, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... with that recognition of religious truth by the state to which we yet adhere, and without which it is highly probable that the northern and western races, after a disturbing and rapidly degrading period of atheistic anarchy, may fatally recur to their old national idolatries, modified and mythically dressed up according to the spirit of the age. It may be observed that the decline and disasters of modern communities have generally been relative to ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... notion of prayer, as a mere attempt to induce God to change his mind, is at least a first step towards the truth that full supply for all our needs may be drawn from the Infinite. Still, such worship as this is hampered with perplexities, and can give only a feeble answer to the atheistical sneer which asks, "What is man, that God should be mindful of him, a momentary ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward |
