"Atheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... virtue is pictured in the successful strife 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 Sermon on the Mount, and those two sublime commandments ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... religious principles and practice among our fellow-citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity, which in many instances tends to atheism itself. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. Profaneness, pride, luxury, injustice, intemperance, lewdness, and every species of debauchery and loose ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... says, "Learn 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, "is like eating without digesting." 6. May we not find "sermons ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... can." We rose and left Mrs. Delamere explaining to Thornton how darling Florence and dearest Beatrix were all that a fond and intellectual mother could desire. She was anxious to be thought to be trembling on the verge of atheism, to which position her highly-gifted intelligence quite entitled her; while, at the same time, her strong judgment and moral virtues enabled her to assist in supporting the orthodox faith. The younger Miss Delamere (Beatrix) ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... others; in Mejnour, as we have before said, cold, passionless, self-sufficing intellect; in Glyndon, the young Englishman, the mingled strength and weakness of human nature; in the heartless, selfish artist, Nicot, icy, soulless atheism, believing nothing, hoping nothing, trusting and loving nothing; and in the beautiful, artless Viola, an exquisite creation, pure womanhood, loving, trusting and truthful. As a work of art the romance is one of great power. It is original in its conception, and pervaded by one central ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... when 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 commit him to the bishops, and they decree him ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 and faint it comes; for the wild jarrings of the Now almost ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... religion. Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice; so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought. Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctions are ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... wonder, that poems of an immoral character never live long; but the reason is, that it is the characteristic of immorality to tie down man in the chains of the senses, and this shews that it has nothing in common with the spiritual nature of poetry. For the same reason, a poem based upon atheism, although it might attract attention for a time, would meet with no permanent response in the human breast; religion being Truth, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... whatever it is, it is hurtful, and has about it something of the despair and strength of atheism. Consider the Book of Job; consider the Arab Mohammedan; consider the fierce heresies which besieged the last of the Romans in this Province of Africa, and which tortured the short history of the Vandals; consider the modern tragedies which develop ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... 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 ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... here. It is pointless to follow the lost children of the party, Naigeon and Sylvain Marechal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics that set atheism up as an obligatory dogma and a superior duty; the socialists who, to suppress egoism, propose a community of property, and who found a republic in which any man that proposes to re-establish "detestable ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... followers of the Apostles exercise the right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark. Not less evil consequences ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... priesthood at the present day nor in the practice of its followers in Ceylon is the name or the existence of an omnipotent First Cause recognised in any portion of their worship. MAUPIED has correctly described Buddhism both in Ceylon and China as a system of refined atheism (Essai sur l'Origine des Peuples Anciens, ch. x. p. 277), and MOUNTSTUART ELPHINSTONE gives the weight of his high authority in the statement that "The most ancient of Baudha sects entirely denies the being of a God; and some of those which admit the existence of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... who deliberated concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and the acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz, Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real, Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis, Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte for Christianity. Besides the sentiments of these confidential counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian religion, were presented ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her father in her), and nobody was greatly surprised, when the war broke out, to have him at first lukewarm, and then avowedly a Confederate. Of course he might as well have professed atheism or free love in this locality—he might better have blown his brains out—which he practically did, anyway. Public sentiment forced him out of the state and over Mason and Dixon's line, and he entered the rebel army as a cavalry captain, and deliberately ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the meaning of the 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 ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... but able fellow student, who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg—a name that seems rampant with republicanism—and very soon he got himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel character called "A Defense of Atheism." ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... class, we call the ceremony deification, but there is not the smallest intention of identifying the person deified with the Supreme Being, and odd as it may seem, the worship of such "gods" is compatible with monotheism or atheism. In China, Shang-ti is less definite than God[105] and it does not appear that he is thought of as the creator of the world and of human souls. Even the greater Hindu deities are not really God, for those who follow the higher life can neglect and almost despise them, without, however, denying ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... things went well) opened before him, of continual strife, self-repression, energy, misrepresentation from his enemies. The Church was sinking further every day. What if this new spasm of fervour were no more than the dying flare of faith? How could he bear that? He would have to see the tide of atheism rise higher and more triumphant every day; Felsenburgh had given it an impetus of whose end there was no prophesying. Never before had a single man wielded the full power of democracy. Then once more he looked forward to the morrow. Oh! if it could but end in death!... Beati ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... now; for Raleigh is out of prison in September, and by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well, especially on his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded for forthwith in Father Parson's 'Andreae Philopatris Responsio' by a charge of founding a school of Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen; a charge which Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... circumstances of 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 ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... he exclaimed, when we reached the staircase. "What blasphemies! Have you felt all the odium in the maxims of that philosopher? He pushes atheism to a joyous frenzy, which makes me wonder. But this indeed renders him almost innocent, for being apart from all belief, he cannot tear up the Holy Church like those who remain attached to her by some half-severed, still bleeding limb. Such, my son, are the Lutherans ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the great fundamentals of Christianity, would be startled by the idea, that on the same principle on which they did this, they must give up the hope of finding any rest for the sole of their foot on any ground of Religion, and not stop short of unqualified Atheism. ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... to think like machines, like the slaves of a process; but thought itself is inconsistent with their effort; their very praises of the heroism of their victims are inconsistent with it. There is a gaping incongruity between the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism which exploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk about the struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between the cubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and art itself. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... perceptibly the same way. The "serious ministers," on the other hand, led by Richard Baxter, their acknowledged head, defended with zeal the reality of witchcraft and the personality and agency of the devil, to deny which they denounced as little short of atheism. They supported their opinions by the authority of Sir Matthew Hale, lord chief justice of England, as distinguished for piety as for knowledge of the law, under whose instructions two alleged witches, at whose ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... soon manage that." Fenwick speaks with the confidence of one in a thriving trade. The deity of commerce, security, can manage all things. Insecurity is atheism in the City. "But then," he adds, "Vereker wouldn't marry, even with a house and big-fee consultations, because he's afraid his mother would hector over ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the grip of parricidal hands, and buried, fathoms deep, beneath a sea of blood; he saw the best of kings expire upon a scaffold, the victim not less of other men's crimes than of his own weakness; he saw that vice was hailed, as if it were virtue, wickedness uplifted, as if it were morality atheism, proclaimed aloud, as if it were religion; that the 'Goddess of Reason' (or rather a vile strumpet) was recognized as the only Deity, and honored with hecatombs of human victims; the people decimated and oppressed by ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... find time to 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 ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 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
... not attract to Christ many men of education; not even among those who have been trained within their own schools. Educated natives, as a general rule, will stand apart from the truth; maintaining, at the best, a state of mental vacuity which hangs suspended, for a time, between an atheism, from which they shrink, and a Christianity, which fails to overcome their fears and constrain their allegiance." Extract from Letter of the Anglican Bishops of India, addressed to the English ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... sorts of bad behaviour, they got up on their knees, and cried "Peccavi" with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England men; they abhorred Popery, atheism, and wooden shoes, and idolatries in general; and hiccupped "Church and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said that Cicero revised the poem of Lucretius after the death of the author, and this circumstance is urged by the abettors of atheism, as a proof that the principles contained in the work had the sanction of his authority. But no inference in favour of Lucretius's doctrine can justly be drawn from this circumstance. (70) Cicero, though already sufficiently acquainted ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... in things—a warped judgement, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that God is denied with a vociferous atheism; it is that He is ignored by an unvoiced indifference. It is not the babel of the market-place that men need to fear; it is its silence. If we say that we live only as we love, that we are strong only as we are pure, that we are successful ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... decay of religion among us. To this may be imputed no small part of that contempt some men bestow on the clergy, for whoever talketh without being regarded is sure to be despised. To this we owe in a great measure the spreading of atheism and infidelity among us, for religion, like all other things, is soonest put out of countenance by being ridiculed. The scorn of preaching might perhaps have been at first introduced by men of nice ears and refined taste, but it ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... aggressive rationalists. Let rationalism filter down in the course of time; the vulgar were not prepared for it as yet. It was bad that they should be superstitious, but worse, far worse, that they should be brutally irreverent, and brutal irreverence inevitably came of atheism preached at the street corner. The men who preached it were themselves the very last to guide human souls; they were of coarsest fibre, without a note of music in them, fit only for the world's grosser purposes. And they presumed to attack the ministry of Christ! ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... known productions of Paine's subsequent career, "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason," were written in Europe, but they were read throughout America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which transformed them and made his pages gay and ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"—that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"—is it not so? But, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Damnation in Hell, it is such an inconceivable punishment, that were it but throughly believed, it would nip this sin, with others, in the head. But here is the mischief, those that give up themselves to these things, do so harden themselves in Unbelief and Atheism about the things, the punishments that God hath threatned to inflict upon the committers of them, that at last they arrive to, almost, an absolute and firm belief that there is no Judgment to come hereafter: Else ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... to that among them. Oh, that my boy, Hugh, as he used to be, should have brought us all to this! But there's no knowing what they won't do among them. Reform, indeed! Murder, sacrilege, adultery, treason, atheism;—that's what Reform means; besides every kind of nastiness under the sun." In which latter category Miss Stanbury intended especially to include bad printer's ink, and paper ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... was in the practical and everyday duties of the Christian life, in