"Atheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Christian, and under the Christian law, and is based upon Christian principles. It is bound to protect and enforce Christian morals and its laws, whether assailed by Mormonism, Spiritism, Freelovism, Pantheism, or Atheism. But the State does the contrary. For, I ask, is not the State indirectly prohibiting the profession of Christianity by establishing a system of education which prohibits all religious instruction? The State forbids ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows —a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues —every stately or lovely emblazoning —the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... struggling—towards higher things. His Pantheism is an indication of it. Pantheism is a half-way house, and marks ascent or descent according to the direction from which it is approached. Now Shelley came to it from absolute Atheism; therefore in his case it meant rise. Again, his poetry alone would lead us to the same conclusion, for we do not believe that a truly corrupted spirit can write consistently ethereal poetry. We should believe in nothing, if we believed that, for it would be the consecration of ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... with practical atheism, which, truth to tell, is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed among the moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to have many objects of veneration than none, and that, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... repelled by the blunt strength of Jane Eyre; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth—the literary rank, in fact—of Jane Eyre. Not long after her marriage, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Friday and kept Lent; they haunted the cathedral; they cultivated the society of the clergy; and in consequence, when books of devotion were once more in demand, Cointet Brothers were the first in this lucrative field. They slandered David, accusing him of Liberalism, Atheism, and what not. How, asked they, could any one employ a man whose father had been a Septembrist, a Bonapartist, and a drunkard to boot? The old man was sure to leave plenty of gold pieces behind him. They themselves were ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... no pleasure to transcribe the utterances of practical atheism; yet enough should be given to show what they teach on the great fundamental principles of Christianity. At a seance, reported in the Banner of Light, July 11, 1868, the following questions were addressed to the spirits, and the ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... Legends—The Intrinsic Improbability that a Religion claiming a Distinct Derivation from Jewish Sources would Borrow from a far-off Heathen System—The Contrast of Christ's Loving Recognition of the Father in Heaven with the Avowed Atheism of Buddhism—The General Spirit of the System Forbids all Thought of Borrowing from it—Points ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox conception of a deity who is ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... can a man act heroically? The 'Doctrine of Motives' will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;—which does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man; this god-like Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... others who deny the divinity of Christ, without, however, separating themselves from the Protestant Church; others, again, who believe in God, but do not believe in any Church; others—and amongst these are many of the cleverest men—who openly profess atheism. In consequence of this state of things, the Catholic party has a natural ally in the Calvinists, who as fervent believers and inflexible conservers of the religion of their fathers, are much less widely separated ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... would have thought this precious passage more characteristic of Mr. Shandy than of atheism. If the fact really were so (which it is not, but almost the contrary) I do not see why the most confirmed theist might not very naturally utter the same wish. But it is proverbial that the youngest son in a large family is commonly the man of the greatest talents ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Hogg, and he published anonymously in Oxford, a little pamphlet called The Necessity of 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 ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... obvious and natural. This kind of good-manners was perhaps carried to an excess, so as to make conversation too stiff, formal, and precise: For which reason (as hypocrisy in one age is generally succeeded by atheism in another) conversation is in a great measure relapsed into the first extreme; so that at present several of our men of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in France, make use of the most coarse uncivilized ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... are very frank in their criticisms of each other. "I did not like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings," said the Mistress. "It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good Christian like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... never a prominent politician. The main interest of Socrates was intellectual and moral; an interest, however, rather practical than speculative. For though he was charged in his indictment with preaching atheism, he appears in fact to have concerned himself little or nothing with either theological or physical inquiries. He was careful in his observance of all prescribed religious rites, and probably accepted the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... term still further, making it designate female energy or the female principle." [173] Buddhism, then, the popular religion in China at the present day, the religion which Dr. Farrar ventures to call "atheism fast merging into idolatry," [174] is not free from the nature worship which deifies the moon. But Buddhism, like most other imperfect systems, has precious gold mixed with its dross; and at the expense of a digression we delight to quote the statement of a recent ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these 'words' (words signifying 'places' and 'dead objects', and signifying nothing more), he adopted other words in their places, other generalities—Atheism and Jacobinism—phrases, which he learnt from Mr. Burke, but without learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words: Since the death of Mr. Burke the forms, and the sentiments, and the tone of the French have undergone ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... being persuaded that idolatry did not take its rise till after the deluge, gives a very singular account of its origin. According to him, atheism had spread itself over the world. This disposition of mind, says he, is the capital crime. Atheists are much more odious to the Divinity than idolaters. Besides, this principle is much more capable of leading men into that excessive corruption the world fell into before the deluge. ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... died for us; and Butler, in the book which still receives more praise than any other attempt at reconciling philosophy and theology, tries to show that here, at least, the two doctrines are in harmony. He has probably produced, in men of powerful intellects, more atheism than he has cured; for he tries to demonstrate explicitly what is tacitly assumed by most theologians—the injustice of God. The doctrine may be horrible, but he says that facts prove it to be true. His whole logic consists in simply begging the question ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... "friend of man." The Arab gives this designation to his horse; but in Europe, where we do not associate closely with the horse, the dog naturally takes the foremost place in our affections. The very highest praise yet given to this animal is probably to be found in Bacon's essay on Atheism. "For take an example of a dog," he says, "and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who is to him in place of a god, or melior natura, which courage is manifestly ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... 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 "Nifelheim." It is ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... "What's yours is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed Bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition Slyme was heard to say that Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free Love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and he was afraid ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... rest of the Members when first introduced to the House, or had he, after refusing to take it, behaved with less violence, I doubt if he would have made any name in Parliament. The House was determined to fight Bradlaugh, and it is not to be wondered at, for he paraded his atheism, and his views on other matters, in the most repulsive manner possible. But Bradlaugh did not run the risk of fighting down mere prejudice. Had he taken the oath, he would only have won the ear of the House by proving himself a great politician. This he ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... originally constituted about one half of a work, entitled "Faith in God and Modern Atheism compared, in their Essential Nature, Theoretic Grounds, and Practical Influence." Simultaneously with the first issue of that work in Scotland, the five principal chapters in this volume were published separately, accompanied ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... prerogative of the crown," he declares, "that is no subject for the tongue of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed. It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: ... so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that." The king, James claimed, could make any kind of law or statute that he thought meet, without any advice from Parliament, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... do I believe it can ever have such effect on a truly benevolent mind. Nothing less than a persuasion of universal depravity can lock up the charity of a good man; and this persuasion must lead him, I think, either into atheism, or enthusiasm; but surely it is unfair to argue such universal depravity from a few vicious individuals; nor was this, I believe, ever done by a man, who, upon searching his own mind, found one certain exception to the general ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... The truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation,—the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... having been brought in, temporarily, to rid it of accumulated thought-rubbish. In our country we received these in the letter, but never sought to make practical use of them, employing them only as a stimulant to incite ourselves to moral revolt. Atheism was thus for us ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... introduced by Max Muller to imply the denial of gods (Sans. deva), on the analogy of Atheism, the denial of God. Max Muller used it particularly in connexion with the Vedanta philosophy for the correlative of ignorance or nescience (Gifford ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... its shell; and not being able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither in the antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible atheists—atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible. This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed from his youth to dissect the creature above all others—before, ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... began by wishing the Temporal Power to be erected into an article of faith, ended by ardently desiring some kind of tacitly accepted modus vivendi with the Italian kingdom, such as that which Cavour proposed. Cardinal Manning was sorry to see the Italians being driven to atheism and socialism, and so he had the courage to change his mind. In 1861 he was in the opposite camp, but there was not wanting then a section of learned and patriotic ecclesiastics who desired peace. It was said that their efforts were rendered sterile by the great organisation ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism. In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... sneer curled the lip of Catiline. He was not even superstitious. Self-vanity and confidence in his own powers, and long impunity in crime, had hardened him, had maddened him, almost to Atheism. Yet he dared not attack the sacred prejudices of the men, whom, but for that occurrence, he had yet hoped to ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... period—when the conception of human nature for the first time takes definite shape—have no less of Religion in them than underlay the 'creed outworn'. To think otherwise would be an error of the same kind as that 'abuse of the word Atheism' against which the author of the work above ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... subtle Aquinas, by the all-accomplished Pascal. The warning has been given in vain. That close alliance which, under the disguise of the most deadly enmity, has always subsisted between fanaticism and atheism is still unbroken. At one time, the cry was,—"If you hold that the earth moves round the sun, you deny the truth of the Bible." Popes, conclaves, and religious orders, rose up against the Copernican ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the luxury of doing good." 2. Goldsmith says that we should learn the luxury of doing good. 3. "The owlet Atheism, hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, cries out, 'Where is it?'" 4. Coleridge compares atheism to an owlet hooting at the sun, and asking where it is. 5. "To read without reflecting," says Burke, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... their souls can repose in peace? Would you deprive the dying of their only source of consolation? Would you rob the world of its richest treasure? Would you let loose the flood-gates of every vice, and bring back upon the earth the horrors of superstition, or the atrocities of atheism? Then endeavor to subvert the gospel; throw around you the firebrands of infidelity; laugh at religion, and make a mockery of futurity; but be assured that for all these things, God ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his constitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, death entered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. For awhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems to have ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Guilds!" "I, the Reign of Louis the Twelfth!" "I, the Latin Dialects!" "I, the Civil Status of Women under Tiberius!" "I am elaborating a new translation of Horace!" "I am fulminating a seventh article, for the Gazette of Atheism and Anarchy, on the Russian Serfs!" And each one seems to add, "But what is thy business here, stripling? What canst thou write at thy age? Why troublest thou the peace of these hallowed precincts?" My business, sirs? Alas! it is the thesis for my doctor's degree. My uncle and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... whole of the case—from grasping the amazing extent and glory of the material globe. And why may not this ultimately be the case also in relation to the moral universe? Why should every attempt to clear up its difficulties, and blow away the objections of atheism to its order and beauty, be supposed to originate in presumption and to terminate in impiety? Are we so much the less interested in knowing the ways of God in regard to the constitution and government of the moral world than of the material, that he should purposely conceal ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... prevalent in the first century of Christianity, and long after. Neither greatness of intellect nor thoroughness of scepticism gave exemption. Even Julius Caesar, the greatest practical genius that ever lived, was somewhat superstitious, despite his atheism and his Vigorous common-sense. It is too often argued that the prevalence of scepticism in the Roman Empire must have made men scrupulous about accepting miracles. By no means. Nothing but physical science ever drives out miracles: ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Inquiry, until you find it bends off to the left into the path of Metaphysics. The path becomes narrower and more difficult continually, and many side-walks lead off to other spots: one, to the wilderness of Atheism; another, to the populous city of Thinkasyouplease; still another, to the dangerous bog of Alldoubt. But if you follow the right road, you cannot possibly err." "Much obliged: I'll try to keep the path." Presently, the traveller returned, in a battered condition: he had wandered from ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... beautiful patterns and fantasies of change, none of that faith which rejoices to watch "the roaring loom of time" weaving ever new garments for the unchanging eternal gods. In new temples, strangely enough, they see only atheism, instead of the vitality of spiritual evolution; in new affirmations they scent only dangerous denials. With the more grave misgivings of these folk of little faith this is not the place to deal, though actually, if there were any ground for belief ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... back to Sakya Muni himself, it is a development of germs latent in his teaching; and to my own mind there is no more wonderful conception in the great religions than that of Dharmakâya. If any one attacks our Buddhist friends for atheism, they have only to refer (if they can admit a synthesis of northern and southern doctrines) to the conception of Dharmakâya, of Him who is 'for ever Divine and Eternal,' who is 'the One, devoid of all determinations.' 'This Body of Dharma,' ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... who will not have quite understood. The simplest of preachers must some day encounter the old lady who accosted, so it is said, a former Bishop of Chester, who, at great pains to be lucid, had unfolded the argument against the errors of atheism, with the words, "Well, my lord, I must say as I think there is a God after all you've ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... of your cause is built. There is but one verity. Those who are willing to tolerate any religion, whatever it may be, and try to make you believe that liberty for both is necessary in your commonwealth, are paving the way towards atheism." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in this life no other pain so horrible. The doubt seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness that may verily be felt. Fools talk of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious thought. They, in their shallow heartlessness, their brainless stupidity, cannot even dimly imagine the anguish of the mere penumbra of the eclipse of faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... 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 because the theology ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Radicals of that day differed from ours in the means, though not in the end. They at least referred to their Bibles, and rather more than was required; but superstition is as mad as atheism! Many of the puritans confused their brains with the study of the Revelations; believing Prince Henry to be prefigured in the Apocalypse, some prophesied that he should overthrow "the beast." Ball, our tailor, was this very prophet; and was so honest as to believe in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... fully persuaded that Arminian principles, when traced out to their natural and unavoidable consequences, lead to an invasion of the essential attributes of God, and, of course, to blank and cheerless atheism. Yet, in making a statement of the Arminian system, as actually held by its advocates, he should consider himself inexcusable if he departed a hair's-breadth from the delineation made by its friends." (pp. ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... the inspiration of enthusiasm and of sentiment. The worship of the Deity was blended with all that was ennobling and beautiful. Moved by these glowing fancies, her susceptible spirit, in these tender years, turned away from atheism, from infidelity, from irreligion, as from that which was unrefined, revolting, vulgar. The consciousness of the presence of God, the adoration of his being, became a passion of her soul. This state of mind was poetry, not religion. It involved no sense of the spirituality of the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... he was condemned and executed; Domitilla was banished to a desolate island on the coast of Campania; and sentences either of death or of confiscation were pronounced against a great number of who were involved in the same accusation. The guilt imputed to their charge was that of Atheism and Jewish manners; a singular association of ideas, which cannot with any propriety be applied except to the Christians, as they were obscurely and imperfectly viewed by the magistrates and by the writers of that period. On the strength of so probable an interpretation, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... reasonable critical type like William Taylor, whose thinking was too dull and too difficult for him. Above all it was too negative and unrelated to anything but the brain for the man who wrote "Lines to Six- foot-three" and consorted with Gypsies. He had taken atheism along with Taylor's literary and linguistic teaching, perhaps with some eagerness at first as a form of protest against conventionally pious and respectable Norwich life. The Bible Society and Mrs. Clarke and her friends came radiant and benevolent to his "looped and windowed" atheism. They ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... on the Origin of Species, upon its Natural Theology" ("Amer. Journ. Sci." Volume XXX, page 226, 1860). Reprinted in "Darwiniana," 1876, page 62. The article begins with the following question: "First Reader—Is Darwin's theory atheistic or pantheistic? Or does it tend to atheism or pantheism?" The discussion is closed by the Second Reader, who thus sums up his views: "Wherefore we may insist that, for all that yet appears, the argument for design, as presented by the natural theologians, is just as good now, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... reality of love ends by making us doubt everything. The final result of all deceptions and disappointments is atheism, which may not always yield up its name and secret, but which lurks, a masked specter, within the depths of thought, as the last supreme explainer. "Man is what his love is," and follows the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into existence with the support of the Papacy, or in despite of it? Would the Church forever set herself against freedom of thought? Always seek to imprison the human mind? Was her unreasonably stubborn attitude directly accountable for the presence of atheism in the place, of all places, where her own influence ought to be most potent, the city of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... almost petrified, almost made stone, and no wonder that kills; but that which is but a vapour, and a vapour not forced but breathed, should kill, that our nurse should overlay us, and air that nourishes us should destroy us, but that it is a half atheism to murmur against Nature, who is God's immediate commissioner, who would not think himself miserable to be put