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Predestination   /prˌidˌɛstənˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Predestination

noun
1.
Previous determination as if by destiny or fate.
2.
(theology) being determined in advance; especially the doctrine (usually associated with Calvin) that God has foreordained every event throughout eternity (including the final salvation of mankind).  Synonyms: foreordination, predetermination, preordination.



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"Predestination" Quotes from Famous Books



... an absolute predestination (fatalism, regulating the universe in advance in all its details) exists or not, is a question of pure metaphysics, the solution of which is quite beyond human comprehension, and need not occupy us here. We must simply ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... class of sophisms by which the most hateful persecutions may easily be justified. To charge men with practical consequences which they themselves deny is disingenuous in controversy; it is atrocious in government. The doctrine of predestination, in the opinion of many people, tends to make those who hold it utterly immoral. And certainly it would seem that a man who believes his eternal destiny to be already irrevocably fixed is likely to indulge his passions without restraint and to neglect his religious ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... principles; instead of that, theological considerations alone were adduced. The attentive reader will have remarked, in Tertullian's statement of the principles of Christianity, a complete absence of the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, predestination, grace, and atonement. The intention of Christianity, as set forth by him, has nothing in common with the plan of salvation upheld two centuries subsequently. It is to St. Augustine, a Carthaginian, that we are indebted ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... possessed by such ideas, could lead a life of love and service to God or man? They must in a measure realize themselves. 'The worst of it is, I do believe,' he said. I, like all connected with him, was broken against the rock of predestination."] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... Dea aloud, Dea the maiden, Dea the other half of a man, Dea flesh and blood, Dea with uncovered bosom. That cry was almost driving away the angel. Mysterious crisis through which all love must pass and in which the Ideal is in danger! Therein is the predestination of Creation. Moment of heavenly corruption! Gwynplaine's love of Dea was becoming nuptial. Virgin love is but a transition. The moment was come. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... fatalism and free will, which, being strongly interwoven both with philosophy and theology had, in all ages, thrown every school and every church into such inextricable doubt and perplexity. The first reformers in England, as in other European countries, had embraced the most rigid tenets of predestination and absolute decrees, and had composed upon that, system all the articles of their religious creed. But these principles having met with opposition from Arminius and his sectaries, the controversy was soon brought into this island and began here to diffuse itself. The Arminians, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... nothing could be clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character, brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any denial of the self-governing power ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Great was the delight of the canons at their powerful postulant and his son, and great the pains taken over the latter's education. The schoolmaster laid stress upon authors such as Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fulgentius. By these means the boy not only learnt Latin, but he also tackled questions of Predestination and Grace, glosses upon St. Paul, hymns and methods of frustrating the Arian. Above all, he was exercised in the Divine Library, as they called the Bible, taught by St. Jerome. Hugh was of course the favourite of the master, who whipt him with difficulty, and ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... arguing from this place. Briefly thus: The apostle having finished the principal part of his epistle, which was problematical, wherein he disputed—1. About justification, chap, i.-vi.; 2. Sanctification, chap. vi. 7, 8; and, 3. Predestination, chap. ix. 10, 11, he comes to the next branch, which is more practical, about good works, chap. xii.-xvi. This twelfth chapter is wholly in the way of exhortation, and he herein exhorts to divers duties. ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London