the great problem of getting men and women to put away the superstitions and narrowness and sins springing from polytheism or practical atheism, and getting them started in ways of godliness. The training schools for evangelists were designed to raise up practical workers rather than speculative theologians. Missionaries considered it their duty (and they were beyond question right) to teach religion ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... at atheism? Thank you, Canon. Thank you very much indeed. I am delighted to have ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Clemens the consul, though he was a cousin and had to wife Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. [Footnote: His sister's daughter.] The complaint brought against them both was that of atheism, under which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of these were killed and the remainder were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria; but Glabrio, colleague of Trajan in the consulship, after being accused ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... I doubt not was in my thoughts long before, viz. the concatenation of argument by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea; and I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other. And I hold this still: I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... perpetually mingle with goodness and happiness? What has been the resource of the Christian intellect against that mystery of evil which baffled the questioner in the book of Job, and drove Lucretius to virtual atheism, and left Marcus Aurelius in doubt whether there be gods or not? The resource of the Christian thinker has been his belief that Jesus Christ was God incarnate. Here was a soul which was sinless and holy, which loved sinners so as ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... meaning and its hereafter. Often they showed her their hearts as they had never shown them even to their own people, and often a word with her sent some student back to work harder and fight stronger against some subtle temptation. She became a wholesome antidote to the spirit of doubt and atheism that had crept stealthily into the college and was attacking so many and undermining what little faith in religion they had when ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... What mortal sins are opposed to Faith? A. Atheism, which is a denial of all revealed truths, and heresy, which is a denial of some revealed truths, and superstition, which is a misuse of ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Robespierre, thinking of Rousseau. Atheism is democratic, say our present-day school teachers. Whence comes this difference of opinion? First because it was fashionable among the great lords of the eighteenth century to be libertines and free-thinkers, but among the people the belief in ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... pleasant rambles were finished. The mistress of Abbot's Manor would certainly object to a wandering parson in her house and grounds. Probably she was a very imperious, disagreeable young woman,—full of the light scorn, lack of sentiment and cheap atheism common to the 'smart' lady of a decadent period, and if it were true that she had been for so many years in the charge of an American aunt with a 'hundred millions,' the chances were ten to one that she would ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... declared that its conception of the [Greek: hen kai pan] was his own;[145] and when, in 1785, Jacobi published the poem without Goethe's knowledge, a controversy arose in which Lessing was charged with atheism and pantheism, and which, as Goethe records, cost the life of one of the combatants, Moses Mendelssohn.[146] Be it said that in his old age Goethe himself came to regard the sentiments of the soliloquy as sansculottisch, and in the time of reaction of the Holy Alliance forbade the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder—of a country practically without religion—the spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism in which it is ingulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is—how to find a religion?—some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding societies, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Richard; 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 his hopes and fears on the more pressing emergencies ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... superfluous drop! one redundant pang! one unneeded cross! Hush the secret atheism! He gave His Son for thee! He calls Himself "thy Father!" Whatever be the trial under which thou art now smarting, let the word of a gracious Saviour be "like oil thrown on the fretful sea;" let it dry every rebellious tear-drop. "He, thine unerring Parent, knoweth that thou hast ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... resignation is an awful thing," said Reckage. "It is a shade better than the atheism of despair; yet ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... votaries one opinion of enormous value in its struggle for power. Originally and properly an association for the practice and spreading of religion, the corporation had succeeded in making itself an object of worship. One great reason why atheism took root in France was the impossibility, induced by long habit, of distinguishing between religion and Catholicism, and of conceiving that the one may exist without the other. The by-laws of the church had become as sacred as the primary duties ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... and politely requesting them to help him. When it so happened that any incautious correspondents acceded to this appeal, Shelley fell with merciless severity upon their feeble and commonplace reasoning. The little pamphlet of two pages was entitled "The Necessity of Atheism"; and its proposed publication, beyond the limits of private circulation already described, is proved by an advertisement (February 9, 1811) in the "Oxford University and City Herald". It was not, however, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... sound of tramping armies and the first mutterings of a mighty storm. The spirit of free inquiry spread like wildfire. In America it led to the War of Independence; in England it led to Deism; in France it led to open atheism and all the horrors of the French Revolution. In Germany, however, its effect was rather different. If the reader knows anything of Germany history, he will probably be aware of the fact that Germany is a land of many famous universities, and that these universities have always played a leading ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... giving them an object; but unless outward and visible honor is paid to a God, religion cannot exist; and, as a consequence, human ordinances lose all their force. If the conscience belongs to God and to Him only, the body is amenable to social law. Is it not therefore, a first step towards atheism to efface every sign of pious sorrow in this way, to neglect to impress on children who are not yet old enough to reflect, and on all other people who stand in need of example, the necessity of obedience ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... remainder of the Anatomy of Wit is taken up with what may be described as the private papers of Euphues, consisting of letters, essays, and dialogues, including A Cooling Carde for all Fond Lovers, a treatise on education, and a refutation of atheism, and so amid the thunders of the artillery of platitude the first ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Atheism by establishment, what, v. 310. ought to be repressed by law, vii. 35. schools of, set up by the French regicides at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... condition has never existed before or since that era of the world. The consequences to Rome were—that the reasoning and disputatious part of her population took refuge from the painful state of doubt in Atheism; amongst the thoughtless and irreflective the consequences were chiefly felt in their morals, which were thus sapped in ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the advice of Cornac, and with the consent of the Sieur de Beaulieu, her equerry," in which mention was made of a supposititious work called, "The Art of not Believing in God," by M. de Bourges, in which an attempt was made to convict the prelate of atheism. This book was attributed to the reformed party; while the libel was strengthened by the indignation felt by the Court of Rome at the circumstance of M. de Bourges having taken upon himself to absolve Henri IV without the Papal authority, on his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. The manner ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... represented by some five hundred intellects. It neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to Civilization, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible figure of the King, that sham Providence, reared by man between himself and heaven. In the face of such achievements, atheism seems like a barren skeleton. What ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... eye, the knowledge of divinity. In short, the one leads to all that is grand, sublime and splendid in the universe; the other to all that is little, groveling[14] and dark. The one is the parent of the most pure and ardent piety; the genuine progeny of the other are impiety and atheism. And, in fine, the one confers on its votary the most sincere, permanent, and exalted delight; the other continual disappointment, and ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... 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
... says Scott, "a fanaticism of atheism, as well as of superstitious belief; and a philosopher can harbour and express as much malice against those who persevere in believing what he is pleased to denounce as unworthy of credence, as an ignorant and bigoted priest can bear against a man who cannot yield ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Louis Philippe, we have not got over our antipathy to their tongue. During the contest, we had constantly refreshed our zeal by fervent declarations of contempt for the frog-eating, spindle shanked mounseers, and persuaded ourselves that their whole literature consisted in atheism and murder, and though we now know that frogs are by no means the common food of the peasantry—costing about a guinea a dish—and that it is possible for a Frenchman to be a strapping fellow of six feet high, the taint of our former persuasion remains with us still as to their books; and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the sentiments of his companions, and that he was never a member of any Church, a believer in the divinity of Christ, or a Christian of any denomination. He is described as an avowed, an open freethinker, sometimes bordering on atheism, going extreme lengths against Christian doctrines, and "shocking" men whom it was probably not very easy to shock. He even wrote a little work on "Infidelity," attacking Christianity in general, and especially the belief that Jesus was the Son of God; but the manuscript ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... adhesion of our race to tiresome monogamy, leaping back by one bound over the whole European Past into ancient and respectable Asia. Ex Oriente lux; ex Oriente gaudia seraglii! It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... which, now for the first, was freed from bondage to the ideas of Aristotle and the alchemists. Atomism, however, was for Boyle merely an instrument of method and not a philosophical theory of the world. A sincerely religious man,[2] he regards with disfavor both the atheism of Epicurus and his complete rejection of teleology—the world-machine points to an intelligent Creator and a purpose in creation; motion, to a divine impulse. He defends, on the other hand, the right ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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 had a moment's pause, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... religion, and becomes at once, by common agreement, the first great cause of the origin and existence of the Christian religion. No Pantheist, or Deist, or Naturalist gets away from this conclusion without avowing Atheism. What does it amount to? Answer: Christianity is of God. The reason is this, the fine cerebral organization of Christ was of God. Hence we have it, first cause, God; second cause, Christ; effect, Christianity. Common admission, Christ is the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... investigate without peril the views of those who held a different belief, and beheld in me, as it were, the embodiment of this opportunity, so she gave me no peace until I had explained the meaning of the words pantheism, atheism, materialism, etc. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... powers. They could not disprove the statements; they could not explain them without opposing the accepted religious beliefs of their time, and so weakening their cause by exposing themselves to the serious charge of atheism; therefore they denied evidence which in the case of any other accusation would have been ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... will help to show his bright and sparkling disposition: At dinner with a large party of famous men and women, a French scientist annoyed all the rest by loudly arguing for atheism, and proclaimed his belief that there is no God. "Very good soup this," struck in Sydney Smith. "Yes, monsieur, it is excellent," replied the atheist. "Pray, sir," continued Smith, "do you believe in a cook?" The ounce of wit was worth a ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... 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 ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... treats the gods. Though I am persuaded, in my own mind, that I have found the true solution of this question, I am not sure that it will make more impression than that of M. Boivin, who contents himself with saying, that every thing was allowed to the comick poets; and that even atheism was permitted to the licentiousness of the stage; that the Athenians applauded all that made them laugh; and believed that Jupiter himself laughed with them at the smart sayings of a poet. Mr. Collier[1], ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... for good or for evil, the power of poetry has been employed to advance it, even from the times when the Monarch-Minstrel of Israel glorified his Maker in Psalms, to the latest attempts which have been made to propagate treason, immorality, or atheism—when we thus think of these things, we may learn how much of gratitude is due to those men who, having had the precious ointment of poetic genius poured abundantly on their heads, have felt and acknowledged that they were thereby ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... subscribed for the furtherance of those praise-worthy objects as in the Eastern States of America. I admit all this, and admit it with pleasure; for I know it to be a fact: I only regret to add that in no other country are such strenuous exertions so incessantly required to stem the torrent of atheism and infidelity, which so universally exists in this. Indeed this very zeal, so ardent on the part of the ministers, and so aided by the well-disposed of the laity, proves that what I have just now asserted is, unfortunately, but ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... he's a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You know, one of those uncouth new people one's so often coming across nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d'emblee in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In former days," said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, "in former days the free-thinker was a man ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... doctrines of the Church; 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 ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... insisted upon the iniquity of abandoning men from their birth to an irremediable state of contempt, from which no virtue could exalt them. The Brahmins looked upon my Brahmin with ineffable horror. They called me the most wicked of vices; they saw no distinction between Justice and Atheism. I uprooted their society—that was sufficient crime. But the worst was, that the Pariahs themselves regarded me with suspicion; they thought it unnatural in a Brahmin to care for a Pariah! And one ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its most superstitious corner. Protestantism was a sin, but atheism was a crime against humanity. The Protestant might be the victim of a mistake, but the atheist was the deliberate son of darkness, the source of fearful dangers. An atheist in their midst was like a scorpion in a flower-bed—no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the last pope, and, in a poetical form, we get Nietzsche's description of the course Judaism and Christianity pursued before they reached their final break-up in Atheism, Agnosticism, and the like. The God of a strong, warlike race—the God of Israel—is a jealous, revengeful God. He is a power that can be pictured and endured only by a hardy and courageous race, a race rich enough to sacrifice and to lose in sacrifice. The image ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... be that both doctrines are meaningless aggregations of words, and therefore not capable of being in any true sense either 'believed' or 'disbelieved.' So again the view of the external world suggests to Newman 'atheism, pantheism, or polytheism.' Almighty benevolence has created a world of intelligent beings, most of whom are doomed to eternal tortures, and having become incarnate in order to save us, has altogether failed in His purpose. The ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... creatures, to whom formerly a gentleman would have blushed to give one glance or to offer a supper. I say this for your benefit, Monsieur de Gerfaut, for in this respect you are far from being irreproachable; and I could bring forth your books to support my theory. If I accuse you of atheism, in love, what have ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... several of the leading Baptist ministers in New England, and, as I was thoroughly imbued with Parker's ideas, we had many heated discussions on theology. There, too, I met Orestes Bronson, a remarkably well-read man, who had gone through every phase of religious experience from blank atheism to the bosom of the Catholic Church, where I believe he found repose at the end of his days. He was so arbitrary and dogmatic that most people did not like him; but I appreciated his acquaintance, as he was a liberal thinker and had a world of information which he readily imparted to those ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... care to punish, because I may punish when I think proper. Therefore, connivance being an engine of private malice or private favor, not of good government,—an engine which totally fails of suppressing atheism, but oppresses conscience,—I say that principle becomes, not serviceable, but dangerous to Christianity; that it is not toleration, but contrary to it, even contrary to peace; that the penal system to which it belongs is a dangerous principle in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... went from city to city, denouncing the "atheistic and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... to that mild variety of anarchism which is commonly called laissez-faire, and which Matthew Arnold calls British Atheism or Quietism. The reader will recall Arnold's quotation ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Verse, The Comick part fit only for a Farse; No Atheism, nor any man we know Abus'd, no repartee, nor splendid show; But very little Bawdy, and less wit, The Devil's in't, crys one, is this Play hit. Faith—may be not, and may be too it will, For Chance sometimes exceeds all rules of skill. As he who Rageing did his Pencil throw, And Painted ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... to religion, that there is no difference between unlike and contrary forms, clearly will have this issue—an unwillingness to test any one form in theory and practice. And this, if indeed it differs from atheism in name, is in fact the same thing. Men who really believe in the existence of God, if they are to be consistent and not ridiculous, will, of necessity, understand that the different methods of divine worship involving ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... philosopher, as he has been called. Hariot has been credited with the invention of the system of notation in Algebra. He discovered the solar spots before, and the satellites of Jupiter almost simultaneously with, Galileo. Hariot, who numbered Bishops among his admirers, was accused by zealots of atheism, because his cosmogony was not orthodox. They discerned a judgment in his death in 1621 from cancer in the lip or nose. His ill repute for free-thinking was reflected on Ralegh who hired him to teach him mathematics, and engaged ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Pantheism,—God in and through all, the infinite Intelligence. Deus est monadum monas—nempe entium entitas. This creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... 'Development.' While I desire that the basis of Regina's education shall be sufficiently broad, liberal, and comprehensive, I intend to be careful what doctrines are propounded; for unfortunately all who sympathize with the atheism of Comte, have not his noble frankness, and fail to print as he did ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the pause, the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet at heart, he was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate. And ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... pock-marked Dominican who had treated me with uncharitable harshness upon my first visit to Florence—was present at table, and was upon the point of denouncing my argument as perverse, unchristian and I know not what else; he had said, "It is my deliberate opinion that detestable beliefs as are Atheism, Calvinism, Mahometanism and the tenets of the Quietists, it were better for a man to embrace all of them in one vast, comprehensive blasphemy, than depend for their refutation upon any argument which Mr. Strelley can advance——" when a friar ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... application of the principle of private judgment, certain leaders began to call in question, not merely individual doctrines, but even the very foundations of Christianity, and, in a short time, Atheism and Naturalism were recognised as the hall-mark of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... "the foundation," so he is "the corner stone" of the building. It is Christ who hath removed that "partition wall between Jews and Gentiles, even the ceremonies of the one, and the atheism of the other." "He is our peace, who hath made both one." The two sides of the house of God are united by this corner-stone, Jesus Christ. Thus we, who were the temples of Satan, are made the temples of God. Thus poor ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... their case essential to my plan. Mr. Storks and Mr. Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane"; and finally—more important than any others—Doctor Jenkinson was Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. All these people I set talking in polite antagonism ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... a generation of men as unknown to them, as the people of Tartary, or the Terra Australia, are to us. And therefore as we draw giants and anthropophagi in those vacancies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better; so those wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of extravagancies amongst us, for want of understanding what we are. Oftentimes it so falls out, that they have a particular pique to some one amongst us, and then they immediately interest heaven in their quarrel; as it is an usual ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... LIVERMORE, referring to Mr. Gladden's remarks, said there was nothing so painful to her as the lack of faith in republicanism among cultivated American gentlemen. Political atheism seemed to be rife among them. What wonder that political corruption exists to such an extent, when the clergymen, the doctors, professors of colleges, members of churches, the educated and cultivated, refuse to exercise the rights of citizenship by going ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." We are more ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Retain the middle term and drop the extremes and you have the Spinozan doctrine of one (uncreated) substance, combining the attributes of thought and extension. This is Pantheism, or objective idealism, as distinguished from the subjective idealism of Fichte. Strange, that the stigma of atheism should have been affixed to a system whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is the ignoration of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and Spinozism a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "Essay on 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 ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of God or any religion, and even give the names of these tribes, especially of some from the interior of South America; while Sir John Lubbock systematically enumerates seven stages of religious development, from atheism to the connection of religious with moral conceptions, and lets each single race run through these stages in an identical series until it either remains on one of the seven stages or arrives at the highest: yet, on the contrary, other equally trustworthy scientists assert that there is not a single ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... and the man who denies, there is only a step. All philosophy is related to atheism. After having told Brigitte that I suspected her past conduct, I began to regard it ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... praying to their common Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another to pieces with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church organizing this monstrous paradox instead of protesting against it? Would it make less atheists or more? Atheism is not a simple homogeneous phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with which every able modern mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets in the light of heaven. And there is the atheism ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... human kind; he must be obviously above it—or he would be obviously below it. Take even the least attractive and popular side of the larger religions to-day; take the mere vetoes imposed by Islam on Atheism or Catholicism. The Moslem veto upon intoxicants cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist (who presides at a Licensing Committee, and also at a large dinner), it is absolutely necessary for him, to make a distinction between gin ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,—who, according to your own showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and inspiration to still higher endeavor—you have been, poisoned by the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... time of Leo X. atheism, or infidelity of some sort, was almost universal in Italy amongst the high ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... catholic, schismless[obs3], Christian, evangelical, scriptural, divine, monotheistic; true &c. 494. Phr. of the true faith. 984. Heterodoxy. [Sectarianism.]— N. heterodoxy; error &c. 495; false doctrine, heresy, schism; schismaticism[obs3], schismaticalness; recusancy, backsliding, apostasy; atheism &c. (irreligion) 989[obs3]. bigotry &c. (obstinacy) 606; fanaticism, iconoclasm; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... What do I think of it all? Well, I love the romantic solemnity of youth; and even in this form, although not without laughter, I have to love it still. They are such ducks! But what are they made of? We were just as solemn as that about atheism and the stars and humanity; but we were all for belief anyway—we held atheism and sociology (of which none of us, nor indeed anybody, knew anything) for a gospel and an iron rule of life; and it was lucky enough, or there would have been more windows broken. What is apt to puzzle one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commonly called 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, Analecta, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... latter respect they were more successful than in the former, and I regret to say that atheism made immense strides among the educated class. They had some profound thinkers among them: Tchernyshevsky, Dobroluboff, Mikhailoff, besides Herzen and Ogareff, the two men who brought out the Kolokol in London in the Russian language, and by their ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... from the dreary flippancy of an effete society to such scenes as those. If we regarded only the pampered classes, then we might well think that true human fellowship had perished, and a starless darkness—worse almost than Atheism—would fall on the soul. But we are not all corrupt, and the strong brave heart of our people still beats true. Young men cherish manly affection for friends, and are not ashamed to show it; sweet ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... know that they fasted of a 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 poor men with families to support, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... selecting the proper subsidiary arts which are necessary for making the web. The royal science is queen of educators, and begins by choosing the natures which she is to train, punishing with death and exterminating those who are violently carried away to atheism and injustice, and enslaving those who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance. The rest of the citizens she blends into one, combining the stronger element of courage, which we may call the warp, with the softer ...
— Statesman • Plato
... Canada was absurdly feeble. The greatest power in all Canada—the Church—shrank in horror from the blood-stained banner of regicide France; and zealous always for the monarchy, the Catholic hierarchy indignantly spurned the overtures of a republic whose most cherished principle was atheism—which had abandoned the worship of God for the cult of Reason. "For God and the King" had been the priestly motto from time immemorial, and the new Republic repudiated obligation not to one only but to both. Accordingly, the vast influence of the Church was exerted ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Parliaments; and the philosopher was composing his own epitaph—one more proof of the ruling passion predominating in death; but why should a Pantheist be solicitous to perpetuate his genius and his fame! I shall transcribe a few lines; surely they are no evidence of Atheism! ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... inquiry is the outcome of a request to write an article on "Atheism" for a projected dictionary of the religious history of classical antiquity. On going through the sources I found that the subject might well deserve a more comprehensive treatment than the scope of a dictionary would ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Spinoza, based on the canon, "Omnis determinatio est negatio," proceeds by wiping out all dividing lines, which he regards as illusions, in order to reach the ultimate truth of things. This, as Hegel showed, is acosmism rather than Pantheism, and certainly not "atheism." The method of Spinoza should have led him, as the same method led Dionysius, to define God as [Greek: hyperousios aoristia]. He only escapes this conclusion by an inconsistency. See E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, vol. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in his Diary:[2]—"Was ever man more tempted than the miserable Mather? Should I tell in how many forms the Devil has assaulted me, and with what subtlety and energy his assaults have been carried on, it would strike my friends with horror. Sometimes, temptations to vice, to blasphemy, and atheism, and the abandonment of all religion as a mere delusion, and sometimes to self-destruction itself. These, even these, do follow thee, O miserable Mather, with astonishing fury. But I fall down into the dust, on my ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... conceptions there has been for ages a slow and steady development. At the bottom of the ladder (speaking of modern times) is Catholicism, and at the top are atheism and science. The intermediate rounds of this ladder are occupied by the various sects, whose name ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... though it may not go 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,' we are told, 'has no boundary, no quarters, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... be for ever alive to the throb of its action; and Burke, as he regarded humanity swarming like bees into and out of their hives of industry, is ever asking himself, How are these men to be saved from anarchy? whilst Newman puts to himself the question, How are these men to be saved from atheism? Both saw the perils of free inquiry ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the year 1810, at the height of those hot debates that preceded the war of 1812. For nine years, he tells us, the subject gradually gained upon him, so that, at last, it was his first thought in the morning and his last at night. From the atheism upon which he had formerly plumed himself, he went to the opposite extreme. For a long time he was plunged into the deepest gloom, regarding himself as a sinner too vile to be forgiven. He sought for comfort in the Bible, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... voice in reading save Gabriel Adams' and my own. I read to her comforting passages of Scripture, and said prayers which carried her soul up to the throne, and fell back on mine in showers of dust and ashes. A great black atheism had fallen on me. There was no justice on ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... they will there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think of are represented somewhere in the records of that one small people. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... good as well as evil fruit. While your siren eloquence has led some doubting Thomases into the barren desert of Atheism, you have driven others to seek a better reason for their religious faith than barbarous tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils. Bigotry has quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic hammer, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the prisoners was no sinecure. Many of them were deeply tainted with the foul atheism engendered by the Revolution; many more with the practical atheism that comes of reckless living. Scenes of cruelty and depravity would occasionally take place, only too likely where a large number of men were left so much to themselves. Yet there were doubtless hundreds among them who, but ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... each other—or convert each other. I used to think all Christians were hypocrites, and I felt quite mildly towards them really. But I know you are sincere—and my soul is mad against you. In the same way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought atheism would leave them free for immorality—and yet in your heart you tolerated them entirely. Now you know that I am an honest man, and you are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong—why ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... And they have been given over to a strong delusion to believe this lie. Above the State is the Eternal Rule of Right and Wrong: above the State is the Supreme Moral Governor of the Universe; yes, above the State is God. Let us proclaim this august verity though in France Atheism has been triumphant; in England Agnosticism is fashionable; in Lutheran Germany—worst of all—evil has been enthroned in the place of good, and "devils to adore for deities" is the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... be so riotously preponderant and good seems to be ever trodden under foot. Either the Death of Christ, if He died and did not rise again, is the strongest argument in the history of mankind for rank atheism, or else it is true that He rose, the King of humanity, glorified and exalted by the vain ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... unfolds. In the strophes of the poem one may assist at the Buddha's birth, an event which is said to have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar. Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... his followers, of course, also combat the claim that Darwinism leads to atheism, and we find them, after themselves having removed the Creator by all their scientific arguments and proofs, making hysterical efforts to smuggle him in again by the back door. To this particular end, they ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... before in the history of the Church. Thousands and thousands of these Greek Catholics were scattered through the prairies; roaming flocks without shepherds, a prey to ravening wolves. Heresy, schism, atheism, socialism and anarchy openly joined hands to rob these poor people of the only treasure they had brought with them from the old-land,—their Catholic Faith. Presbyterian ministers were seen to celebrate among them "bogus masses"; schismatic emissaries tried ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... gentle-minded, he could never have thought of erasing from the hearts of mankind the knowledge of God and the comfortable faith in His fatherly care, or been guilty of "the atrocious wickedness of diffusing atheism through the land." Horne goes on to charge this "atrocious wickedness" against Smith too. "You would persuade us," he says, "by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits and the proper antidote against the fear of death, but surely he who can reflect ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Virtue and Wealth pursues only Pleasure, reaps as the consequence of such conduct the destruction of his intelligence. The destruction of intelligence is followed by heedlessness that is at once destructive of both Virtue and Wealth. From such heedlessness proceed dire atheism and systematic wickedness of conduct. If the king does not restrain those wicked men of sinful conduct, all good subjects then live in fear of him like the inmate of a room within which a snake has concealed itself. The subjects do not follow such a king. Brahmanas and all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... replete with accounts of lectures which were in process of preparation. They were discourses on the Evidences of Revelation and their author was most desirous of getting to Philadelphia that he might there deliver them. At that time this City was full of atheism and agnosticism. Then, too, the hope of establishing a Unitarian Church was ever in Priestley's thoughts. How delightful it is to ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... contrasted 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, although ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and all the neighbouring peoples who hold the same beliefs, to modern Deists.[2] They are remote from Atheism and from cult! Suggestions about an ancient Egyptian influence are made, but popular Egyptian religion was not monotheistic, and priestly thought could scarcely influence the ancestors of the Dinkas. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... The fires of Smithfield consumed brave, humble victims, while Erasmus jested over the rising price of wood, In France the Inquisition entrapped many men of literary distinction, Louis de Berquin 1529, John de Caturce 1532, Stephen Dolet 1546; on the charge of heresy or atheism which could only with great difficulty be refuted. To kill a fellow-creature or to watch him put to death would be physically impossible to most of us, in our unruffled lives; where from year's-end to year's-end we hardly even hear a ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to give the world a taste of his atheism and impiety, I shall recite two of his verses, as ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... and ambiguous hope. I see that the Bible fits into every fold of the human heart. I am a man, and I believe it to be God's book because it is man's book. It is true that the Bible affords me no additional means of demonstrating the falsity of Atheism; if mind had nothing to do with the formation of the Universe, doubtless whatever had was competent also to make the Bible; but I have gained this advantage, that my feelings and thoughts can no longer refuse their ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... not a little reason for thinking that the same physiological ends might have been differently achieved. The one doctrine limits the possibilities of creation; the other denies the implied limit. Which, then, is most open to the charge of covert Atheism? ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... over six days (Dec. 4-15, 1654), discharged its mind fully on the Toleration Question. They resolved that there should certainly be a toleration for tender consciences outside the Established Church, but that it should not extend to "Atheism, Blasphemy, damnable Heresies to be particularly enumerated by this Parliament, Popery, Prelacy, Licentiousness or Profaneness," nor yet to "such as shall preach, print, or avowedly maintain anything contrary to the fundamental principles of Doctrine held forth in ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay down his life for the right of every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine's centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in The Times; and ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... them enjoy the Opinion of their own Superlative Judgements" and run madly after Scot, Hobbes, and Osborne. It was, in truth, a danger to religion that he was trying to ward off. One of the fundamentals of religion was at stake. The denial of witchcraft was a phase of prevalent atheism. Those that give up the belief in witches, give up that in the Devil, then that in the immortality of the soul.[18] The question at issue was the reality ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Cuba? What good will it do there? If only the good it has wrought elsewhere, Heaven help the Cubans! Protestantism is nothing but a disorganizer and a pathway to infidelity and atheism. This is the only reason of its existence. As a positive moral force, it is a farce. It has never converted a single nation, but it has unconverted Protestants themselves with a holy vengeance. Berlin has 75,000 ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... history of much atheism, not only an atheism of atheists, but a more terrible atheism of Christians, an unconscious atheism, whose roots have struck far into many souls whose last breath would be spent in denying it. So, I repeat, ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... century of positivism and atheism has been able to overthrow everything but Satanism, and it cannot make Satanism yield ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... and private affairs. Young men of the richer sort had made a pastime of the same pursuit, 'which was not unamusing.' And hence bitter enmities had arisen; the professors of knowledge had revenged themselves by calling him a villainous corrupter of youth, and by repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... officer, the greatest military genius at that period in Germany, and, on that account, misunderstood, foretold the inevitable defeat of Prussia, and, although far from being a devotee, declared, "The cause of the national ignorance lies chiefly in the atheism and demoralization produced by the government of Frederick II. The enlightenment, so highly praised in the Prussian states, simply consists in a ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... was naturally ambitious, but was the wisest Clergy-man I ever knew. He was a lover of mankind, and had a delight in doing good. More was an open hearted, and sincere Christian philosopher, who studied to establish men in the great principles of religion against atheism, that was then beginning to gain ground, chiefly by reason of the hypocrisy of some, and the fantastical conceits of the ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... conception and expression, clothed his ideas in those plain homely terms that are the most 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 |