into the hands of Nature, who does not only set him up for a mark for others to shoot at, but delights herself to blow him up like a glass, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... he began to be regarded as a leader. He became an adept in public speaking too, and the announcement that he was to be present at a meeting was almost sure to draw a crowd. He ceased attending any place of worship, and indeed the incipient atheism of his earlier years seemed to settle into a kind of general unbelief ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... the persecution under Domitian (81-96) does not seem to have been a persecution of Christianity as such. The charges of atheism and superstition may have been due to heathen misunderstanding of the Christian faith and worship. There is no sufficient ground for identifying Flavius Clemens with the Clemens who was bishop of Rome. For bibliography of the persecution under Domitian, see Preuschen, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... the new school to which you belong and who are the enemies of everything permanent. You are destroying customs to make way for theories, manners for boon comradeship, chivalry for finance, elegance for vulgarity, religion for atheism, and character for sentiment. You are to blame for all the present disorders, and such as you have brought about the burning of your own chateau. No, Madame, I will not permit the marriage. How dare you propose it to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... is that justifies Von Hartmann's description of the nineteenth century as "the most irreligious that has ever been seen;" this and not the assault upon dogma or the decline of the churches. There is a depth below atheism, below anti-religion, and into that the age has fallen. It is the callous indifference to everything which does not make for wealth. . . . What is eloquently described as "the progress of civilization," as "material prosperity," and "unexampled wealth," or, more modestly, as "the rise of the industrial ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Atheism." This quotation is made with admirable felicity and force by Dr. Whewell, page 378 of Bridgewater Treatise on Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was reading my Bible, she exclaimed with a profane expression, "I wish you'd pitch that book overboard, it's enough to sink the ship;" the contradiction implied in the words showing the weakness of her atheism, which, while it promises a man the impunity of non-existence, and degrades him to desire it, very frequently seduces him to live as an infidel, but to die a ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... a system we have long ago given our opinion. In its higher forms, "Shint[o] is simply a cultured and intellectual atheism; in its lower forms it is blind obedience to governmental and priestly dictates." "Shint[o]," says Mr. Ernest Satow, "as expounded by Motooeri is nothing more than an engine for reducing the people to a condition ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... call a freethinker; that is to say, a deist, or, perhaps, an atheist; for, though he did not absolutely deny the existence of a God, yet he entirely denied his providence. A doctrine which, if it is not downright atheism, hath a direct tendency towards it; and, as Dr Clarke observes, may soon be driven into it. And as to Mr. Booth, though he was in his heart an extreme well-wisher to religion (for he was an honest man), yet his notions of it were very slight and uncertain. To say truth, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... to the balcony and sing the National Hymn. You will order banners to be made bearing suitable watchwords, such as 'Long live the King,' 'May he govern as well as reign,' 'Long live the Crown,' the 'Flag,' and (perhaps) the 'Army.' You will oppose these generating ideas to 'Atheism' and 'Anarchy.' The essential point is that the people must be caused by festivals, songs, bands of music, and processions to think of the throne as their bulwark and the King as their saviour, and to take ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may yet find a heart to wonder at the spirit which the temple holds as an envelope holds a letter. Reversing the process of mind which seems to lead so many medical students to atheism, Dr. Levillier had found that the more he understood the weaknesses, the nastinesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh, the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul. One day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... complain that Rationalism was the work of acknowledged foes; but is bound to confess, with confusion of face, that it has been produced by her own sons; and that English Deism and French Atheism were welcomed, and transmuted into far more insidious and destructive agencies than they had ever been at home. The Rationalists did not discard the Bible, but professed the strongest attachment to it. They ever boasted that their sole object was the defence and elevation ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned, which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the powers of nature, reconciled the apparent multiplicity of gods with monotheism, or even with atheism. So far, however, as outward appearances were concerned, the worship was grossly polytheistic. Various deities, whom it was not considered at all necessary to trace to a single stock, divided the allegiance of the people, and even of the kings, who regarded with equal respect, and glorified with ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... but the copy is distorted as well as amplified. There is no air of reality in Franz: he is a villain of theory, who studies to accomplish his object by the most diabolical expedients, and soothes his conscience by arguing with the priest in favour of atheism and materialism; not the genuine villain of Shakspeare and Nature, who employs his reasoning powers in creating new schemes and devising new means, and conquers remorse by avoiding it,—by fixing ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Astrologer astrologiisto. Astrology astrologio. Astronomer astronomiisto. Astronomy astronomio. Astute ruza. Asunder aparte. Asylum rifugxejo. At cxe, je. At (house of) cxe. At all events kio ajn okazos. At any time iam. Atheist ateisto. Atheism ateismo. Athletic atleta. Athlete atleto. Atlas landkartaro. Atmosphere atmosfero. Atom atomo. Atomism atomismo. At once tuj. Atone rebonigi. Atonement rebonigo. Atrocious kruelega. Atrocity kruelego. Atrophy atrofio. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... matched in the most dissociable manner, and mingled together in a kind of dance. It would be tedious to describe their habits and persons; for which reason I shall only inform my reader, that the first couple were Tyranny and Anarchy; the second were Bigotry and Atheism; the third, the Genius of a commonwealth and a young man of about twenty-two years of age, whose name I could not learn. He had a sword in his right hand, which in the dance he often brandished at the Act of Settlement; and a citizen, who stood by ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... Fayette to America, and then returned to Paris, to plunge, with the most reckless gayety, into the whirlpool of human passions boiling and whirling there. In the conflict of parties he became a victim. Condemned to death, he was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. Imbruted by atheism, he entered his cell with a merry song and a joke. He furnished a sumptuous repast for the prisoners at the hour appointed for his execution, and invited the jailers for his guests. When the executioners arrived, he smilingly ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... is the part of a good citizen to maintain. Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay your rates: don't be a vulgar deist—a fellow like Toland who is poor and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... now, in spite of our atheism and our apathism, amid all the overwhelming world-influences of this great 'living Present'—the ghost of the dead Past will come rushing back upon us with its solemn voices and its infinite wailings of pity: but soft ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... holding the system itself, rather than the faults and shortcomings of men, to be by its very nature responsible for all the economic evils of the day. "Down with the Stars and Stripes" is their cry. "Abolish religion and the present form of marriage." "Atheism and free-love must reign supreme." Then, trusting that workingmen will admire anything, provided that it be adorned in sufficiently glowing colors, they paint such fabulous pictures of Socialism ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... ATHEISM, leaving his shoes at the church door. The infidel fool is always represented in twelfth and thirteenth century MS. as barefoot—the Christian having "his feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace." Compare "How beautiful are thy feet ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... discussed in the following pages, even if the conclusions yielded by this discussion were more negative than they are, I should deem it culpable cowardice in me for this reason to publish anonymously. For even if an inquiry of the present kind could ever result in a final demonstration of Atheism, there might be much for its author to regret, but nothing for him to be ashamed of; and, by parity of reasoning, in whatever degree the result of such an inquiry is seen to have a tendency to negative the theistic theory, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... hundreds and thousands of the classes of whom we are speaking. From the cradle to the grave, might not their influence in the direction of Religious Belief be summarised in one sentence, "Atheism made easy." Let my readers imagine theirs to have been a similar lot. Is it not possible that, under such circumstances, they might have entertained some serious doubts as to the existence of a benevolent God who would thus allow His creatures to starve, or that they would have been so preoccupied ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... who make an abstraction of human nature, fomentors of atheism, fed on chimerae and hatreds, emancipators of woman, destroyers of the family, genealogists of the simian race, you whose name was but lately an outrage, be satisfied: you shall have been the prophets, and your disciples will be the high-priests ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... system of society as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levelling principle of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably at work in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Popery or with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or with hypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, but all acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to be trying that experiment with the British ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... purchased a garden, where he established his philosophical school. He taught that pleasure is the highest good; a tenet, however, which he explained and dignified by showing that it was mental pleasure that he intended. The ideas of atheism and sensual degradation with which the name of Epicurus has been so frequently coupled are founded on ignorance of his real teaching. But as he denied the immortality of the soul, and the interference of the gods in human affairs,—though he held their existence,—his ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... demolish, once and for all, the reactionary proposals of Bakounin. To Marx, much of the program of the Alliance seemed a remnant of eighteenth-century philosophy, while the rest