... had been a doctor or a captain, I should have had a cobweb and predestination in the place of them. Your soldiers of the religion on the one side, and of the good old faith on the other, would not have left unto me safe and sound even ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... Catholic Church call gluttony a mortal sin? Why should fasting occupy a place in the disciplines of religion? What is the meaning of Luther's advice to the young clergyman who came to him, perplexed with the difficulties of predestination and election, if it be not that, in virtue of its action upon the brain, when wisely applied, there is moral and religious virtue even in a hydro-carbon? To use the old language, food and drink are creatures of God, and have therefore a spiritual value. Through our neglect of the monitions ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... would seem that one may lawfully hope in man. For the object of hope is eternal happiness. Now we are helped to obtain eternal happiness by the patronage of the saints, for Gregory says (Dial. i, 8) that "predestination is furthered by the saints' prayers." Therefore one may ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... a study is this! To attain a dim reflection of it, is the ambition of angels—higher they can not soar. "To be conformed to the image of His Son!"—it is the end of God in the predestination of His Church from all eternity. "We shall be like Him!"—it is ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... thing about it," she resumed, "was that while Sally Ann was talkin', not one of us felt like laughin'. We set there as solemn as if parson was preachin' to us on 'lection and predestination. But whenever I think about it now, I laugh fit to kill. And I've thought many a time that Sally Ann's plain talk to them men done more good than all the sermons us women had had preached to us about bein' 'shame-faced' and 'submittin'' ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... ago, had I been happy enough to win your daughter, I should have tried my hardest to wean her from Rome; but I have lived and thought since then, and I have come to see that Calvinism is a religion of despair, and that the doctrine of Predestination involves contradictions as difficult to swallow as any fable of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... deadlock between predestination and free will serves admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take life at the level of common sensation and common experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... and place, and insist with such tenderness and eloquence on the great depth and breadth of true Christian love and charity, that his oldest deacon shook his head, and wished he had shown as much interest when he was preaching, three Sabbaths back, on Predestination, or in his discourse against the Sabellians. But he was sound in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside at the council held in the town of Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which expelled its clergyman for maintaining ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse. They never heard anything but "religion." Their heads were filled with "predestination," "transubstantition," "free will," and a hundred other queer words, expressing obscure points of "the true faith," whether Catholic or Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they were baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... How could you know her! Musotchka ... Take note, my dear sir, this girl's name is Musa—and it's not a nickname, but her real name ... Isn't that a predestination? Musotchka, I want to introduce you ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... answered the regent, laughing, "have you become a sufficiently good Catholic no longer to believe in predestination? I believe in it, as you know. Would you wish me to plague my mind about a danger which has no existence; or which, if it does exist, has its result already inscribed in the eternal book? No, my mother, no; the only use of all these exaggerated precautions ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... believed in it; she said to herself that she trusted it absolutely. But how was she to know exactly what it was? And yet, could she escape from it even if she wished to? Could she wander away into any path where the Divine Will did not mean her to set foot? Predestination—free will. "If only I were ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... no longer allowed to preach, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came from the spirit of love ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... With boldness in predestination, With threats of absolute damnation Yet YEA and NAY hath some salvation For his own tribe, not every nation: See a ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... Fathers (notably Augustine) advanced the question to the Theological stage, by connecting it with the great doctrines of Original Sin and Predestination; in which stage it shared all the speculative difficulties attaching to these doctrines. The Theological world, however, has always been divided between Free-will and Necessity; and probably the weightiest names are to be found among the Necessitarians. No man ever brought ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... theological meeting in Salamanca. At this meeting a Jesuit named Prudencio de Montemayor put forward a thesis which opened up the difficulties connected with the reconciliation of the theological doctrines of predestination and free-will. Owing to some disturbance in the assembly, Montemayor's voice did not reach all who were present and, in the interest of the audience, Luis de Leon repeated Montemayor's arguments without lending them any support; his action was misunderstood, and many supposed ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

... to the history of the will. And what precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct. Man is only what he becomes—profound truth; but he becomes only what he is, truth still more profound. What am I? Terrible question! Problem of predestination, of birth, of liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I heard this evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul tormented and appealing and finally seizing upon God, and possessing itself ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the parish of Brougham, every 2nd day of April for ever, upon a stone hereby. Laus Deo." This was the Lady Anne Clifford of whom it was said by the facetious Dr. Donne, that she could "discourse of all things, from predestination to slea silk." Her well-known answer, returned to a ministerial application as to the representation of Appleby, shows the spirit and decision of the woman:—"I have been bullied by an usurper (the Protector Cromwell), I have been neglected by a Court, but I'll not be dictated to by a ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... often attempted to show that Gordon was an extreme Calvinist, there is no evidence that he ever stated his views on the subject in any stronger language than that used in Article XVII. of the Prayer-Book of the Church of England, which says:—"Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... importance by those who justly estimate the grand principles of Christianity. The whole strength of the intellects which had long been engaged in the conflict for national and religious liberty, was now directed to metaphysical theology, and wasted upon interminable disputes about predestination and grace. Barneveldt enrolled himself among the partisans of Arminius; Maurice became ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... every dramatic and extravagant tendency to which the amazing year had inclined her. With her growing ease in her changed environment, and the growing popularity she enjoyed there, came also a sense of predestination, the conviction that her extraordinary history justified her in any act of daring or of unconventionality. There was nothing to be gained by self-control or sanity, Norma might tell herself, at least for those of the ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... too, in spite of the individual's pro- 150:21 test and contrary to the law of divine Mind. This human view infringes man's free moral agency; and it is as evidently erroneous to the author, and will be to 150:24 all others at some future day, as the practically rejected doctrine of the predestination of souls to damnation or salvation. The doctrine that man's harmony is gov- 150:27 erned by physical conditions all his earthly days, and that he is then thrust out of his own body by the operation of matter, - even the doctrine of the superiority of matter ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... stop, they have found it at last? Reader, what do you suppose that they have found? What were they in search of? Why some text of Scripture which seem to support their own peculiar notions on the subject of Baptism, Election, Predestination, the Final Perseverance of the saints, &c. The zeal of such persons to propagate their opinions is not more remarkable than the confident, dogmatic manner in which they express them. It is remarkable that professors of religion who are most ignorant ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward

... clairvoyance and an active subconscious mind will often produce very wonderful results—although not of course the more complex phenomena of full clairvoyance and prevision. Some persons have claimed that even this form of prevision implies something like fate or predestination, but this is not fully true, for we must remember the fact that in some cases it is possible to so act in accordance with a clairvoyant warning of this kind that the impending calamity may be escaped. But, on the other hand, we must also remember ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... not trouble them; predestination and justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination and baptism were to them problems not to be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... power. Calvinism, in its essential features, never will cease from the earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it. The predestination of a sovereign will is written over all things. The old Greek tragedians read it, and expressed it. So did Mahomet, Napoleon, Cromwell. Why? They found it so by their own experience; they tried the forces of nature enough to find their strength. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Islam. Such influence would no doubt be distant and indirect, for a Brahman would not come into contact with Moslim doctors, though it is said that Madhva could speak Persian.[601] But some Moslim ideas such as the absolute separation of God from the world and the predestination of souls to eternal happiness and misery may have entered Brahman minds. Still, nearly all Madhva's views (with the possible exception of eternal punishment) have Indian analogies. The Yoga teaches that there are innumerable souls distinct from one ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... and Ratramnus (d. after 868); and the last theologian who came into France from abroad, Johannes Scotus Erigena (d. circa 880). The theological method of all these was merely that of restatement. But the controversy about predestination, which, in the 9th century, Hincmar and Hrabanus fought out with the monk Gottschalk of Fulda, as well as the discussions that arose from the definition of the doctrine of transubstantiation of Radbert, enable us to gauge the intellectual ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... confronted by a far greater difficulty when we endeavour to realize how all the future may also be comprehended in that consciousness. If we could believe in the Mohammedan doctrine of kismet, or the Calvinistic theory of predestination, the conception would be easy enough, but knowing as we do that both these are grotesque distortions of the truth, we must look round for a ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... blindness for the very purpose of punishing them in the most cruel manner. We see these pernicious characteristics of the Divinity penetrating the entire economy of the Christian religion; we find them in the books which are pretended to be inspired, and we discover them in the dogmas of predestination and grace. In a word, every thing in religion announces a despotic God, whom his disciples vainly attempt to represent to us as just, while all that they declare of him only proves his injustice, his tyrannical caprices, his extravagances, so frequently cruel, and his partiality, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... by one of those chances which seems like predestination, we got hold of a great Martyrology, in which the most curious narratives are given of the total abeyance of physical life which a man can attain to under the paroxysms of the inner life. By reflecting on the effects ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... natural selection or survival of the fittest,—must appear to us superfluous laws of Nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free-will and predestination. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... through Grant's lines. Had he met alone a squadron of cavalry in the field, he would, probably, have taken his stand against a pine, and aimed his musket as coolly as if a squirrel were the mark. With his sunny temper, and his gloomy gospel of predestination, his heart could swell with hope even while he fought single-handed in the face of big battalions. What concerned him, after all, was not so much the chance of an ultimate victory for the cause, as ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... you shall have decided on your departure, perform the journey as rapidly as possible, and bring here, into my house, in the Rue de Babylone (what predestination! that I should dwell in the street of BABYLON,—a name which must at least accord with the ear of an Oriental),—you will bring hither, I say, this dear prince, who is so happy as to have been born in a country of flowers, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... with s. 11, and the judicious remark there on the mere accommodation in the 'prae' of predestination. But the subject was ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... comparatively blind to its logical implications. For if God is infinite, then He is all; and if He is all, what becomes of human individuality, or how are human initiative and responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett, in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if somewhat tentative, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... creed of conduct in the dawn on Lake Champlain, and showed her that according to its tenets he was permitted a kind of action that in other men might be reprehensible. He came to the story of Evie last of all, and allowed her to see how dominating a part Fate, or Predestination had ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... an admonition to England; an application to the Scots nobility, &c.; a letter to Mary the queen-regent, a history of the reformation; a treatise on predestination, the first and second blast of the trumpet; a sermon preached August 1565, on account of which he was for some time prohibited from preaching. He left also sundry manuscripts, sermons, tracts, &c. which ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... commonly supposed that the idea of unconditional predestination is implied in the writing of the names in the book of life. There is nothing in the figure itself to lead to that, and the text from Jeremiah suggests, on the contrary, that the voluntary attitude of men to God determines their being or not being inscribed in the book of heaven, since ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... prayers of a saintly priest. On one occasion, after enumerating the follies of the pagan religions, he thus goes on: 'Our theologians, too, quarrel about "the guinea-pig's tail," about the Immaculate Conception, Antichrist, Sacraments, Predestination, and other things, which were better let alone than talked of publicly.' Once, when he was not at home, his room and manuscripts were burnt. When he heard the news he stood opposite a figure of the Madonna in the street, and cried to it: 'Listen to what I tell you; I am not mad, I am saying what ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... stalwart Vulcan in the guise of an Antinous, known as Jonas Prescott, had wandered from his father's forge in Lancaster down the Bay Path to Sudbury. Mary and he had met, and the lingering of their parting boded ill for any predestination not stamped with their joint seal of consent. With that lack of astuteness proverbially exhibited by parents disappointed in match-making designs upon their children, the vexed father and mother began a course of vigorous repression, and thereby riveted more firmly than ever the chains which ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... 744; subjection &c. 749; stern necessity, hard necessity, dire necessity, imperious necessity, inexorable necessity, iron necessity, adverse necessity; fate; what must be. destiny, destination; fatality, fate, kismet, doom, foredoom, election, predestination; preordination, foreordination; lot fortune; fatalism; inevitableness &c. adj.; spell &c. 993. star, stars; planet, planets; astral influence; sky, Fates, Parcae, Sisters three, book of fate; God's will, will of Heaven; wheel of Fortune, Ides of March, Hobson's choice. last shift, last resort; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... good and evil, but these are ruled by one supreme being called Holloloo. This account of the religion of Daaga was confirmed by the military chaplain who attended him in his last moments. He also informed me that he believed in predestination;—at least he said that Holloloo, he knew, had ordained that he should come to white man's country ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... word or sentence he could hear, whether it concerned himself or not. He had peculiar theories, and one of them was, as he would tell you, that if you overheard a remark apparently not intended for you, you were to make yourself quite easy, as it was "a point of predestination" that you should at that particular moment, consciously or unconsciously, play the eavesdropper. The reason of it would, he always averred, be explained to you later on in your career. The well-known saying "listeners never hear ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... of the discourse was, "The universal free grace of God to all mankind," to which he opposed the Calvinistic tenet of particular and personal predestination; in defence of which indefensible notion he found himself more at a loss than he expected. Edward Burrough said not much to him upon it, though what he said was close and cogent; but James Naylor interposing, ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood

... success is partly a matter of predestination and partly of free will. You cannot make the genius, but you can either improve or destroy it, and most men and women possess the assets which can be turned ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... accordance with the race dogma that some European races are born to rule and others to obey, it was inevitable that they should draw the further inference that they of all races were the dominant race. It is true that the belief of the Calvinist in religious predestination may lead to a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic conclusion. The believer in predestination may assume that he is predestined to eternal damnation as easily as he assumes that he is predestined to eternal salvation. But the pseudo-scientific ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... reasoning, and as the great argument for immediate treaty, that every effort to overturn the system of the French revolution must be unavailing; and that it would be not only imprudent, but almost impious, to struggle longer against that order of things, which, on I know not what principle of predestination, he appears to consider as immortal. Little as I am inclined to accede to this opinion, I am not sorry that the honourable gentleman has contemplated the subject in this serious view. I do, indeed, consider the French revolution ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones

... listened to sermons full of the hopelessness of predestination; she frankly said she did not believe that Adam was her federal head and representative, and that she, therefore, was born in sin. "I'm a sinner," she said, smiling; "we're all miserable sinners, you know, Mr. Ward, and perhaps we all sin ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... end of this month, Knox had returned to Edinburgh. His work on Predestination was published ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... be a puzzle to many, how beings should be born into the world whose organization is such that they unavoidably, even in a civilized country, become malefactors. Does God, it may be asked, make criminals? Does he fashion certain beings with a predestination to evil? He does not do so; and yet the criminal type of brain, as it is called, comes into existence in accordance with laws which the Deity has established. It is not, however, as the result of the first or general intention ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... relates, that most of Bussapa's family have fallen victims to tigers. But the firm belief of the "tiger-slayer" in predestination, makes him blind ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... the course of the Sacred Narrative but when he breaks silence at the scene of the Last Supper to ask the Lord a question as to predestination; and Christ replies beside the mark, or rather does not answer him at all. He was also the author of a Canonical Epistle, in which he seems to have been inspired by the Second Epistle of Saint Peter; and, according to Saint Augustine, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... while, but at length his patience wore out; he cut her short in all her futile attempts at spiritualization, and mocked at her wire-drawn degrees of faith, hope, and repentance. He also dared to doubt of the great standard doctrine of absolute predestination, which put the crown on the lady's Christian resentment. She declared her helpmate to be a limb of Antichrist, and one with whom no regenerated person could associate. She therefore bespoke a separate establishment, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... Oliver Cromwell arose. He was born in the year 1599, of a good family. He was a country squire, a gentleman farmer, though not much given to fox-hunting or dinner hilarities, preferring to read political pamphlets, or to listen to long sermons, or to hold discussions on grace, predestination, free-will, and foreknowledge absolute. His favorite doctrine was the second coming of Christ and the reign of the saints, the elect,—to whom of course he belonged. He had visions and rhapsodies, and believed in special divine illumination. Cromwell was not a Presbyterian, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... foundation of the world; all who are justified by Christ go into life eternal. Therefore it follows that there is no Purgatory, and all masses are damnable, especially those for the dead. And whosoever upholds free will—namely, man's capacity to turn to God as and when he will—denies predestination and the grace of God. Man is by nature utterly depraved; and all the evil that he doth proceeds from his ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... field of theological thought, beginning with the personality of Deity as revealed in Nature, the spiritual nature and attributes of Deity, and the incarnation; discussing by the way the general relations of theology to science, man, and his place in Nature; and ending with a discussion of predestination and free-will, and of prayer in relation to invariable law—all in a volume of three hundred and twenty-four duodecimo pages! And yet the author remarks that many important subjects have been omitted because he felt unable to present them in a satisfactory manner from a scientific ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... foresees how he leads himself and constantly acts in adaptation. In what follows it will be seen that laws of tolerance are also laws of divine providence, that every man can be reformed and regenerated, and that no other predestination ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg

... strange power over us boys. You never talked religion much, but I have seen high fellows come away from being with you as still and quite as one feels when one goes into a church. I can't understand all the hang of predestination, and moral ability, and natural ability, and God's efficiency, and man's agency, which Dr. H. is so engaged about; but I can understand you, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... mind, the solace of the spirit, the polisher of intelligence, the bright sun of understanding, and has been preferred by the philosopher, its inventor, to all other means by which we arrive at wisdom.' The second advantage is in the promotion and cultivation of religion; predestination and free-will are both exemplified—the player being able to move where he will, yet always in obedience to certain laws. 'Whereas,' says the writer, 'Nerd—that is, Eastern backgammon—on the contrary, is mere free-will, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various

... Lethington, who was certainly not hampered by theological prejudice. With Puritanism itself he had much natural affinity, and as a determinist the philosophical side of Calvinism attracted him as strongly as it attracted Jonathan Edwards. Froude combined, perhaps illogically, a belief in predestination with a deep sense of moral duty and the responsibility of man. Every reader of his History must have been struck by his respect for all the manly virtues, even in those with whom he has otherwise no sympathy, and his corresponding contempt ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... with Julia! What castles they used to build about living together and working with the heathen around home. And Julia always went to the old East Church, too; and they had believed just the same things, the same election, and predestination and damnation and all; at one time they had thought of going out missionaries together to the Polynesian Island, but that had been before Julia took Captain Cairnes for better or worse, principally worse, and before she herself undertook ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various

... may be possible such good as a man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... they were emptied, he filled them again, and put them on the top of his box. He smoked a pipe, and talked with one man about whether it would be worth while to grow young again, and the duty of being contented with old age; about predestination and freewill and other metaphysics. I asked him what his sales amounted to in the course of a day. He said that butternuts did not sell so well as walnuts, which are not yet in season; that he might to-day have sold fifty cents' worth of walnuts, never less than a dollar's worth, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... non-natural. "The few coincidences," continues Father Dalgairns, "between Mother Juliana and Wycliffe are among the many proofs that the same speculative view often means different things in different systems. Both St. Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe's Pantheistic Necessitarianism." Yet on account of the mere similarity ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... predestination was applicable, and was applied by him, to the same purpose of fortifying and of exalting the courage of his adherents.—"If anything of the matter had happened unto us, we had not been slain here. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... But my philosophy was suddenly interrupted by the solution of another remarkable fact, and of more personal moment than the scintillation of the stars, by finding I had put my head in an ant's nest. I started to my feet, affirming that I had never been so unwary before. But I am a believer in predestination, and know that this accident could no more fail of occurrence, than that from my cradle, in harmony of order, it should fail being traced, link by link, to the instant at which it came upon me. See, now, its consequences. No sooner had a score of angry ants been brushed ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... more agency on his part than anything foretold to Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... them while there, had arrested a dangerous meeting between him and herself and her husband in her own house, impressed her more than all. It imparted to her a hideous tranquillity born of the doctrines of her youth—Predestination! She reflected with secret exultation that her moral resolution to fly from him and her conscientiously broken promise had been the direct means of bringing him there; that step by step circumstances not in themselves evil or to be combated had led her along; that ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte

... mind as to freewill and predestination, but in spite of this doubt expressly states his desire to find ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... so furiously about him. A most refreshing smell of garlic in Spittlefield's and Soho at twelve. Country fellows staring at the two wooden men at St. Dunstan's from one to two, to see how notably they strike the quarters. The great point of Predestination settled in Russell-court about three; and the people go home as wise as they came. Afternoon sleepy in most churches. Store of handkerchiefs stolen at St. Paul's. Night, not so sober as might ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... yet he once believed that God was pleased to send his only begotten son to redeem the world by his death on a cross. A strange conception truly. And while he was thinking these things Paul fell to telling his dogma concerning predestination, and he was anxious that Jesus should digest his reply to Mathias, who had said that predestination conflicted with the doctrine of salvation for all. But Jesus, who was of Mathias' opinion, refrained from expressing himself definitely on the point, preferring to forget Paul, so that he might ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... immediately after we read that He 'has predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of His will.' Soon after, we hear that 'He hath revealed to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself'; and that our predestination to an inheritance in Christ is 'according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... with Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's not an easy ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... sutures of the skull-bones as evidence of this writing; and the purport of it, they say, depends on his previous life and actions. The same view appears to underlie the Christian, or rather, the Pauline, dogma of Predestination. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism, instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they say to our most cherished powers, There ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... meaning is unknown,) among the Western Indians. But, after a time, the feeling passed away, and he became, somehow, a subject of religious impressions, which assumed the shape of a daily expectation of the Coming of Christ, joined with a firm belief in the doctrine of predestination. In this frame of mind, influenced by a feeling like the instinct, perhaps, of the bird which returns from the southern clime, whither the cold of winter has driven it, to seek again the tree where hung the parental nest, George Armstrong came back to the place of his birth. He ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... be for further controversy, Fletcher quickly discovered that he had not yet done with it. Toplady, Vicar of a Devon village, and so-called author of "Rock of Ages," bitterly attacked a tract of Mr. Wesley's on Predestination, referring to some of his own Calvinian heresies. Wesley had neither time nor inclination to wage a paper war with an angry man. The work was undertaken by Fletcher, who found himself plunged afresh into the troubled waters of ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen

... itself, pernicious, as well as false; its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination, or overruling principle which cannot be resisted; he that admits it is prepared to comply with every desire that caprice or opportunity shall excite, and to flatter himself that he submits only to the lawful dominion of nature, in obeying the resistless ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... 128: The old Norse word is rlg, which is plural, (from r Ger. ur, and lg, laws,) and means the primal law, fate, weird, doom; the Greek moira. The idea of predestination was a salient feature in the Odinic religion. The word rlog, O.H.G. urlac, M.H.G. urlone, Dutch orlog, had special reference to a man's fate in war. Hence Orlogschiffe in German means a naval fleet. The Danish orlog means ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre

... "with the Scripture doctrine of Predestination, and, in thinking over it, in connection with the destinies of man, it must have struck you that, however much it may interfere with our fixed notions of the goodness of Deity, it is thoroughly in accordance with the actual condition of our race. As far as we can know of ourselves ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... frame of a family portrait?" Filled with romantic fancies, he began to think whether this had not some secret connection with his fate? whether the existence of the portrait was not bound up with his own, and whether his acquisition of it was not due to a kind of predestination? ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... anybody anything about her. And now everything has come right. And I had a hand in bringing it about. Perhaps, as Mrs. Lynde says, everything is foreordained and it was bound to happen anyway. But even so, it's nice to think one was an instrument used by predestination. Yes indeed, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... our little table by the window, decorously discussing damnation, predestination, and other matters fitting that sunny Sabbath noontide. And at moments, very, very far away, I heard the faint sound of church-bells, perhaps near North Castle, perhaps at Dobbs Ferry, so sweet, so peaceful, that it was hard to believe in eternal punishment and in ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... replied Septimus. "It seemed to be right to say it. I know when I get things into my head there appears to be room for nothing else in the world. One takes things for granted. When I was a child my father took it for granted that I believed in predestination. I couldn't; but I did not dare tell him so. So I went about with a load of somebody else's faith on my shoulders. It became intolerable; and when my father found out he beat me. He had a bit of rope tied up with twine at the end for the purpose. I shouldn't like ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... bring it, read as deeply as you may. Some people think otherwise; that they can get the peace of God by understanding. If they could but understand more, their minds would be at rest. So they weary themselves with reading, and thinking, and arguing, perhaps trying to understand predestination, election, assurance; perhaps trying to understand which is the true Church. What do they get thereby? Certainly not the peace of God. They certainly do not set their minds at rest. They cannot. Books cannot give a live soul ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... 1757.... "Sensible as heart can be to the tender interest you deign to take in what concerns me. Dear Sister, fear nothing on my score: men are always in the hand of what we call Fate" ("Predestination, GNADENWAHL,"—Pardon us, Papa!—"CE QU'ON NOMME LE DESTIN); accidents will befall people, walking on the streets, sitting in their room, lying in their bed; and there are many who escape the perils of war.... I think, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... deeply interested in the matter, and gave us his reasons for being so. He passed some scathing comments on the contumacy and narrow-mindedness of the sect who had the misfortune to be his opponents; and after that he proceeded to say a few words about Free Will and Predestination. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... sort of an opinion whatever upon the Shorter Catechism was, in his father's eyes, nothing short of impious. But, as the young man was of that class that rush in where angels fear to tread, he had given his views on predestination without any hesitancy and had gone off to the field leaving his father in a very bad humour. Wee Andra himself was particularly happy, for he took an unfilial delight in troubling his paternal relative. At heart he was respectful and dutiful ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... Their press had done its part in the work of the times. They had printed the 'Book of Sports' and the 'Westminster Confession;' broadside ballads concerning Robin Hood and Maid Marian; and heavy folios on Free-will and Predestination. Christopher and Hubert had increased in substance also to a degree never dreamed of in their German home. The dealers in books began to talk of them as somewhat notable men; but cares and causes of division had come with property and importance. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various

... hundred and fifty pounds of the money remained intact; and he was joyful. He struck a light to look at his watch: the watch had stopped;—that was a bad sign. He could not forget it. Why had his watch stopped? A chilling thought as to whether predestination did not govern the world, allayed all tumult in his mind. He dressed carefully, and soon heard a great City bell, with horrid gulfs between the strokes, tell him that the hour was eleven toward ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... is so little of a philosopher that he seems hardly to be conscious of the difficulties of his own theory. Both in Paradise Lost and in the Treatise of Christian Doctrine he enlarges with much dogmatism and some arrogance on the difference between foreknowledge and foreordination. He rejects predestination decisively, but he not only does not answer, he does not even so much as mention, the difficulty that arises in attempting to distinguish between what is foreordained by Omniscience and what is foreknown by ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... be hired at any price,—at least, none could be found in an hour's search from one hotel or livery-stable to another. Chip, whose sleepless night and meditated fraud had not left much of the saint in him, swore the whole of Waltham as deep as the grimmest view of predestination would allow. And he restrained himself from being still more profane only lest his wrath should awaken inconvenient suspicions. After all, there was one old tavern a little way out, where possibly a one-horse affair could be raised. The Birch House was a sort of seedy, dried-up, quiet, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,—never darkened across any man's road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not caught ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... a sudden enlightenment. Her face had for a moment a far-away death-like predestination over it. His heart sank like lead as ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... practical difference whether the source of it be regarded as natural or super-natural, material or mental: so that a man be fated to will only in certain ways—and this with all the rigour which belongs to causation as physical—it is scarcely worth while to dispute whether the predestination is of God or of Nature. There can be no question, however, that in this matter the possibility which I have supposed to be suggested by the spiritualist is more far-fetched than that which obviously lies to the hand of the materialist; and, moreover, that it too plainly wears the appearance ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... sent a more fervent appeal than the poor, sinful girls who shunned the gaze of the crowd. The prayer of Charles was heard, and God, who works wonders in the least of his works, brought about the conversion of this child of predestination in a manner as ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... Predestination and Election, Justification by Faith alone, Sanctification, Assurance and Perseverance, Original Sin, Sacramental Grace, Sin ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson

... more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... conformity with the most approved leaders of our church, that the articles were to be interpreted in an Arminian sense, and that only; that is strictly in regard to the Trinitarian controversy, and liberally in the questions of predestination and grace. Nothing according to my reasoning could be more plain than that they were purposely left ambiguous, in these matters, by the compilers; in favour to men in their public capacity, who I admitted in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... natures, if not of their understandings, into question; it may be thought at least an ill sign, if not an ill constitution, since some of the fathers went so far as to esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself. While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and requests of these two entertainments will do so too: and happy those that ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... eliminated also. The idea of predetermined destiny colours that drama throughout; the whole thing might be the old Scandinavian way of stating a problem older than Scandinavia, that of free-will and predestination. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... patient. Love has reasons that reason does not understand; and if Cornelia is Hyde's by predestination, as well as by choice, vainly we shall worry and fret; all our opposition will come to nothing. Give Cornelia this interval, and tithe it not; in a few days Arenta will have gone away; and as for Hyde, any hour may summon ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... himself every morning on the cast-iron chafing dish which stood all day in the black angle of the grate; his dinner came in from a cookshop; and our old porter's wife went up at the prescribed hour to set his room in order. Finally, a whimsical chance, in which Sterne would have seen predestination, had named the man Gobseck. When I did business for him later, I came to know that he was about seventy-six years old at the time when we became acquainted. He was born about 1740, in some outlying suburb of Antwerp, of a Dutch father and a Jewish mother, and his name was Jean-Esther Van Gobseck. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... perfection and my own imperfection, I feel that the possibility is greater of lessening that distance. It gives me more self-respect, more self-reliance. George Bridges says that the logical conclusion of that old doctrine is what philosophers call determinism—Calvinistic predestination. I can't believe in that. The kind of grace God gives me is the grace to help myself by drawing force from the element of him in my soul. He gives me the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the party, he borrowed for the occasion, as well as his pistol. The three proceeded on their way—La Salle, the friar, and the Indian. "All the way," writes the friar, "he spoke to me of nothing but matters of piety, grace, and predestination; enlarging on the debt he owed to God, who had saved him from so many perils during more than twenty years of travel in America. Suddenly, I saw him overwhelmed with a profound sadness, for which he himself ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... the most famous among the writings of St. Fulgentius, is that entitled, On the Two-fold Predestination, to Monimus, in answer to certain difficulties proposed to him by a friend of that name. In the first book he shows, that though God foresees sin, he predestinates no one to evil, but only to good, or to grace and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... is not condemned because it arouses thought, but only when it is abstract in method. Browning often deals with profound ideas, but always by concrete illustrations. For example, he discusses the doctrine of predestination by giving us the individual figure of Johannes-Agricola in meditation: the royalist point of view in the seventeenth century by cavaliers singing three songs: the damnation of indecision by two Laodicaean lovers in The Statue and the Bust. When Browning is interested in ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... Member of the University: if a paltry project is ushered into the world for combining ancient prejudices with modern time-serving, it is by a Member of the University. Thus we get at a stated supply of the annual Defences of the Sinking Fund, Thoughts on the Evils of Education, Treatises on Predestination, and Eulogies on Mr. Malthus, all from the same source, and through the same vent. If they came from any other quarter nobody would look at them; but they have an Imprimatur from dulness and authority: we know that there is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... Cigars." In one of the issues of the Knoxville Gazette there is advertised for sale a new song by "a gentleman of Col. McPherson's Blues, on a late Expedition against the Pennsylvania Insurgents"; and also, in rather incongruous juxtaposition, "Toplady's Translation of Zanchi on Predestination." ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt

... or the final result of this grave and earnest controversy, it leaves untouched the corruption of human nature, the deity and atonement of Christ, justification by faith, the necessity of Divine influence to renew and purify the heart, and the scriptural doctrine of predestination, according to the fore-knowledge of God. This distinction is important; since, if it be overlooked, the rejectors of Calvinism may be supposed to have also rejected the capital doctrines of the Reformed faith. Fuller ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull

... for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade education—that is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man of narrow intellect—his passion against his brother already excited, and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination—gliding into such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin, preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely in the likeness ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... in the impenetrable shades, Claudius concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre's prima donna. While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient rock-salt mine. In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here, a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... be expected of a preacher, selecting this passage as the foundation of his discourse, that he would have something to say upon the subject of predestination. It is my purpose to make this the theme of the occasion; and this purpose has governed me in the selection of the text. The subject is one of great practical importance. It relates to the Divine government—its leading principles and the great facts of its administration. Some suppose ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson

... result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... touch of the more secular boy—which he protected from a too inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early predestination has always been the common episcopal experience. Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy bishop," and those early ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... outline form the scripture references the teachings about each. Power, sin and unrighteousness, righteousness, justification, faith and belief, atonement, redemption, adoption, propitiation, election, predestination. ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell

... was impending in Scotland, Knox was living at Geneva. He may have been engaged on his "Answer" to the "blasphemous cavillations" of an Anabaptist, his treatise on Predestination. Laing thought that this work was "chiefly written" at Dieppe, in February-April 1559, but as it contains more than 450 pages it is probably a work of longer time than two months. In November 1559 the English ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... raised by Quadratus [Cordatus]. What a spectacle if the Lutherans would oppose each other as the Cadmean brethren! I will therefore modify whatever I can. Yet I desire a more thorough exposition of the doctrines of predestination, of the consent of the will, of the necessity of our obedience, and of the sin unto death. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... by infant baptism. He, therefore, to my mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists, and was immersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... told him that Trajan had been delivered from hell, for his love of justice, by the prayers of St. Gregory; and that Riphaeus, for the same reason, had been gifted with a prophetic knowledge of the Redemption; and then it ended with a rapture on the hidden mysteries of Predestination, and on the joy of ignorance itself when submitting to the divine will. The two blessed spirits, meanwhile, whom the bird mentioned, like the fingers of sweet lutenist to sweet singer, when they quiver to his warble ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... several circumstances about the resurrection of the dead, the nature of our bodies after the resurrection, and in what manner they shall be united to our souls. They also attack one another "very weakly with great vigour," about predestination. And it is certainly true, (for Bishop Taylor and Mr. Whiston the Socinian say so,) that all churches in prosperity alter their doctrines every age, and are neither satisfied with themselves, nor their own confessions; neither does any clergyman ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... who, by all past ages, have been recognized as masters of literature and style, are struck out of their hands, and they (the schoolmasters) substitute their own comments; disputing in a circle of children about Anti-Christ and the doctrine of predestination."[21] ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... "you've never heard of a thing, away off here in your wild Highlands, is a mighty poor proof that it doesn't exist. I suppose you don't believe in predestination. I've always known," he said grandly, "that I should marry my cousin—even against her will and better judgment. You don't more than half believe ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... with his spiritual nature. If a boy is well stuffed with good things and then won't listen to advice, you might as well stop wasting your breath on him, because there is something radically wrong with him. Probably his grandfather had dyspepsia. And a dyspeptic ancestor is worse for a boy than predestination, in my opinion. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... and Predestination—the two dogmas which have, more than any others, agitated the public mind—are discussed at length. Of course he accepts the latter theory, but under a different name. Free Will, he contends, inevitably leads to aristocracy, and Predestination to democracy; and the British and Scottish ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... purely mechanical, with no natural point of connection in man, and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of a higher power. To true moral independence, ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... and endowments and appanages, withal he had no seed, or son or daughter, and therefore he sued Almighty Allah that he might be blessed with even a girl-child to inherit his good and keep it together. Suddenly he heard a Voice bespeak him in dreamery saying, "Ho Such-an-one, Predestination overcometh Prudence and resignation to the trials sent by Allah is foremost and fairest." Hearing this he arose without stay or delay and casually[FN498] slept with his wife who, by decree of the Decreer and by allowance of Allah Almighty, conceived that very night. When she ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... predestination? It is this: God is mightier and wiser than we are, and so he does with us as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... of his unsystematic system is that one should give oneself freely up to what the gods throw in one's way. And if the gods—in their inescapable predestination—have made him "for me" and me "for him," to cling fast with cold cautious hands to the anchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys



Words linked to "Predestination" :   election, predestinarian, fate, preordination, theology, predestine, divinity, theological doctrine, predestinationist, destiny



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