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noun
Theism  n.  The belief or acknowledgment of the existence of a God, as opposed to atheism, pantheism, or polytheism.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Theism" Quotes from Famous Books



... presented by the senses; 'first principles are abstractions from facts, not elementary truths prior to reasoning.' This is pure nominalism, in its crudest form. It makes all arguments in favour of the great truths of religion valueless; for if there are no universals, rational theism is impossible. It follows that the famous scholastic 'proofs of God's existence' have for Newman no cogency whatever; indeed it is difficult to see how he can have escaped condemning the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... Atheism; he projected sending it round broadcast as an invitation or challenge to discussion. This small pamphlet—it is scarcely more than a flysheet—hardly amounts to saying that Atheism is irrefragably true, and Theism therefore false; but it propounds that the existence of a God cannot be proved by reason, nor yet by testimony; that a direct revelation made to an individual would alone be adequate ground for convincing that individual; and that the persons to whom such a revelation is not accorded are ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hebertists in the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the opposition, and it is the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... courteous, tolerably cultivated, fond of generalities, and easily and quickly roused, and very much in earnest. For instance like that amiable logician the Marquis de Ferrieres, an old light-horseman, deputy from Saumur in the National Assembly, author of an article on Theism, a moral romance and genial memoirs of no great importance; nothing could be more remote from the ancient harsh and despotic temperament. They would be glad to relieve the people, and they try to favor them as much as they can.[1312] They are found detrimental, but ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... princess dead, but he freed himself."—Johnson's Sketch of Morin. "Ought is an imperfect verb, for it has no other modification besides this one."—Priestley's Gram., p. 113. "The verb is palpably nothing else but the tie."—Neef's Sketch, p. 66. "Does he mean that theism is capable of nothing else except being opposed to polytheism or atheism?"—Blair's Rhet., p. 104. "Is it meant that theism is capable of nothing else besides being opposed to polytheism, or atheism?"—Murray's Gram., 8vo, p. 307. "There is no other method of teaching ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... a connection between the proposed substitutes for religion and the special training of their several authors. Historians tender us the worship of Humanity, professors of physical science tender us Cosmic Emotion. Theism might almost retort the apologue of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic God is too crude and positive a force; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... eaten the vitals of non-catholic sectaries. The teaching of so-called Christian churches has evaporated into a mere natural theism, the supernatural element has disappeared. Both the Socialist and Agnostic frankly confess that the demolition of the sects is but a preliminary skirmish: the real battle lies farther afield. The lines ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... to me an universal language, which delicately delineated the violent passions of our kind, and transmitted from generation to generation national predilections and pious emotions towards the God of Creation. That mythology should so generally be interpreted Theism, and that forms or ceremonials of worship should be held to limit and define belief in creed, may, in my apprehension, be partly traceable to the school-book Lampriere's Classical Dictionary. You or your correspondents may attribute it to ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... in proving himself a strong theist and a strong anti-revelationist, who is to succeed in proving himself one thing or the other in any matter whatsoever? By occasional confusion between theism and Christianity; by taking advantage of the formal phrases of adhesion to the Roman Church, which very often occur, and are often the happiest bits of irony in an ironical production; by citations of his morality, which is decidedly Christian, though often attributed ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... self-denials to check her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind the liberty of her actions. All her external aspects are in harmony with the weakness and the strength of human nature. We recognize ourselves in her, and find all the characteristics of our own humanity there developed into a theism so divine, clothed with a personification so exquisite and poetical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still to live in our hearts, a silent and shadowy religion without ceremonies or altars or sacrifices. The festive gods of the "Iliad" made man a deity to himself, and his soul ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Look at even the first minds of all those epochs; how paralyzed they are by false fundamental positions like these; how, more especially, all insight into the true constitution and working of nature is, as it were, blocked up. During the whole of the Christian period Theism lies like a mountain on all intellectual, and chiefly on all philosophical efforts, and arrests or stunts all progress. For the scientific men of these ages God, devil, angels, demons hid the whole ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of Matthew Arnold.] Handbook and Dictionary of Modern Arabic, Kabail Vocabulary, Libyan Vocabulary, Text of the Iguvine Inscriptions, Christian Commonwealth, History of the Hebrew Monarchy, Hebrew Theism, Early Life of Cardinal Newman, Anglo-Saxon Abolition of Negro Slavery, not to mention many others, alone show how writing largely filled his days ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... Manjusri was the deified teacher; and Avalokitesvara was the Spirit of the Buddhas present in the church. Before many centuries had elapsed, these imaginary beings, with a few others, had become gods to whom men prayed; and thus Buddhism became a religion with some kind of theism,—which Gautama ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... it furnished the best guide of life; and spiritual truth, as Bunsen said, was independent of history. He had no sort of sympathy with those who rejected belief in Christianity altogether, still less with those who abandoned Theism. Although he could not be a minister of the Church, he was content to be a member, understanding the Church to be what he was brought up to think it, the national organ of religion, a Protestant, evangelical ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that God willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism into the open road of theism. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... shaken himself free from Revelation, and is fighting the problem of life, its meaning and worth, without any help from Law, or Prophet, or Psalm. He does retain belief in what he calls 'God,' but his pure Theism, with little, if any, faith in a future life, is a creed which has no power of unravelling the perplexed mysteries of life, and of answering the question, 'What does it all mean?' With keen and cynical vision he looks out not only over men, as in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... speculate on the spiritual pathology of the functionless wealthy, the half-educated independent women of the middle class, and the people of the Abyss. While the segregating new middle class, whose religious and moral development forms our main interest, is developing its spacious and confident Theism, there will, I imagine, be a steady decay in the various Protestant congregations. They have played a noble part in the history of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulae and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... but any number), has well ended. Whether this, however, is so or no, the rhubarb can be seen in Covent Garden, and I am afraid it must be admitted that to the philosophically minded there lurks within it a theory of evolution, and even Pantheism, as surely as Theism was lurking in ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... blood, the 'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... of this school are recognizable by their evangelical style, their melancholy theism, and, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... incensed offerings are made before a tablet, on which is inscribed the name Yuh-Hwang Shang-ti, which some interpret as "The Supreme Ruler of the Imperial Heavens," and regard as the nearest approach to pure Theism of which there is any indication in Chinese worship (See Doolittle, pp. 170, 625; and Lockhart in J. R. G. S., xxxvi. 142). This worship is mentioned by the Mahomedan narrator of Shah Rukh's embassy (1421): "Every year there are some days on which the Emperor eats no animal food.... ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism (q.v.) in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker—following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt''—classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical evidences for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... professors who appeal to that judge, play a part most inconsistent and dangerous, as is evident in the case of Origen Bachelor, who more zealous and candid than prudent, declared the real and only question between Atheism and Theism a question of fact, reducing it to these terms—'Is there reason, all things considered, for believing that there is a God, an intelligent cause of things, infinite and perfect in all his attributes and ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... average. 'They' always seem very fallible, very human to me, and nothing 'they' do startles me. I have no patience with those who make much of the morbid side of this business. To me it is neither 'theism' nor 'diabolism,' and is neither destruction of an old religion or the basis of a new one—But all this verges on the controversial, and is not good for our psychic. Let's sing some good old tune, like ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... Leibnitz and the Cartesians were Theists, and believed the will of God to be an efficient cause. Doubtless they did, and the Cartesians even believed (though Leibnitz did not) that it is the only such cause. Dr. Tulloch mistakes the nature of the question. I was not writing on Theism, as Dr. Tulloch is, but against a particular theory of causation, which, if it be unfounded, can give no effective support to Theism or to any thing else. I found it asserted that volition is the only efficient cause, on the ground that no other efficient cause ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... important to the safety of society, and is said to have sent the servant out of the room on one occasion when one of the company was doubting the existence of the Deity, giving as a reason that he did not want to have his throat cut. Yet it is probable that his theism went a little deeper than this. He says that matter is probably eternal and self-existing, and that God is everlasting, and self-existing likewise. Are there other Gods for other worlds? It may be so; some nations and some scholars have believed in the existence ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the evidence of the supernatural in the history ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... that fills that bottomless pit and shoreless sea the human heart, there is nothing deeper down in it than just its deep and unsearchable atheism. The very deepest thing, and the most absolutely inexpugnable thing, in every human heart is its theism; its original and inextinguishable convictions about itself and about God. But, all but as deep as that—for all around that, and all over that, and soaking all through that—there lies a superincumbent mass of sullen, brutish, malignant atheism. Nay, so deep down is ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... notable sentence which is sustained by the facts: "Not an American book of the first class has ever been written by an atheist or denier of immortality." That sentence need not offend an admirer of Walt Whitman, for he "accepts both theism and the doctrine of the future life." American thought has remained loyal to the great Trinity, God, Freedom, and Immortality. So it comes about that while there are a number of these writers who could be put under the ban of the strongly orthodox in religion, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... fact of immanence; and it may be said at once that the theory of Divine finitude put forward by the present writer will be seen to differ from that of John Stuart Mill, as the idea of self-limitation differs from that of a limitation ab extra—in other words, as Theism differs ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Monotheism, then, not Tri-theism, is the doctrine set forth in the Scriptures. "If the thought that wishes to be orthodox had less tendency to become tri-theistic, the thought that claims to be free would be ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... distinct, are essentially at one; that nature cannot contradict revelation; that revelation cannot contradict nature; and that the intuitions of the soul cannot be in conflict with either. Hence it teaches that the Naturalist need not fear revelation; nor the Christian believer, natural Theism. Since it is one and the same God who dwells in nature, in Christ, and in the soul, all his revelations must be in harmony with each other. To suppose otherwise is to "divide the substance" ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... Alexandretta and the Regent's Park. Her religious instruction I myself shall attend to, when she is sufficiently advanced to understand my teaching. At present she is a Mohammedan, if she is anything, and believes firmly in Allah. I consider that a working Theism is quite enough for a young woman in her position to go on with. In the afternoon she walks out with Antoinette. Once she stole forth by herself, enjoyed herself hugely for a short time, got lost, and was brought back thoroughly frightened by a policeman. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... Outside the Church, Bishop Colenso on the Pentateuch, and Renan's 'Vie de Jesus.' Part II. gives us 'The Future Prospects of Religious Faith.' Under the head of Rational, we have the Rationalist Solution of the Problems, The Faith of the Future, Theoretic Theism, and Practical Theism. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... essentially Indian in opinion and prejudice, but German in instinct and thought. A little liquor only mellowed him—it thawed away the last remnant of Indian reticence. He talked with his associates upon all the knotty questions of law, art, and religion. Indian Theism and Pantheism were measured against the Gospel as taught by the land-seeking, fur-buying adventurers. A good class of missionaries had, indeed, entered the Cherokee Nation; but the shrewd Se-quo-yah, and the disciples ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown

... interpret the Jewish formula of belief in the same spirit as the herd,— the religion inculcated in the breast of Leila was different from that which Inez had ever before encountered amongst her proselytes. It was less mundane and material—a kind of passionate rather than metaphysical theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed, with many human sympathies and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a fallen sect. ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book III. • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... with one another. But the Genesis narratives are distinguished by their freedom from the polytheistic ingredients which disfigure the corresponding narratives elsewhere. They are on the elevated plane of that pure theism which is the kernel of the Hebrew faith. This whole subject is elucidated by Lenormant, in The Beginnings of History (1882). The Book of Joshua relates the history of the conquest of Canaan; Judges, the tale ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... was always discovering to me things which I would never have seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight and adoration. There was something so intimate in his theism that it purified, elevated and broadened mine, even when I could not agree with him. His constant exclamation when a fine landscape would burst upon our view, or a shaft of light would pierce the clouds and glorify a mountain, ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... Now, saying nothing about the questionable propriety of thus prejudging an issue in science, we think this is an unfortunate accusation. What is there in the hypothesis of necessary, as distinguished from actual, correlation of parts, which is particularly in harmony with Theism? Maintenance of the necessity, whether of sequences or of coexistences, is commonly thought rather a derogation from divine power than otherwise. Cuvier says—"None of these parts can be changed without ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... that there is no desire to save the evidences of design unless they serve at the same time to testify to the nature of that design as beneficent,—I must once more observe that the difficulty thus presented to theism is not a difficulty of modern creation. On the contrary, it has always constituted the fundamental difficulty with which natural theologians have had to contend. The external world appears, in this respect, to be at variance with our moral sense; and when the antagonism ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally, the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... Frenchman defined life as "the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted," he was as conclusively indulging in the argumentum in circulo as if he had said, "Life is the antithesis of what is not life." This would be as luminous a definition as that which should make Theism the opposite of Anti-theism, or the Algebraic statement x-y the antithesis of xy—one of no definitional value so long as there is no known quantity ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... dualistic creed of the old Persian, he also blended a reformed Magian worship of the elements, which had gained a footing among the Chaldean priests, and which originally came from the Scythic invaders. Magism could not have come from the Semitic races, whose original religion was theism, like that of Melchisedek and Abraham; nor from the Japhetic races, or Indo-European, whose worship was polytheism—that of personal gods under distinct names, like Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. The first to yield to this Magism were the Medes, who adopted the religion of older settlers,—the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a Barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy, [6] and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration. His first and only article of faith was the existence of one God, the Author of all good; who fills by his presence the heavens and earth, which he has created by his power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... kinds—the religion of the man, and that of the citizen. The first, without temples, without altars, without rites, limited to the inner and private worship of the Supreme God, and to the eternal duties of morality, is the pure and simple religion of the Evangel, the true theism. The other, established in one country only, gives that country its own gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its own dogmas and ritual, and all foreigners are deemed to be infidels. Such were all the religions ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... the most general terms can I trace the other origins of these present views. I do not think modern religion owes much to what is called Deism or Theism. The rather abstract and futile Deism of the eighteenth century, of "votre Etre supreme" who bored the friends of Robespierre, was a sterile thing, it has little relation to these modern developments, it conceived of God as an ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... Adi Samaj, aiming to diffuse the truths of Theism among their own nation, the Hindus, have naturally adopted a Hindu mode of propagation, just as an Arab Theist would adopt an Arabian mode of propagation, and a Chinese Theist a Chinese one. Such differences in the aspect of Theism in different ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of uncertainty—the nebulous country in which words play the part of realities—is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or immortality—appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to life again in a metaphysical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that to which Robert Elsmere would bring us—Theism, with Christ as a model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sentiments you have made known to me," said I, "strikes me all the more because of what you confess you do not know, than because of what you say you believe. They seem to be very like that theism or natural religion, which Christians profess to confound with atheism or irreligion which is their exact opposite. But in the present state of my faith I should have to ascend rather than descend to accept ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... that he ought not to be the object of worship, but only the way by whom we approach to the Father; and as in fact we need no such "way" at all, this was (in the result) a change from practical Ditheism to pure Theism. His "mediation" was to me always a mere name, and, as I believe, would otherwise have been mischievous.[2]—Simultaneously a great uncertainty had grown on me, how much of the discourses put into the mouth of Jesus was really ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... great god above all gods. So the future may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith; and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological war in the desert than like the dry radiance of theism or monism. I have said nothing here of my own faith, or of that name on which, I am well persuaded, the world will be most wise to call. But I do believe that the tradition founded in that far tribal battle, in that far ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... revelation, and that whatever was not in harmony with the verdict of reason must be eliminated. Many of his disciples like Remiarus, Mendelssohn, and Garve developed the principles laid down by Wolf until the very mention of dogma was scouted openly, and Theism itself was put forward as only the most likely among many possible hypotheses. In the revulsion against dogmatic beliefs the party of the Pietists founded by Spener towards the end of the seventeenth century found much support, while the Conscientiarians, who maintained that man's own conscience ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... he lived, in much closer obedience to its laws than we of this latter-day Christendom. It seems to me, if we cannot respect the religion of others we deny our own. If we are powerless to see the theism behind the overlying animism, we argue a strange ignorance of what crept over other faiths, in the way of legends and superstitions quite foreign to ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... obvious. The world's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in the year 1893, is an illustration of this statement. The dragon, the beast, and the false prophet met in "mutual confidence and respect," a "brotherhood" of religions. Theism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, Catholicism, the Greek Church, and Protestantism in many forms—all these were represented. And the devotees of these religions ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... noncomformity[obs3]; secularism; syncretism[obs3], religious sects. protestantism, Arianism[obs3], Adventism, Jansenism, Stundism[obs3], Erastianism[obs3], Calvinism, quakerism[obs3], methodism, anabaptism[obs3], Puseyism, tractarianism[obs3], ritualism, Origenism, Sabellianism, Socinianism[obs3], Deism, Theism, materialism, positivism, latitudinarianism &c. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Free Church; ultramontanism[obs3]; papism, papistry; monkery[obs3]; papacy; Anglicanism, Catholicism, Romanism; popery, Scarlet Lady, Church ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... vitiates his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny them this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... revelation from God, or not, its moral precepts are, as far as I know unexceptionable; there is not, I believe, any thing extravagant or impracticable in them, they are such as promote the good order of society. Its religion in fact is merely Theism garnished, and guarded by a splendid ritual, and gorgeous ceremonies; the belief of it can produce no oppression and wretchedness to any portion of mankind, and for these reasons I for one will never attempt to weaken its credit, whatever may be my own opinion ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English

... judicious men, is to hush it up. No matter what the difference is about; that is thought so little to the purpose, that your well-judging men will not even take the trouble to inquire what it is. It may be, for what they know, a question of theism or atheism; but they will not admit, whatever it is, that it can be more than secondary to the preservation of a good understanding between Christians. They think, whatever it is, it may safely be postponed for future consideration—that things will right ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... for them and conduct their course yourself, and must learn to travel the road along which they are to be led. The husband must become himself the priest and the director: not by inculcating a vague theism or a cold morality, but by establishing in his household the purity and the practice of a Christian faith. If the domestic throne is to be upheld on its rightful foundation, the altar must be reared by its side. The philosopher and historian must stoop to learn from his own children that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... polytheism from all its hiding-places in the theology which they had inherited; they created the first consistent, remorseless, naked monotheism, which, so far as history records, appeared in the world (for Zoroastrism is practically ditheism, and Buddhism any-theism or no-theism); and they inseparably united therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and for its efficiency as a bond of social life, was and is, unsurpassed. So I think we must not judge Ezra and Nehemiah and ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... a Titan, he fairly vanquishes all antagonists by pure mental superiority; never understating their views or evading their arguments, but meeting them in all their force and crushing them." Another critic says: "It is a great argument for Theism and against Atheism, magnificent in its strength, order, and beauty.... The style is lucid, grave, harmonious, and every way commensurate with the dignity and importance of the subject.... The chapter on Pantheism is admirable. Regarding it as 'the most formidable rival of Christian Theism at ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... he has neither fear nor hope. Atheism, truly, he never could abide: to him, as to all of us, it was flatly inconceivable that intellect, moral emotion, could have been put into HIM by an Entity that had none of its own. But there, pretty much, his Theism seems to have stopped. Instinctively, too, he believed, no man more firmly, that Right alone has ultimately any strength in this world: ultimately, yes;—but for him and his poor brief interests, what good was it? Hope for himself in Divine Justice, in Divine Providence, I think he had not practically ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... exported from Bengal.[90] But another form in which the Buddha-force is impersonal and analogous to the Parabrahma of the Vedanta is much older. Yet when this philosophic idea is expressed in popular language it comes very near to Theism. As Kern has pointed out, Buddha is not called Deva or Isvara in the Lotus simply because he is above such beings. He declares that he has existed and will exist for incalculable ages and has preached and will preach in innumerable millions of worlds. His birth here and his nirvana ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... of Savonarola turned with no less loathing, and with more contempt, than from the Canti Carnascialeschi and Aristophanic pageants of Lorenzo, which made Florence at Carnival time affect the fashions of Athens during the Dionysia. It is true that Italy owed much to the elevated theism developed by Platonic students. While the humanists were exalting pagan license, and while the Church was teaching the worst kinds of immorality, the philosophers kept alive in cultivated minds a sense ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... made that this means Pantheism, overlooking the fact that in all mythologies and cosmologies, an ideal and pure theism was recognized as lying back of and beyond the pantheons of the gods and the deification of ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... sea of doubt and distress on which I had been tossing for nearly twelve months. On the following Sunday, I saw them again, and was cordially invited down to their Dulwich home, where they gave welcome to all in doubt. I soon found that the Theism they professed was free from the defects which revolted me in Christianity. It left me God as a Supreme Goodness, while rejecting all the barbarous dogmas of the Christian faith. I now read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion", Francis ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... by widely differing processes. In the psychical world that quality which we call spirituality may be associated with and evoked by Theism, or the belief in a Divine Father; by Pantheism, as in the case of Spinoza, whose face at the very first glance impresses you with its spiritual cast; or even by the Buddhist belief in Nirvana. It may also be ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler

... from Mr. Voysey, earnest, interesting, and pathetic in accounts of Whitechapel experiences. His Theism fills him with the joy of unbounded faith in a perfect God; but his keen sense of the evil done by the worship of Jesus as another and equal God leads him to a painful blindness to ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... God with Nature, and an incapacity of finding unity in the manifold and infinity in the individual,—these are the origin of polytheism. The most perfect instance of this kind of theism is that of early Greece; other nations seem to have either transcended, or come short of, the old Hellenic standard,—a mythology in itself fundamentally allegorical, and typical of the powers and functions of nature, but subsequently ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... years ago we should certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less far-reaching, about "revealed religion" altogether, and, at the best, "faint possible Theism," in the place of old-fashioned orthodoxy. And earnest men, content to bear as best they may their own burden of doubt and disappointment, do not dissemble to themselves that the immediate outlook is dark and discouraging. Like the French monarch they discern the omens ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... Falthurne: the Manuscript of the Abbe Savonati, translated from Italian by M. Matricante, Primary School Principal, The Accursed Child, The Two Friends, a satiric sketch, The Day's Work of a Man of Letters, Some Fools, and, furthermore, fragments of a work on idolatry, theism and natural religion, a historic monograph on the Vaudois, some outlined letters on Paris, literature, and the general police system of the realm of letters. In his youthful enthusiasms, Honore de Balzac shifted from Beaumarchais ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... subject to it, and owe to it their existence and their allegiance. No such grand theology had ever appeared in the world before, so far as we know; and it is the forerunner of the later monotheist religions, while it is even more abstract and impersonal, and may well rank as a scientific theism. ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; under another, simple demonology; under another, a mere farrago of ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... Hume, in the Natural History of Religion, sagaciously remarks, that the most refined and philosophic sects are constantly the most intolerant. * Note: Hume's comparison is rather between theism and polytheism. In India, in Greece, and in modern Europe, philosophic religion has looked down with contemptuous toleration on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... it appreciates him and his time. One laments that his mind had so hard a lot; but every real man must, in one way or another, fight a great battle. . . . Especially I feel indebted to Abbot's article. Truly he 'says, that the great question of the coming days is,—theism, or atheism? Not whether Jesus is our Master, the chief among men, but whether the God in whom Jesus believed really exists; and, by consequence, whether the immortality which lay open to his vision is but a dream of weary and burdened humanity? Herbert Spencer believes in no such God and Father, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... in a suspicious mood. Nor was he long before he sympathised with Mr Gunnery's distaste. Though too young to grasp the arguments at issue, his prejudices were strongly excited by the conventional Theism which pervades Figuier's work. Already it was the habit of his mind to associate popular dogma with intellectual shallowness; herein, as at every other point which fell within his scope, he had begun to scorn average people, and to pride himself intensely ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with the power of combination, and must urge individually their claims to adoration and propitiation. The ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... that they never entertained an idea of Theism or the belief of one supreme power is that they have no word in their language to express the person of God, except the Allah tala of the Malays, corrupted by them to Ulah tallo. Yet when questioned on the subject they assert their ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... in egard to the publication of the Expose succinct, which was to justify Hume in the eyes of the French. Hume and Holbach had much in common intellectually, although the latter was far more thoroughgoing in his repudiation of Theism. ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing

... tendency to pure theism, and met the objection that it retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men from social affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society, apart from the question of its truth,—useful as ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... inherent excellence, forms the controlling motive of their conduct, regardless of penalty or reward. Humanity is yet on the low moral plane, where penal laws, human or divine, are the most potent forces in regulating human life. Hence the sad fact appears that when theism seems most successfully assailed we hear from many quarters ill-concealed rustlings of exultation at the welcome loosening of the bonds of morality and religion. It seems to be overlooked that a very stern theological system may be quite rationally evolved ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... under his miraculous gourd-vine in the suburbs of Nineveh, and confidently expects to see it collapse. He imagines that in pointing out a number of evident errors and inconsistencies in "revealed religion" he has hit Theism in its stronghold; but he hasn't. He has but torn and trampled the ragged vestments of religion, struck at non-essentials, called attention to the clumsy manner in which finite man has bodied forth his idea of Infinity—has made the unskillful laugh and the judicious grieve. In an ignorant ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... manner? In addition to these observations it may be recommended, that parents should be careful to give their children what may be called a literal instruction in Christianity, in contradistinction to pure theism, or to those doctrines which they conceive may come from the teachings of the Holy Spirit, so that they may have a more intimate knowledge of all their principles, as ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... Being, the Creator, Jehovah, Infinite Spirit, Deity, the First Cause, the Almighty; (Hebrew) Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, Jah. Associated Words: theism, deism, atheism, theocracy, theocrasy, theology, theomachy, pantheism, acosmism, pancosmism, theocentric, thearchy, theomania, theosophy, theochristic, theodicy, theophany, demiurge, anthropomorphism, anthropomorphology, tetragrammaton, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... God, with a loving Heart upon it, with a council of peace and purpose of mercy for you and for me, the creatures of a day indeed, but who are to live when the days shall cease to be. 'My kindness!' What a wonderful word that is, so far above all the cold delusion of so-called theism! 'My kindness!' the tender-heartedness of an infinite love, the abounding favour of the Father of my spirit, His gentle goodness bending down to me, His tenderness round about me, eternal love that never can die; the thing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... everlasting granite of the Alps or the Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the Ganges. As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and Hesiodean theogonies. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against the philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightly polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was that the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too narrow a ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... The leaders have been, in the Unitarian line, such as Channing, who purified Christianity of its Calvinistic harshness and then of its Athanasian metaphysics; and Parker, who took the great step to simple theism,—Christian in ethics and piety, but purely naturalistic in theology. In the other great branch of the New England church,—for in New England alone has America shown religious originality,—Bushnell in a scholastic way, and Beecher ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... must note that Bergson avoids theological forms of expression, because he is well aware that these—especially in a philosophical treatise—may give rise to misconceptions. He does not, like Kant, attack any specific or traditional argument for Theism; he does not enter into theological controversy. He has not formulated, with any strictness, his conception of God; for he has recognized that an examination of Theism would be of little or no value, which was not prefaced by a refutation of mechanism and materialism, and by the assertion ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... Heracleitus, to develop the idea of evolution systematically. In doing this, they not only omitted some characteristic features of their master's teaching, but they made additions altogether foreign to it. One of the most influential of these importations was the transcendental [71] theism which had come into vogue. The restless, fiery energy, operating according to law, out of which all things emerge and into which they return, in the endless successive cycles of the great year; which creates and destroys worlds as a wanton child builds up, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... brotherhood have been driven into dissent by the yoke of Brahmanism. Generally worshippers of some form of Vishnoo, and occasionally, as in Kabeer's case, influenced by the monotheism of Islam, these sects begin by professing theism and opposition to caste, though Hindooism is elastic enough to keep them always within its pale and ultimately to absorb them again. For sixteen years Krishna Pal was himself a gooroo of the Ghospara sect, of which from Carey's to Duff's earlier days ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... which can be taught with safety only to the "perfect" or "fully initiated";[110] and he by no means rejects such expressions as the Pleroma (the totality of the Divine attributes), which were technical terms of speculative theism. St. John, too, in his prologue and other places, brings the Gospel into relation with current speculation, and interprets it in philosophical language. The movement known as Gnosticism, both within and without the Church, was an attempt to complete this reconciliation between ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... that there is somebody, somewhere, who is strong enough to deal with the earth and its contents as men deal with the things and events which they are strong enough to modify or control; and who is capable of being moved by appeals such as men make to one another. This belief does not even involve theism; for our earth is an insignificant particle of the solar system, while the solar system is hardly worth speaking of in relation to the All; and, for anything that can be proved to the contrary, there may be beings endowed with full powers ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... certain that Bage would or need have felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible Carrier-and-Fouche developments in a favourable and fostering atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and allegory was woven, partly by art and partly by the ignorance of error, which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation, will never unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in symbolism and image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and remote regions of Asia,—the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God AL or ELS and its symbolical representations of JEHOVAH Himself were ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... me now what I understand then by a first philosophy, my answer will be such as I suppose you already prepared to receive. I understand by a first philosophy, that which deserves the first place on account of the dignity and importance of its objects, natural theology or theism, and natural religion or ethics. If we consider the order of the sciences in their rise and progress, the first place belongs to natural philosophy, the mother of them all, or the trunk, the tree of knowledge, out of which, and in proportion to ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke

... is relaxed. Melanesia and Polynesia show an increased definiteness of theistic figures. Northwestern North America is, in comparison with the East, undeveloped in this regard. Similar relations between totemism and theism appear in India and South America. In a certain number of cases the facts suggest that the former system has been superseded by ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... asking for a clean heart and a right spirit! And yet at this time Harriet Martineau had gotten well beyond the idea that God was a great, big man who could be beseeched and moved to alter His plans because some creature on the planet Earth asked it. Her religion was pure Theism, with no confounding dogmas about who was to be saved and who damned. The state of infants who died unbaptized and of the heathen who passed away without ever having heard of Jesus did not trouble her at all. She already accepted the truth of necessity, believing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... analogy. Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign—perhaps a cause—of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an importance the intensity of which made every other question insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... consciousness of moral distinctions, but possesses from the very first, apart from all experience and education, a definite and clear knowledge of the particular vices which ought to be avoided and the particular virtues which ought to be practised. This theory is usually connected with a form of theism which maintains that the conscience is particularly a divine gift, and is, indeed, God's special witness or oracle ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... Robert Elsmere all there is of Christianity is left except the miraculous. Theism remains, and the idea of a protecting Providence is left, together with a belief in the immeasurable superiority of Jesus Christ. That is to say, the miracles are discarded for lack of evidence, and only for ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... not know how to help. The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?—This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of European theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,—it rejects the theistic satisfaction with ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... poems, Caliban on Setebos, Rabbi Ben Ezra, and A Death in the Desert, should be read in that order; for there is a logical order in the thought. The first is God as an amphibious brute would imagine him: the second is noble Hebrew theism: the third is the Christian God of Love. Whilst the second is the finest poem of the three, the first is the most original. The word "upon" is ironical: it is Caliban's treatise on theology. We read Caliban ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... the benefit of an old fogey like myself. I think she is genuine. I hope so! At any rate I will believe she is, till she proves herself otherwise. Of course 'the trend of modern thought' has touched her. The cruellest among the countless cruel deeds of latter-day theism is to murder the Christ in women. For, as woman's purity first brought the Divine Master into the world, so must woman's purity still keep Him here with us,—else we men are lost— lost through the sins, not only of our fathers, but chiefly ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... close the book with a sense of something wanting. The author points out the danger there always is of a faith which is intellectually demonstrable becoming, with many, a faith of the intellect merely,—and frankly avows that "there is a cause why Theism, even in warmer and better natures, too often fails to draw out that fervent piety" which is characteristic of narrower and intenser beliefs. This cause she traces to the neglect of prayer, and the consequent removal afar off, to vague confines of consciousness, of the Personality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the "Romanzero," dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to accompany it with ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... wanted you to understand is that, in my judgment, there can be no deliverance for the world from the troubles by which it is overwhelmed so long as theism holds the religious field ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... apologetics? And from the conditions of ancient thought, or, at least, from what we know of it, this resolves itself into the question: How far had the Greek philosophers advanced by means of speculative thought toward a conscious theism, and by what means did the various individuals and schools among them seek to prove the existence of the Divine? The answer to this inquiry will involve a brief examination of the contributions of the pre-Socratic philosophers (especially Anaxagoras), Socrates, ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole

... IN WHICH IT MAY BE CONSIDERED, EXPERIENCE AS A WHOLE IS SELF-CONTAINING AND LEANS ON NOTHING. Since this formula also expresses the main contention of transcendental idealism, it needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous. It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to denying theism and pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny either; everything would depend on the exegesis; and if the formula ever became canonical, it would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters. I myself read humanism theistically ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... had too much wisdom to meet bigotry with bigotry, or set Protestant intolerance against Catholic absolutism. But they had too much sympathy with the spirit of Europe to react into free thinking or to make a frontal attack on revealed truth. They took their stand on a fundamental Christian theism, the common religion of all good men; they repudiated the negative enormities ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... decidedly a solidarity as well as a separateness in all human and probably in all lives whatsoever, and this consideration goes far, I think, to establish an opinion that the constitution of the living universe is a pure theism and that its form of activity is what may he described as cooperative. It points to the conclusion that all life is single in its essence, but various, ever-varying and interactive in its manifestations, and that men and all ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... shewing them that their views of the Godhead could not stand the test of a vigorous and discriminating logic, and that Christianity alone rested on a sound philosophical foundation. But the exposition of a pure system of theism had comparatively little influence on the hearts and consciences of these system-builders. Considering the time and skill devoted to its culture, Athens had yielded perhaps less spiritual fruit than any field of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... simplest statement of fact. Then is their whole theory of social relations—both in and out of the body—most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop. They are to me, however, deeply interesting, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantism disappears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the friends of the Protestant church are logical in their refusal to abandon the apostle's creed, and the individualists are illogical in imagining that they can keep ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the "kernel of the psychological problem" than many of his predecessors. The second article contains a good discussion of the bearing of the book on the question of design, and concludes by finding in it a vindication of Theism more wonderful than that in Paley's 'Natural Theology.') have also ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... conventional were rubbing their eyes and wondering why they had ever believed, or even dreamed, that there was a God to love, asking one another what was the secret of the spell that had held them so long. Christianity and Theism were passing together from the world's mind as a morning mist passes when the sun comes up. His recommendations—? Yes, he had those clear, and ran them over in his mind ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... cat or ibis or crocodile, there was worshipped in the Egyptian temple the celestial being, the god of heaven or of the sun, whose nature is light, who is righteous and good, and who more and more fills the mind of the worshipper with noble adoration, and leads him towards the high truths of theism. These high gods of Egypt were represented, as we have seen, from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, under animal forms. As far back as we can see, Hathor is a cow, and Horus a hawk, and Anubis a jackal. Did beast worship spring by ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... of the world postulates of practical philosophy. More generally, it is just this conviction that 'what is' has its source and explanation in what 'ought to be', which is the central thought of all philosophical Theism. If we can accept such a faith, we shall not, of course, be enabled to eliminate mystery from things. We shall, for instance, be still quite in the dark about the way in which evil comes to be in a world of God's making. We shall neither be able to say how any particular thing comes ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... ask you to contrast with this infinitely simple and infinitely deep utterance all other thoughts of a divine Being—the cold abstractions of Theism, the dim dreads of popular apprehension, the vague utterances of any mythology, the clouds that men's thoughts have covered over the face of this great truth—and then, to set by the side of all these groping, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... objects to details in the narrative, such as the mention of days before the existence of the sun,(169) his real hatred is against the idea of the unity of God, and the freedom of Deity in the act of creation. It is the struggle of pantheism against theism. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... follower of the Bostroem philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending to remove me farther from a belief in any God outside the world, so that after the Meeting Carl von Bergen and I exchanged letters on Theism and Pantheism, which assumed the width and thickness of treatises. For very many years the Swedish essayist and I kept up a friendly, though intermittent intercourse. Meanwhile von Bergen, whose ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... humanity added to god-like power. In the faith of the Moslem, the human character of the man Mahommed, elevated to an all-potential viceregency in things sacred, gives great strength to what without it would be but a weak theism. Literally it is Allah's supreme prophet that maintains for Allah himself a place in the Mahommedan mind. Again, in Popery we find an excess of humanity scarce leas great than in the classical mythology itself, and with nearly corresponding results. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... to find a stronger argument in favour of Theism, than that the eye must have been made by one who sees, and the ear by ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote

... credence. The only difference is that where Montaigne, disparaging the powers of reason by the use of that very reason, used his "doubt" to defend himself alike against the atheists and the orthodox Christians, Catholic or Protestant, himself standing simply to the classic theism of antiquity, Pascal seeks to demolish the theists with the atheists, falling back on the Christian faith after denying the capacity of the human reason to judge for itself. The two procedures were of course alike ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... had been pressing the favourite Christian dilemma—Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and certainty; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as stable, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... at is Balfour's capacity for mental detachment. In the first year of the war he found time to deliver, extempore, the Gifford lectures, and in the next year he published "Theism and Humanism." It is said, of course, that he had a great gift for getting or allowing other people to do his work in the war council and the admiralty; but that does not entirely explain ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... when a man or an institution is condemned by jurist or popular opinion when an opportunity is not given to present the facts on both aspects of the case, just so is no man justified in making a decision between theism and atheism until he becomes acquainted with both sides of the controversy. Freethought but asks a hearing and the exercise of the unbiased reason of the man who has not hitherto been ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... monument—is this process of making character, and developing ourselves, to be cut short by such a contemptible thing as the death of the body? One very distinguished evolutionist, who has been forced onwards from his position to a kind of theism, declares that he is driven to a belief in immortality because he must believe in the reasonableness of God's work. And it seems to me that if indeed—as is plainly the case—moral ends are supreme in our life's history, it brings utter intellectual bewilderment and confusion to suppose that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy clothes or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... work for the good of a system superior to them, and that all apparent imperfections contribute to the perfection of the whole. As our philosopher makes use of the idea of the world-harmony to support theism and the theodicy, so, further, he derives the content of morality from it, thus giving ethics a natural basis independent of self-interest and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... out of Agnosticism," by quoting only one phrase from it. The sentence in full is this: "By a wholly new line of reasoning, drawn exclusively from those sources [science and philosophy], this book aims to show that, in order to refute agnosticism and establish enlightened theism, nothing is now necessary but to philosophize that very scientific method which agnosticism barbarously misunderstands and misuses." There is no "pretension" whatever in these words, except that the general "line of reasoning" set forth in the book is, as a whole, different ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot

... scholars meet us in astonishing abundance, and along with these, accusations of the most serious nature are brought formally against them. Among these are anger, vanity, obstinacy, self-adoration, dissolute private life, immorality of all descriptions, heresy, theism; further, the habit of speaking without conviction, a sinister influence on government, pedantry of speech, thanklessness towards teachers, and abject flattery of the great, who st give the scholar a taste of their favours and then leave ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... suggestive, and even if he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation. There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right and the social contract. The one is an inevitable deduction from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary king, and gives a "divine commission" as well to a constable as to the most majestic prince. The proponents of the social contract are in ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... therefore really at one with the spirit of the New Testament, whilst all other systems are couched in the spirit of the Old; that is to say, theoretically as well as practically, their result is Judaism—mere despotic theism. In this sense, then, my doctrine might be called the only true Christian philosophy—however paradoxical a statement this may seem to people who take superficial views instead of penetrating to the heart of ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer

... a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing into theism—a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger; for who am I to judge him? I think at such a sight, as the preacher—was it not Baxter?—at the sight of a thief or murderer led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of——, goes A.C.S.," and drop a tear ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... best to prevent the execution of Louis XVI., fell with the Girondins, was thrown into prison, and only escaped with his life by an accident. Then, under the very shadow of the guillotine Paine wrote his "Age of Reason," to recall France from atheism to a mild humanitarian theism. This book was fatal to Paine's reputation. Henceforth the violent denunciation of theological opponents pursued him to the grave, and left his name a byword to the orthodox. As Paine's contribution ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... the processes of mental integration, developes in one direction into monotheism, and in the other into pantheism. When the powers of nature are held predominant in the minds of the philosophers through whose cogitations this evolution of theism is carried on, pantheism, as the highest form of psychotheism, is the final result; but when the moral qualities are held in highest regard in the minds of the men in whom this process of evolution is carried on, monotheism, or a god whose essential characteristics ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell

... excelsis," nevertheless gave his composition a scope which placed it beyond the apparatus of the Church, and filled it with a spirit that spurns the limitations of any creed of less breadth and universality than the grand Theism which affectionate communion with ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... substance. It is more to the purpose to observe that in the mind of its first originator—and this a mind which was sufficiently clear in its thought to die for its perception of astronomical truth—the theory of Pantheism was but a sublime extension of the then contracted views of Theism. And I think that we of to-day, when we look to the teaching of this martyr of science, will find that in his theory alone do we meet with what I may term a philosophically adequate conception of Deity. ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... the loom of nature, the feeling not of despair, but of what has been called atheism, one ingredient of atheism, has arisen: atheism never fully realised, and wrongly so called—recently it has been called severe Theism, indeed; for it is joyful sometimes, interested and placid always, exultant at the strange splendour of the spectacle which its intellect has laid bare to contemplation, satisfied with the perfection of the mechanism, content to be a part of the self-generated organism, and ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism with its 'creation out of nothing,' and the really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural to a certain extent, self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal



Words linked to "Theism" :   religious belief, monotheism, pantheism, faith, theist, polytheism, atheism, theistical, theistic



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