was pure utopianism, consisting of unsound and impractical reforms, mixed with atheism and schoolboy declamation. Altogether, the policies and projects of Bakounin seemed so vulnerable that the General Council evidently felt that little preparation was necessary in order to defeat them. They seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that Bakounin ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... spiritual gifts, God's [1] presence and providence. St. Paul stood where Socrates had stood four hundred years before, defending himself against the charge of atheism; in the place where De- mosthenes had pleaded for freedom in ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... rights of all men has always encountered the peculiar scorn of aristocracies, and no men have been so bitterly persecuted in history as those who represented the religious opposition to despotism. The Hebrew aristocracy in old Palestine called this sentiment 'atheism' in Jesus Christ, and crucified Him. The pagan aristocracy called it a 'devilish superstition' in the early Christians, and slaughtered them like cattle. The priestly and civil absolutism of the sixteenth century called it 'fanaticism' in the Dutch and German reformers, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state: this is the only one, that it is possible with God, since He who made us out of nothing can surely re-create us; and that He will do this we humbly hope." He published an ode against atheism, with which he has strangely enough often ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... proceedings against him were depending, with a bill against atheism and profaneness, he was at Chatsworth, and appeared extremely disturbed at the news of it, fearing the messengers would come for him, and the earl of Devonshire would deliver him up, the two houses of Parliament ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... unexplained mysteries of life. Christian philosophers refuse to admit that an atheist can exist in the flesh. They claim that his denial is fathered by his desire and wish, that at most he only doubts, and while professing atheism, he is ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of an athlete at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenes, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully; not in the genial libertinism of Horace, or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No! these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek the way of life. For eighteen hundred years the spirit of these writers has been engaged in weaponless contest with ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... her heart Did greatest hold in her self-greatest part, That she did make her god; and 'twas less naught To leave gods in profession and in thought, Than in her love and life; for therein lies Most of her duties and their dignities; And, rail the brain-bald world at what it will, That's the grand atheism that reigns in it still. Yet singularity she would use no more, For she was singular too much before; But she would please the world with fair pretext; Love would not leave her conscience perplext: Great men that will have less do for them, still Must bear them out, ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... up his sermon by deploring the tendency to atheism which he had noticed "among those merchants who had recently gone up with the caravans to Babylon for spices" (this was just his high-toned way of describing Deacon Wiggleford's trip to Chicago in a day-coach for groceries), and hoped that the goods which they ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... scene a quite openly borrowed representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the bourgeois, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevist fashion. Both books, and Verite, display throughout a singular delusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism above mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago, I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... right have you to assume—that she would have been left to lie there? Rather, did I not promise you in the market-square that, her chastening over, my cart should fetch her? Did I not keep my word? And could you not read in the action some earnest that the girl would be looked after? Your atheism, sir, makes you dull ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... calling Cardinal Newman's attention to the recent revival of the vigorous old lie which attributes to him the statement that he regarded the Established Church as the great bulwark against atheism in England, his Eminence has written as follows: My dear ——. Thank you for your letter. I know by experience how difficult it is, when once a statement gets into the papers, to get it out of them. What more can ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... get their stomachs full, they begin to make trouble between our people and their hands. There's where the strikes come from, and the unions and the secret societies. They come here and break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung! Let 'em go back if they don't like it over here. They want to ruin ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... assembly "ought not to deal, to judge, or to meddle, with her majesty's prerogative royal[c]." And her successor, king James the first, who had imbibed high notions of the divinity of regal sway, more than once laid it down in his speeches, that "as it is atheism and blasphemy in a creature to dispute what the deity may do, so it is presumption and sedition in a subject to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power: good christians, he adds, will be content with God's will, revealed in his word; and good subjects will rest in the king's will, revealed ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... who saith in his heart, There is no God." Ps liii. The atheist differs entirely from the sceptic and agnostic (which see). In "A plea for Atheism," the writer says: "If the word 'God' is defined to mean an existence other than that existence of which I am a mode, then I deny 'God,' and affirm that it is impossible that 'God' can be." The Psalmist's definition is ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... one who was most anxious that his lord's strength and resolution should carry him successfully through a day so agitating. For although Varney was one of the few, the very few moral monsters who contrive to lull to sleep the remorse of their own bosoms, and are drugged into moral insensibility by atheism, as men in extreme agony are lulled by opium, yet he knew that in the breast of his patron there was already awakened the fire that is never quenched, and that his lord felt, amid all the pomp and magnificence we have described, the gnawing of the worm that dieth not. Still, however, assured as ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the great could be remembered with delight. He related, that being present when the Duke of Buckingham talked profanely before King Charles, he said to him, 'My lord, I am a great deal older than your Grace, and have, I believe, heard more arguments for atheism than ever your Grace did; but I have lived long enough to see there is nothing in them, and so I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... than I who exclaim, I am a Christian, and I detest you. It is difficult to obtain a knowledge of a man during a long intercourse, yet I would condemn him on the evidence of a single letter. He may, perhaps, be unhappy in his atheism, and wish to hear all my arguments to enable him the better to arrive at the truth. Perhaps, too, I may be called to effect so beneficent a work, the humble instrument of a gracious God. Oh, that it may indeed be so, I will not ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... question to me just now. This is my reply. The essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason, or atheism, or crime, or acts of any kind—it has nothing to do with these things—and never had. There is something besides all this, something which the arguments of the atheists can never touch. But the principal thing, and the conclusion of my argument, is that this ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... affright did He bend his mind's eye on the space beyond the grave; nor could hide from himself how justly he ought to dread Heaven's vengeance. In this Labyrinth of terrors, fain would He have taken his refuge in the gloom of Atheism: Fain would He have denied the soul's immortality; have persuaded himself that when his eyes once closed, they would never more open, and that the same moment would annihilate his soul and body. Even this resource was refused to him. To permit his ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... words, the Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848 with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the worship of Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not only of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... say, that a king is accountable to none but God. Do what he will, let God take order with it; this leadeth kings to atheism, let them do what they please, and to take God in their own hand: in regard of laws, they teach nothing to kings but tyranny: and in regard of government, they teach a king to take an arbitrary power to himself, to do ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... Such natures were left 'miserably bare'; the sense of dependency by any tie upon the invisible world, or at least upon the supernatural world, had decayed, and unless this painful void were filled up by some supplementary bond in the same direction, a condition of practical atheism must take place, such as could not but starve and impoverish in human nature those yearnings after the infinite which are the pledges of all internal grandeur. But this dependency could not be replaced by one of the same vicious nature. Into any new dependency ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that religion in its higher essence would not suffer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered. The sense of the Divine in Nature, instead of dwindling down to atheism, received fresh stimulus from the immeasurable prospect of an infinite and living universe. Bruno, even more than Spinoza, was a God-intoxicated man. The inebriation of the Renaissance, inspired by golden visions of truth and knowledge close within man's grasp, inflamed with joy at ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... suffering, that impotent pain,—the human debris of the social process,—which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... that reason is the enemy, and not the twin sister of faith; to oppose revelation to science, as if God's two messages could contradict each other; to widen the Manichaean distinction between secular and spiritual matters, so pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man; to fancy that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His teaching, His providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to pretend that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by denying to them any practical ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... the part of guides and governors to us; and these favourite doctrines of theirs I call,—or should call, if the doctrines were not preached by authorities I so much respect,—the first, a peculiarly British form of Atheism, the second, a peculiarly British form of Quietism. The first-named melancholy doctrine is preached in The Times with great clearness and force of style; indeed, it is well known, from the example of the poet Lucretius and others, what great masters of style the atheistic [130] ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold |
