"Irreligious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... takes the ground that there is something irreligious and contrary to Christianity in the chronicling of such phenomena. It is fortunate that Mary Magdalene and the early disciples did not hold that theory. So far from its being irreligious to ascertain facts, there is a subtle impiety in ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... circumstances, because you must remember, things were very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that, roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a few exceptional men—Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of faith, and threatening political society, obstinately deaf to the voice of wisdom, with the retributive horrors of repeated revolutions; and yet neither in philosophy, in religion, nor in politics, has Mr Carlyle any distinct dogma, creed, or constitution to promulgate. The age is irreligious, he exclaims, and the vague feeling of the impenetrable mystery which encompasses us, is all the theology we can gather from him; civil society, with its laws and government, is in a false and perilous position, and for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... suggested by some train of thought which Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing. I do not think one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by it as an irreligious or even profane speech. It is a better way always, in dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it follow out its own thought. It will keep to it for a while; then it will quit the rail, so to speak, and run to any ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... robbers. When he moved about the country with the ruffians who attended him, the inhabitants fled to the woods, leaving their houses to be pillaged. William allowed no law to be pleaded against his own will. His life, and the life of his courtiers, was passed in the foulest vice. He was as irreligious as he was vicious. It was in especial defiance of the Christian sentiment of the time that he encouraged the Jews, who had begun to come into England in his father's days, to come in greater numbers. They grew rich as money-lenders, and William protected them against their debtors, exacting a high ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... no doubt, indicate clearly enough the state of general opinion at this time. But what then? Their great compeers, the giants of thought, foreshadow what it will be. The profligate novels, licentious drama, and irreligious opinions of the middle class now in France, are the result of the infidelity and wickedness which produced the Revolution. The opinions of the great men who have succeeded the school of the Encyclopedie, who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... at night, the keeping of men to tell us what can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea! Yet there was no scoffing in it. We were neither irreligious. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... mistake me. Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependance, but my dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been "more fool than knave." A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet is a monster. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... theology, which has become famous both in England and abroad, had its origin at Oxford, about A. D. 1838. Some distinguished members of the university thought that the church of England was in an alarming position, and that irreligious principles and false doctrines had been admitted into the measures of the government of the country on a large scale. To check the progress of these supposed errors and mischievous practices, they published a series of "Tracts for the Times," on such subjects as the constitution ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... soldier's life that his lovely character displayed itself. He never avoided the most trying and irksome duties. If he had selfishness, those who knew him long and well as schoolmates and comrades never discerned it. More than once I have heard his beautiful Christian example spoken of by irreligious comrades. Bitter and inexplicable as may be the Providence which has removed one so full of promise of good to his fellows, I feel that we may thank God that we have been permitted to witness a life so Christ-like terminated by ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able writers and ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... of master over disciple, since the days of James's discipleship began after the resurrection of Jesus. In any case there is no reason to think that the companions of Jesus' home were uncommonly irritating or in any way irreligious, only Jesus was not altogether like them (John vii. 5), and the fact of difference was a moral discipline, which among other things led to that moral growth by which innocence passed into positive goodness. If the home was such a school ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... the envy and mighty working of the enemy, there was kindled a persecution of the Christians by an irreligious and sacrilegious Judge of the Goths, who spread tyrannous affright through the barbarian land, it came to pass that Satan, who desired to do evil, unwillingly did good; that those whom he sought to make deserters ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... remained the ghost of his faith in Lois, the faintly flickering hope that some day they would come together again. It lay dormant in him, like an irreligious man's unacknowledged faith in God and a hereafter, but it, too, vanished when he read in a Seattle newspaper, already three months old, the announcement of his wife's divorce. He flinched when he read ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... life," went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 1624, Pope Urban VIII. anathematized all snuff-takers, who committed the heinous sin of taking a pinch in any church; and so late as 1690, Innocent XII. excommunicated all who indulged in the same vice in Saint Peter's church at Rome. In 1625, Amurath IV. prohibited smoking as an unnatural and irreligious custom, under pain of death. In Constantinople, where the custom is now universal, smoking was thought to be so ridiculous and hurtful, that any Turk, who was caught in the act, was conducted in ridicule through the streets, with a ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... dropped at the first blast of that irreligious outbreak. But the white-lawn tie reassured him. There was no time for argument. Before those loafers was no fit place. He grabbed up the little man, poked him into the pung, held him in with one hand and with the other drove furiously ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... clothes and what pay was due to me, unless I went back to my duty; yet, when I described the circumstances of the hellish life I led under the tyrannic sway of Oakum and Mackshane; and, among other grievances, hinted a dissatisfaction at the irreligious deportment of my shipmates, and the want of the true presbyterian gospel doctrine; he changed his sentiments, and conjured me with great vehemence and zeal to lay aside all thought of rising in the navy; and, that he might show how much he had my interest at heart, undertook to ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... questions raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter of the same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give her some arguments which she might later use with her father to confute the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You see, he has been asked to give money to our Settlement and would like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves of Settlements because they give no religious instruction; he has always been ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... rapture. It must hurt;—but they seem to enjoy it! Just as some women become nuns, and flagellate themselves,—and then when they are writhing from their own self-inflicted stripes, they dream they are the 'brides of Christ,' entirely forgetting the extremely irreligious fact that to have so many 'brides' the good Christ Himself might possibly be troubled, and would surely occupy an inconvenient position, even in Heaven! Each man,—each woman,—makes for himself or herself a little groove or pet sorrow, in which to trot round and round and bemoan life; the secret ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... rights want, not the ballot so much as the dissolution of the marriage tie. They propose to form a tie for the term of five, six or seven years. Mark the men or women who are the most strenuous advocates of woman suffrage. They are irreligious and immoral. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... which in effect is the same in Nature, though different in the time, yet this was allow'd among the Jews by the Law of God; and is the constant practice of our own and other Christian Nations in the World: the which our Author by his Dogmatical Assertions doth condem as Irreligious; which is Diametrically contrary to the Rules and Precepts which God hath given the diversity of men to observe in their respective Stations, Callings, and Conditions of Life, as hath ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... iconoclast in the world like an extreme Mohammedan. Last time they overran this country they burned the Alexandrian Library. You know that all representations of the human features are against the letter of the Koran. A statue is always an irreligious object in their eyes. What do these fellows care for the sentiment of Europe? The more they could offend it, the more delighted they would be. Down would go the Sphinx, the Colossi, the Statues of Abou-Simbel—as the saints went down ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stairs with the rocking chair, she thought, "Nothing could be more suiterble. We are both about the same age; I am most respecterbly connected—in fact, I regard myself as somewhat his superior in this respect; he is painfully undeveloped and irreligious and thus is in sore need of female influence; he is lonely and down-hearted, and in woman's voice there is a spell to banish care; worst of all, things are going to waste. I must delib'rately face the great duty with which Providence has brought me face to face. At first, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now. He sees not as man sees, but far clearer: judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower—breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the faults of public worship in the west. The practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes the whole performance ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... figures of the family might be less understood. Therefore the frames have preceded the portraits. Every one is aware that things influence beings. There are public buildings whose effect is visible upon the persons living in their neighborhood. It would be difficult indeed to be irreligious in the shadow of a cathedral like that of Bourges. When the soul is everywhere reminded of its destiny by surrounding images, it is less easy to fail of it. Such was the thought of our immediate grandfathers, abandoned by a generation which was soon to have no signs and no distinctions, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Europe. Our situation affords us a retreat from their cabals, and the present happy union of the states bids fair for extirpating the future use of arms from one quarter of the world; yet such have been the irreligious politics of the present leaders of the Quakers, that, for the sake of they scarce know what, they would cut off every hope of such a blessing by tying this continent to Britain, like Hector to the chariot wheel of Achilles, to be dragged ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... advance gratis unlimited funds to Socialist town councils to be wasted as fancy may direct (see page 258). Therefore they wish to abolish "that most costly of all modern parasites, the banker."[757] Some very irreligious, if not atheistic, Anarchist-Socialists, such as Mr. Morrison Davidson, pretend to object to interest on religious grounds because, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life said, 'Lend hoping for nothing again.'"[758] Other Socialists wish to abolish the banks and the charging ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... child! You silly 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 ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... own actions are governed by reasonable or moral motives? Can the gluttonous father expect a self-denying son? With how ill a grace must a man who will often be disguised in liquor, preach sobriety? a passionate man, patience? an irreligious man, piety? How will a parent, whose hands are seldom without cards, or dice in them, be observed in lessons against the pernicious vice of gaming? Can the profuse father, who is squandering away the fortunes ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... circumstances, is alien to the character and temperament of the Irish people. In short, I have urged that the policy of revenge is un-Christian and unintelligent, and, that, as the Irish people are neither irreligious nor stupid, it is un-Irish. I well remember taking up this position in conversation with some very advanced Irish-Americans in the Far West and the reply which one of them made. "Wal," said my half-persuaded ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... The truth is, she and I (long since contracted) Are now so sure that nothing can dissolue vs: Th' offence is holy, that she hath committed, And this deceit looses the name of craft, Of disobedience, or vnduteous title, Since therein she doth euitate and shun A thousand irreligious cursed houres Which forced marriage would ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... honest tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations when he took to his trade or when he didn't. A honouring and obeying wife would let his trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious woman? If you're a religious woman, give me a irreligious one! You have no more nat'ral sense of duty than the bed of this here Thames river has of a pile, and similarly it ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... familiar bracketing of his person with another's was distasteful to him. Besides, the man who had sprung up at his elbow bore a reputation that was none of the best. The owner of a small chemist's shop on the Flat, he contrived to give offence in sundry ways: he was irreligious—an infidel, his neighbours had it—and of a Sabbath would scour his premises or hoe potatoes rather than attend church or chapel. Though not a confirmed drunkard, he had been seen to stagger in the street, and ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... sense than we yet dream of! For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... written, nor am inclined to write, for that or for any other paper, but have suggested to them, over and over, a change of the motto and style. However, I do not think that it will turn out either an irreligious or a levelling publication, and they promise due respect to both churches and things, i.e. the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... himself," she would say. "I employ more policy in managing him than the whole Vatican employs to keep all Christendom in its fetters." On the appearance of danger, Voltaire ate his words without scruple; his irreligious writings were usually launched under cover of the anonymous. At every step, however, he was advancing farther and farther into the lists, and at the very moment when he wrote to Father La Tour, "If ever anybody has printed in my name a single page which could scandalize ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... looked towards me. "Do you know, Nikhil," he said, "I believe Sandip is not irreligious—his religion is of the obverse side of truth, like the dark moon, which is still a moon, for all that its light has gone over to the ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... two propositions: first, that there is such a process as evolution; second, that he had discovered the method by which evolution is accomplished. Before his time there was no general agreement as to the fact of evolution. People generally thought the idea absurd, as well as irreligious. All previous efforts on the part of advanced thinkers to persuade mankind of the truth of evolution had been nearly without effect. Among the early philosophers the whole idea was purely speculative. They made no attempt to prove it, and the conception ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... grown in strength and material prosperity with a celerity of growth hitherto unknown among nations. We may dislike Americans personally, we may find ourselves uncomfortable when there, and unable to sympathize with them when away. We may believe them to be ambitious, unjust, self-idolatrous, or irreligious; but unless we throw our judgment altogether overboard, we cannot believe them to be a weak people, a poor people, a people with low spirits or with idle hands. Now to what is it that the government ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... a schoolboy, waiting to be awakened by an accident. And it is ten times more so when to the schoolboy you add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of stunted schoolboy. You said just now that things might be done by religious mania. Have you ever heard of irreligious mania? I assure you it exists very violently, especially in men who like showing up magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the temptation of showing up a much more tremendous sham ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Matthew Arnold, define religion as motivated ethics. Ethics is a knowledge of right conduct, religion is an agency to produce right conduct. And its working is more like that of instinct than it is like that of reason. The irreligious man, testing a proposition by reason alone, may decide that it is to the interests of all concerned that he should not utter blasphemy. The orthodox Christian never considers the pros and cons of the question; he has the Ten Commandments and the teachings ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... herself as well—it costs seven francs apiece. They take their food with them; they go and laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is nonsense. One can say one's prayers just as well here. Mere Krebs thinks so too, but then she says, 'If I do not go, it will look ill; people will say I am irreligious; and as we make so much by flour, God would think it odd for me to be absent; and, besides, it is only seven francs there and back; and if it does please Heaven, that is cheap, you know. One will get it over and over again in Paradise.' That is what ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... of school-books is condemned because he cites Guizot and Thierry; another because he blames the massacres of Saint Bartholomew, and thinks they were caused by "religious fanaticism." But first of all, and more than all, the bishop condemns "that irreligious" Parisian journal, La Presse. "The number of its subscribers is deplorable; but they are becoming and shall become less; no priest must subscribe to it. No priest must be seen with it. No priest must 'ordinarily' read it." This is all very proper, according ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... endeavour to induce her to authorise him to contradict her own letter. He appealed first to her affection, and then to her duty; and after that, having failed in these appeals, he poured forth the full vials of his wrath upon her head. She was ungrateful, obstinate, false, unwomanly, disobedient, irreligious, sacrilegious, and an idiot. In the fury of his anger, there was hardly any epithet of severe rebuke which he spared, and yet, as every cruel word left his mouth, he assured her that it should all be taken to mean nothing, if she would only now tell him ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... woman! She's hopelessly irreligious; that's the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything: there's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl's faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... place in the same souls. Georges and Aurora had been caught up by the new current of Catholicism which was conquering many people of fashion and many intellectuals. Nothing could be more curious than the way in which Georges, who was naturally critical and perfectly irreligious, skepticism being to him as easy as breathing, Georges, who had never cared for God or devil—a true Frenchman, laughing at everything—suddenly declared that there lay the truth. He needed truth of some sort, and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... place his hand on some child's head, to say some kind words to its mother, and to offer his ring to be kissed. One day, when he was surrounded by a crowd of prostrate and respectful people, he saw a man whose worn face bore traces of irreligious passion, who was moving away as if to escape the apostolic benediction. The Holy Father approached him, and said gently, "Do not run away; an old man's blessing has never done any one any harm." This remark spread through Paris and made a most favorable impression. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... lover. Would to Heaven that I had not to go down to my boobies at Cleve! I should like nothing better than to amuse myself an autumn at Dallington with the little Dacre, and put an end to such an unnatural and irreligious connection. She is a splendid creature! Bring her to ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... will injure the efficiency of the Church at Amoy. Besides the objection furnished by the increase of denominations, which the heathen will thus, as readily as the irreligious in this country, be able to urge against Christianity, it will deprive the churches of the benefit of the united wisdom and strength of the whole of them for self-cultivation and for Christian enterprise, and will introduce a spirit of jealous rivalry among them. We ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... the little voices unite as the blending of many waters. Such fresh, happy voices, singing with such innocent, heedful tenderness as would bring tears to the eyes of even stony-hearted old Malthus, bring to the most irreligious thoughts of Him who bade little children come to Him, and would not have ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... go their small way, and believe they have discharged their duty. That is not the case. When a man has the honour to be a priest, he must be active. It is necessary, as in the time of the persecutions, to make proselytes and win souls; to confront the irreligious propaganda with our propaganda; lampoons, with lampoons; speeches, with sermons; acts, with acts. In short, we must struggle. Can we remain still and idle, when our Holy Father is imprisoned in a den ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... (Gnosis), without discipline, without sacraments, resting partly on a narrative which these very historical critics tear in pieces, each in his own fashion, and partly on a categorical imperative which is really the voice of "irreligious moralism," as Pfleiderer calls it. The words are justified by such a sentence as this from Herrmann: "Religious faith in God is, rightly understood, just the medium by which the universal law becomes individualised for the particular man in his particular place in the world's ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... was published in 1848, the twenty-sixth book to flow from Marryat's pen. It was completed after his death by a member of his family. It is intended for children, and its religious overtones are in contrast to Marryat's other works. He was far from irreligious, but this book is ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... traditional doctrine. We are not, however, now concerned with Milton's belief, but with his representation of his creed,—his picture, so to say, of it in "Paradise Lost"; still, as we cannot but think, that picture is almost irreligious, and certainly different from that which has been generally accepted in Christendom. Such phrases as "before all time," "eternal generation," are doubtless very vaguely interpreted by the mass of men; nevertheless, no sensitively orthodox ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... she knew how long an irreligious life, and the infamous society with which, as her father's wife, her mother was compelled to mingle, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... people make use of a library which admitted works of irreligious and immoral tendency? It was an undoubted fact (the Mercury made it known) that of late there had been added to the catalogue not only the "Essays of David Hume" and that notorious book Buckle's "History of Civilization," but even a large collection of the writings of George ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 — as science goes on repeating to us every day — it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... than Moore knew that Byron was not irreligious?—And yet he pretended that he was. And finally, Who was better aware that Byron's greatest aim was to be useful to humanity, and yet encouraged the belief that Byron's expedition to Greece was purely to satisfy the desire that people should speak of him as ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... total income from all sources of three-quarters of a million per annum. Now consider from whence all this has sprung. It is only twenty-five years since the author of this volume stood absolutely alone in the East of London, to endeavour to Christianise its irreligious multitudes, without the remotest conception in his own mind of the possibility of any ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... first. It was certain that any new work by the author of Don Juan would be subjected to the severest and most hostile scrutiny, and it was doubtful if a translation of part of an obscure and difficult poem, vaguely supposed to be coarse and irreligious, would meet with even a tolerable measure of success. At any rate, in spite of many inquiries and much vaunting of its excellence (see Letters, June 29, September 12, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 314, 362), the MS. remained for more than ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did wicked deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because wicked deeds seemed the legitimate operation of his whole infernal organisation. Phrenologically, he was without a soul. Is it to be wondered at, that the devils are irreligious? What, then, thought I, who is to blame in this matter? For one, I will not take the Day of Judgment upon me by authoritatively pronouncing upon the essential criminality of any man-of-war's-man; and Christianity has taught me that, at the last day, man-of-war's-men ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to inquire. It is certain, at least, that the whole is not covered. And nothing more lends confidence to the method than this. For one thing, room is still left for mystery. Had no place remained for mystery it had proved itself both unscientific and irreligious. A Science without mystery is unknown; a Religion without mystery is absurd. This is no attempt to reduce Religion to a question of mathematics, or demonstrate God in biological formulae. The elimination of mystery from the universe ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... a very easy thing, and requires no previous preparation of heart by self-examination, for very wicked and thoughtless people to call upon the Lord in times of great danger, or in seasons of distress. Some years ago a very thoughtless and irreligious family near my home lived on the bank of a certain stream. Suddenly, after a great rain, their house was surrounded by a flood of water that threatened its destruction. They knew not what to do; and in their ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... succeeded by his son, William Rufus (1087-1100), who was as able a man as his father. He promised to be liberal, and to lay no unjust taxes; but he proved to be—especially after the death of the good Lanfranc, the archbishop of Canterbury—a vicious and irreligious king. The Norman nobles would have preferred to have his brother Robert, who was duke of Normandy, for their king; but the English stood by William. He left bishoprics and abbacies vacant that he might ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... common and general error of the uninitiated to bring the following accusations against philosophers. Some of them think that those who explore the origins and elements of material things are irreligious, and assert that they deny the existence of the gods. Take, for instance, the cases of Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and other natural philosophers. Others call those magicians who bestow unusual care on ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, "And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her life ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... sacred music was in order. Even De Forrest and Addie joined in this with considerable zest. It was the proper, and about the only thing that could be done on a Sabbath evening. The most irreligious feel better for the occasional indulgence of a little religious sentimentality. When the aesthetic element is supreme, and thorny self-denial absent, devotion is quite attractive to average humanity. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... no distinction between those who professed religion and those who made no profession. Their own religion was national. There was no division between the religious and irreligious. All were religious. In other words, they were all educated in the same faith, all united in observing the same religious rites, and all entertained the same religious belief, as had been handed down to them from their forefathers. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... her as it changed. Her own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this child of earth, and the renascence, brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted, and scolded, and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the same desire to know that which Infinite Mercy has concealed. There is but little probability that the curiosity of mankind in this respect will ever be wholly eradicated. Death and ill-fortune are continual bugbears to the weak-minded, the irreligious, and the ignorant; and while such exist in the world, divines will preach upon its impiety and philosophers discourse upon its absurdity in vain. Still, it is evident that these follies have greatly diminished. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... something. Here, again, is a point of unity. All are equally assured there ever has been something. Something is, something must always have been, cry the religious, and the cry is echoed by the irreligious. This last dogma, like the first, admits not of being evidenced. As nothing is inconceivable, we cannot even imagine a time when there was nothing. Universalists say, something ever was, which something is matter. Theists say, something has been from all ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... way," cried Fichta, "I would shut up these irreligious American schools. Religion is the base of the social life ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... convicts the influence of superstition is less prevalent, although, amongst many of the lower orders of Irish, the traces of it are to be discovered; it leads, however, to no injurious consequences, and deserves encouragement, in preference to those totally irreligious principles which might naturally be expected to shew themselves amidst a body of men, of characters and dispositions so hostile to every thing which ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... in part by a practical refutation of the prejudice against religion drawn from the irreligious character of many men of science. The Author's subject has led him in the present work to confine his illustrations on this head to the question of natural religion: but the translator will avow that a main motive with him to undertake the labor of this ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... is shown by considering such points, and making for the demise of others even more preparation than for our own. Otherwise there is a selfishness about it by no means Christian-minded. You look at things always from such an intense and even irreligious point of view. But such things are out of my line altogether. Your ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... themselves happy in your friendship? Well, in such hours, remember your Master, and the hatred of Herod seeking to kill the Child. Try to call to mind something of the secret, as well as the open, bitterness of men, religious and irreligious alike, which began to hunt Him while yet in swaddling clothes, and which hunted Him still ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... erect. Every political act is a moral act, in view of the principle which we have expounded, that whatever we do, all must be done to the glory of God. Through the force of this principle it acquires a religious or an irreligious character; is clothed with a fearful significance, as it indicates the condition of the inward life; and is linked to everlasting consequences, as it forms part of the history of an immortal being. Whatever is done, ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... valuable, as permitting of the attendance of tailors who had not yet struck—Pinchas's politic advice had not failed to make an impression. Like so many reformers who have started with blatant atheism, he was beginning to see the insignificance of irreligious dissent as compared with the solution of the social problem, and Pinchas's seed had fallen on ready soil. As a labor-leader, pure and simple, he could count upon a far larger following than as a preacher of militant impiety. He resolved ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Mormons, and infidels, as well as of believers in Christianity, they endeavor to establish such forms as will be acceptable to their mongrel and motley membership. Hence their prayers and other forms of worship are such as may be consistently used by the irreligious and by infidels, and only by them. We do not say that no Christian prayers are offered up in Masonic lodges. No doubt some godly men, as chaplains, offer up extempore prayers in the name of Christ; but such prayers are not Masonic. They are not authorized ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... introduce it into Oxford, but failed. He is the author of several works, amongst others a system of Cartesian philosophy, where a chapter on "Angels" revives the methods of the schoolmen. His chief opponent was Samuel Parker (1640-1688), bishop of Oxford, who, in his attack on the irreligious novelties of the Cartesian, treats Descartes as a fellow-criminal in infidelity with Hobbes and Gassendi. Rohault's version of the Cartesian physics was translated into English; and Malebranche found an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... thirteen thousand francs income. Mme. d'Epinay, in the midst of success, became acquainted with Mlle. Quinault, the daughter of the famous actor of the time, and herself a great actress. This woman invited Mme. d'Epinay to her so-called salon, which was, possibly, the most licentious and irreligious of the salons then in vogue, where she met Duclos, with whom she immediately formed a ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... him. The indignation and stupefaction of the author can be well understood when he was told that the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper that his proof- reader—a young lady—had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless evidence of the manner in which the editor was imperilling ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... proof needed to show the irreligious influence exerted by Darwinism applied to man? At the University of Wisconsin (so a Methodist preacher told me) a teacher told his class that the Bible was a collection of myths. When I brought the matter to the attention of the President ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... to marry persons of your own faith and religious convictions, unless one is willing to adopt those of the other. Difference of faith is apt to divide families, and to produce great trouble in after life. A pious woman should beware of marrying an irreligious ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... said, "very, especially to a man who has seen stout and elderly females sit in that same chair and state their conviction that they were destined to be George Eliots or Charlotte Brontes, women who had written one improper or irreligious novel, which had obtained a certain ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Incarnation, since the outward modifications of visible form were but the symptoms of a freshly-communicated informing intelligence). It transfigured them; from men sunk in the gross and sensual thoughts and aims of an irreligious and priest-ridden age—an age which ate and drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes, and maundered of the divine right of kings—from this sluggish degradation it roused and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as Puritans. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... life, we should accept and follow the ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help. Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered, must both ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... letter is a mixture of pious demureness and querulous selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband. This sinful man requires of her—of her, a soul devoted to religion— that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds himself within ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the Gentiles the same?" There are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... lies in the pulpit, 'nail't wi' Scripture,' lies in the counting room railed with false entries, religious lies, told by Deacon Longface, for the advancement of what the Deacon calls 'the gospel,' and irreligious lies told by Bill Snooks, and clenched with an oath, lies in good books, and lies in bad ones, lies written, and printed in the newspapers, and lies whispered in the ear, and any number of lies sent by telegraph! And then, there's the walking lies, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... were then recalled and along with them a mass of idle gossip and scandal against the women. It was remembered that Mother Joan was "a monstrous malicious woman, full of oathes, curses, and imprecations irreligious." Some of her neighbors "dared to affirme that she dealt with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses and threatning of revenge." At length, in February of 1618/19, on the return of the earl from attending His Majesty "both at ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... for God and His people. Improve what was well begun by others before you, and not perfected by them.' Under this latter head he dwelt on the possible abuse of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and the irreligious ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... all the days throughout the rolling year There's not a day we pass so much amiss, There's not a day wherein we all appear So irreligious, so profaned as this. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... to the Protestant critic of Catholicism, nothing more needs to be brought out prominently, than the firm hold our religion can exercise over souls that are naturally irreligious. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... rabid Churchmen, of any school of thought, ever again take exception to the irreligious character of playhouse entertainments. Let them read the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre in The Times for March 13:—"During Holy Week this theatre will be closed, re-opening on Saturday, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... otherwise, on Parliamentary sayings and doings. I can say nothing from myself, as I have not read one single speech, except that I cannot bear the humiliating exclusion of any kind of useful knowledge from a University out of false consideration for religious or irreligious scruples. [84] Surely young men had better be taught boldly to face the fact that men differ than be dealt with in this ridiculously tender and ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... also always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, and for no ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... he had invested his funds in the new town. He was a prudent man, and when the proposal was made him by the two proprietors to join them in the enterprise, he was disinclined to do so. They were irreligious men, stirring, energetic workers, but devoid of interest in "things unseen," and therefore could not be expected to care for the present and future moral condition of the settlement. Yet we should do them the justice to say that they were not indifferent to the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... such as could not write. In all their preachments they so highly pretended to the Spirit, that some of them could hardly spell a letter. To be blind with them was a proper qualification of a spiritual guide, and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost convertible terms. None save tradesmen and mechanics were allowed to have the Spirit, and those only were accounted like St. Paul who could work with their hands, and were able to make a pulpit before preaching ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (afterwards viscount Kenmuir) was born about the year 1599. He received a reasonable measure of education, and yet, through the circumstance of his birth, the corruption of the age, but above all the depravity of nature, and want of restraining grace in his younger years, he became somewhat irreligious and profane, which, when he arrived at manhood, broke out into more gross acts of wickedness, and yet all the while the Lord never left him altogether without a check or witness in his conscience, yet sometimes ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions!" This latter passage is characteristic, and many who do not like Jefferson will read between the lines the exultation of a man who was not always careful to draw the line between religious liberty and irreligious license.] ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... very great consequence to the Commonwealth of the Protectorate what theory of Toleration should be adopted into its Constitution, whether the Parliament's or Cromwell's. For the ferment of religious and irreligious speculation of all kinds in the three nations was now something prodigious, and there were widely diffused denominations of dissent and heresy that had not been in existence ten years before, when the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly first discussed the Toleration Question. ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... at Eleusis by the Athenians every fourth year. They were said to have been introduced B.C. 1356, and were very sacred. All persons were required to be initiated. If they refused it they were supposed to be irreligious. "Have you been initiated?" was asked in dangerous situations. The initiated were said to be calm in view of death. It was the personal ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... There was much sense in a remark made by an intelligent gentleman, who, although not pious himself, said: "I cannot look with any complacency upon a woman who does not manifest gratitude and love to Jesus Christ. Above all things, I hate to see so unnatural an object as an irreligious woman." ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... appearance of great men "in great crises of human history" were events so striking "that men would be liable to term them providential in a pre-scientific age." On this Mr. Spencer remarks that "in common with the ancient Greek Mr. Gladstone regards as irreligious any explanation of Nature which dispenses with immediate Divine superintendence." And as an instance of the partnership "between the ideas of natural causation and of providential interference," he instances a case where a prince "gained popularity by outliving certain abnormal ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... visit Madame Orio's house, and on that very day I held an argument in metaphysics, in which I contended that any being of whom we had only an abstract idea, could only exist abstractedly, and I was right; but it was a very easy task to give to my thesis an irreligious turn, and I was obliged to recant. A few days afterwards I went to Padua, where I took my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... convention. It was the simplest thing in the world to make the chartered libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to bid him throw off ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... here instead of taking you away from me," she said, plaintively, to Rachel one morning, when she made the disagreeable discovery that Rachel and Hester were friends. "I don't care much about her myself, she is so profane and so dreadfully irreligious. But Edward likes to talk to her. He prefers artificial people. I wonder he did not marry her. That old cat, Lady Susan Gresley, was always throwing her at his head. I wish she was not always persuading you to leave me for hours together. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... agitation of spirit to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco: "Questo e Gesu Nazzareno"—as the housekeeper might say, "This is the present Earl"—also points out the marble copy of the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... characteristic, in the record of those observances which attested the public feeling, is this— that he who at that time had no bust, picture, or statue of Marcus in his house, was looked upon as a profane and irreligious man. Finally, to do him honor not by testimonies of men's opinions in his favor, but by facts of his own life and conduct, one memorable trophy there is amongst the moral distinctions of the philosophic Caesar, utterly unnoticed hitherto by historians, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... precepts, continue to lead a life which this very religion condemns. Is a credulous murderer less to be feared than a murderer who does not believe anything? Is a religious tyrant any less a tyrant than an irreligious one? ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... order to get out of them, instead of patiently waiting God's time! They have, perhaps, unkind parents, and they are so uncomfortable at home, that they take the first opportunity which presents itself of getting away. They marry irreligious persons, not asking themselves the question whether they are irreligious, merely from impatience to get out of their present discomfort; "Any thing but this," they say. What is this but to act like Saul? he had ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... indeed. I can't understand this modern mania for curates. In my time we girls saw them, of course, running about the place like rabbits. But we never took any notice of them, I need hardly say. But I am told that nowadays country society is quite honeycombed with them. I think it most irreligious. And then the eldest son has quarrelled with his father, and it is said that when they meet at the club Lord Brancaster always hides himself behind the money article in The Times. However, I believe that is quite a common occurrence nowadays and that they have to take in extra copies ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... hope you go to church sometimes: I am sorry to see the young men of the present day so irreligious. Perhaps you could get my old friend, Madame De—, to choose the Cachemire—take care ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... word of the Countess was spoken. Having eaten, they went off to ride, leaving me to amuse myself as I might. The air of the chateau seemed the freer for their absence, but still it was to me a sinister place, and an irreligious place too, for, though the Count and his friend were Catholics, I had not seen the sign of a chaplain or of any religious observance since I had crossed the drawbridge. So I prepared myself for a dull yet anxious day, and lounged about the hall and court-yard as the places where ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... have made the fatal mistake of intrusting their children's education to those whose gifts were wholly intellectual and not spiritual, and who have misled the young pupils entrusted to their care, into an irreligious or infidel life, or, at best, a career of mere intellectualism and worldly ambition. In not a few instances, all the influences of a pious home have been counteracted by the atmosphere of a school which, if not godless, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing" (p. 104). My only comment is c'est ignolile! His Reverence acts the part of Satan in Holy Writ, "Does Job serve God for naught?" Compare this selfish, irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judaeus (On the Allegory of the Sacred Laws, cap. 1viii.), to measure the extent of the fall from Pharisaism to Christianity. And the latter is still infected with the "bribe-and-threat ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... harm may have come of not believing in Apollo? Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as irreligious mania? Is there no such thing in the house ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... boat and jumped on board. He was a young but serious-faced man with a red beard, was thirty years of age, and had achieved no little distinction for having once attempted to convert Captain "Bully" Hayes, when that irreligious mariner was suffering from a fractured skull, superinduced by a bullet, fired at him by a trader whose connubial happiness he had unwarrantably upset. The natives thought no end of Macpherson, because in his ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... a pity that the poor fellow gave himself the trouble to go down into damp, unwholesome graves, for the purpose of fetching up a few trumpery sheets of manuscript; and if the public has been rather tired with their contents, and is disposed to ask why Mrs. Sand's religious or irreligious notions are to be brought forward to people who are quite satisfied with their own, we can only say that this lady is the representative of a vast class of her countrymen, whom the wits and philosophers of the eighteenth century have brought to this condition. The leaves of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which has cheered me for you, Margaret, though, as we poor irreligious human beings often say to each other, 'I wish I had your faith.' You have given me more than I had, however. But are we to say no more about anything? Must we leave this comfortable ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... on them, lose her money to them, and feel herself no whit degraded. Such company brought on her no conviction of shame. But yet she was not of them. Coarse she was; but neither dishonest, nor selfish, nor vain, nor irreligious, ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... encourage them, if they would be men indeed, to labour after the attainment of this his excellent art. He would often- times please himself {90a} with the thoughts of what he could do in this matter, saying within himself; I can be religious, and irreligious, I can be any thing, or nothing; I can swear, and speak against swearing; I can lye, and speak against lying; I can drink, wench, be unclean, and defraud, and not be troubled for it: Now I enjoy my self, and am Master of mine own wayes, and not they of me. This I have attained with ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... always claimed that I am irreligious. They will not accept the fact that I am a Quaker—or, rather, they seem to think a Quaker is an infidel. I am glad you are a Methodist, for now they cannot claim that we are ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... solemnly. "He's inclined to brood about things like shimmys. They were just starting to do the—maxixe, wasn't it, Jimmy?—when he became a monk, and it haunted him his whole first year. You'd see him when he was peeling potatoes, putting his arm around the bucket and making irreligious ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the most irreligious or most careless among us, the words, under the influences of our situation, come fraught with ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious—it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious. Take a humble simile. Suppose a writer were daily saluted ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Meletus, you will have it that by such habits I corrupt the young. We know, I fancy, what such corrupting influences are; and perhaps you will tell us if you know of any one who, under my influence, has been changed from a religious into an irreligious man; who, from being sober-minded, has become prodigal; from being a moderate drinker has become a wine-bibber and a drunkard; from being a lover of healthy honest toil has become effeminate, or under the thrall of ...
— The Apology • Xenophon
... typical Oriental colouring, the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent in European art to a certain point. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... not actually irreligious. She read her Bible occasionally, and went through a form of prayer by her bedside every night; but religion had never touched her heart. It was but an empty name to her, and she was too secure in her self-confidence and ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... when the wine and jests were circulating fast, though he was only a poet in the vulgar tongue. There were even learned personages who maintained that Aristotle, wisest of men (unless, indeed, Plato were wiser?) was a thoroughly irreligious philosopher; and a liberal scholar must entertain all speculations. But the negatives might, after all, prove false; nay, seemed manifestly false, as the circling hours swept past him, and turned round ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... those of Roman devotees. But he is not going to dwell here on this point; it is dwelt upon at tolerable length in the text, and has likewise been handled with extraordinary power by the pen of the gifted but irreligious Volney; moreover, the elite of the Roman priesthood are perfectly well aware that their system is nothing but Buddhism under a slight disguise, and the European world in general has entertained for some time past an inkling of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... much to think of besides "the quarrels of women and savages." Moreover, he was not quite sure of his ground with regard to Asako. To take a wife from her husband against his will, seems to the Japanese mind so flagrantly illegal a proceeding; and old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke had warned his irreligious son most gravely against the danger of tampering with the testament of Asako's father, and of provoking thereby a visitation of his ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... all colonial enterprises, that no one provision or pledge of prosperity was held equally indispensable by all parties to such hazardous speculations. The merest worldly foresight, indeed, to the most irreligious leader, would suggest this sanction as a necessity, under the following reason:—colonies the most enviably prosperous upon the whole, have yet had many hardships to contend with in their noviciate of the first five years; were ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... learning of religious truth, or the moral obligations that it teaches. The child taught and trained for this world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... we take the experience of an individual or the history of a tribe, whether we have recourse to the opinions of religious teachers or irreligious philosophers, we find them nigh unanimous that the emotion which is the prime motor of religious thought is fear. I need not depend upon the well-known line ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... through all the past, the whole extent of its rightful but never assumed dominion. So feeble and confined in the function of judgment through which it must see and act, it is especially incapable of admitting the monitor's estimate of the measure of guilt involved in omission, and in an irreligious state of the mind, as an exceedingly grave addition to the account of criminal action. The man is totally and honestly unable to conceive of the substantial guilt of anything of which he can ask, what injury it has done to anybody. This single point—whether positive harm has been done ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... decree forbidding them to engage in the Japanese trade, which would compel them to go elsewhere. He enumerates the beneficial results of this measure, and declares that even without these Macao should be abandoned; for its people are lawless and irreligious, and are not even vassals of Spain, but of China. The Portuguese of Macao are needed in India, which country would be benefited in many ways by the measure proposed, as also would the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Moreover, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... abodes of the gods as the Greeks conceived them. The Romans, before they knew the Greek poetry, seem to have had no definite imagination of such an assembly of gods. But the Roman and Etruscan races were by no means irreligious. They venerated their departed ancestors, and in each family the worship of these ancestors was an important duty. The images of the ancestors were kept in a sacred place, each family observed, at fixed times, memorial ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... a worthier speaker and another occasion. But no one who knew Mr. Gladstone could fail to see that it was the essence, the savor, the motive power of his life. Strange as it may seem, I can not doubt that while this attracted many to him, it alienated others, others not themselves irreligious, but who suspected the sincerity of so manifest a devotion, and who, reared in the moderate atmosphere of the time, disliked the intrusion of religious considerations into politics. These, however, though numerous enough, were the exceptions, and it can not, I think, be questioned ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... intelligible approach to that very "otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconciling influence over the heart of man—the way the human spirit expands and blossoms in His presence—is moving beyond expression to any observer, religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunner and defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimous solicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and women of this torn and distracted age, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Him. If you deeply feel the bond that knits you to Christ, and really live near to Him, you will be near to your brethren. You will feel that 'blood is thicker than water,' and however like you may be to irreligious people in many things, you will feel that the deepest bond of all knits you to the poorest, the most ignorant, the most unlike you in social position; ay! and the most unlike you in theological opinion, who love the Lord Jesus ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... "You mustn' talk irreligious," said her elderly friend. "Besides, there's nothin' amiss with him, settin' aside his foolishness. I've a-thought sometimes, now, o' buildin' a boat down here, an', when the time came, makin' believe to exchange. Boat-buildin' is slack just now, but ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... law—brave, because they were inured to dangers—proud, because they were independent, and vindictive, because each was the avenger of his own wrongs. It would be unjust to the borderer to pursue the parallel much farther. He is irreligious, because he has inherited the knowledge that religion does not exist in forms, and his reason rejects mockery. He is not a knight, because he has not the power to bestow distinctions; and he has not the power, because he is the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Eadbald succeedeth Ethelbert in the Kentish kingdome, his lewd and vnholie life, he is an enimie to religion; he is plagued with madnesse; Hebert king of the Eastsaxons dieth, his three sonnes refuse to be baptised, they fall to idolatrie and hate the professours of the truth, their irreligious talke and vndutifull behauiour to bishop Melitus, he and his fellow Iustus passe ouer into France, the three sonnes of Hebert are slaine of the Westsaxons in battell, the Estsaxons by their idolatrie prouoke archbishop Laurence to forsake the land, ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... purse of clear gain on the voyage, a conviction arises that she could not guess wrongly. She might have tossed up, having coins in her pocket, heads or tails? but this kind of sortilege was then coming to be thought irreligious in Christendom, as a Jewish and a Heathen mode of questioning the dark future. She simply guessed, therefore; and very soon a thing happened which, though adding nothing to strengthen her guess as a true one, did much to sweeten it if it ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... general, and those things which in consequence and coherence of this general deliberation happen unto me in particular, I am bound to embrace and accept of. But if so be that they have not deliberated at all (which indeed is very irreligious for any man to believe: for then let us neither sacrifice, nor pray, nor respect our oaths, neither let us any more use any of those things, which we persuaded of the presence and secret conversation ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... said the cases were not parallel. Irreligious persons, he remarked, were not in imminent danger of immediate death; they might die to-morrow; but in all probability they would not, and an ill-timed or injudicious admonition might forever repel them. We must accept the doctrine of probabilities, and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton |
