"Irreligious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a common and general error of the uninitiated to bring the following accusations against philosophers. Some of them think that those who explore the origins and elements of material things are irreligious, and assert that they deny the existence of the gods. Take, for instance, the cases of Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and other natural philosophers. Others call those magicians who bestow unusual care on the investigation of the workings ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Francis Charles. "No man is really irreligious. Whether we make broad the phylactery or merely our minds, we are all alike at heart. The first waking thought is invariably, What of the day? It is a prayer—unconscious, unspoken, and sincere. We are all sun worshipers; and when we meet we invoke the sky—a good ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... in him there remained the ghost of his faith in Lois, the faintly flickering hope that some day they would come together again. It lay dormant in him, like an irreligious man's unacknowledged faith in God and a hereafter, but it, too, vanished when he read in a Seattle newspaper, already three months old, the announcement of his wife's divorce. He flinched when he read that it had been won on the grounds of desertion, and thereafter ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... side by side, exchanging their opinions in regard to Gervaise, whom they stigmatized as an irreligious ne'er-do-well whose child would never have gone to the Holy Communion if it ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... became acquainted with Mlle. Quinault, the daughter of the famous actor of the time, and herself a great actress. This woman invited Mme. d'Epinay to her so-called salon, which was, possibly, the most licentious and irreligious of the salons then in vogue, where she met Duclos, with whom she ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... extravagant commendations; for he sees a thousand faults in himself which he is much engaged in overcoming, though others perceive them not. He is conscious of neglecting many an opportunity of doing good, and of failing to suppress sufficiently many an evil thought; and though some irreligious people may fancy that he already carries things too far, as they absurdly term it, yet there is nothing of which he is himself more sure than that he falls short in every duty, and especially in those things of which ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... propositions: first, that there is such a process as evolution; second, that he had discovered the method by which evolution is accomplished. Before his time there was no general agreement as to the fact of evolution. People generally thought the idea absurd, as well as irreligious. All previous efforts on the part of advanced thinkers to persuade mankind of the truth of evolution had been nearly without effect. Among the early philosophers the whole idea was purely speculative. They made no attempt to prove it, and the conception was without influence ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... goes, we are not monastics," he said, with a sparkle in his deep-set eyes; "we are but a family of ancient lineage, expelled from our home in these irreligious times. It is no longer in our power to do all the good we would, and therefore we are much undervalued. Perhaps you have heard of ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... centre so completely in one concerning whose antecedents I knew absolutely nothing. I have been almost culpably rash and blind,—but I could not look into your beautiful, sad eyes, and doubt that you were worthy of the love that sprang up unbidden in my heart. I knew that you were irreligious, but I believed I could win you back to Christ; and when I tell you that, after living thirty-eight years, you are the only woman I ever met whom I wished to call my wife, you can in some degree realize ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... here matter sensational enough for the most exacting novelist; but we disclaim all effort to play upon the passions, or add another work of fiction to the mass of irreligious trash so powerful in the employ of the evil one for the seduction of youth. In the varied scenes of life there are many actions influenced by secret motives known only to the heart that harbors them. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... fundamentally, through inveterate habit and by previous adaptation of imagination and affection. Otherwise, "there will be no stable political state" in France;[6106] "so long as one grows up without knowing whether to be a republican or monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the State will never form a nation; it will rest on uncertain and vague foundations; it will be constantly exposed to disorder and change."—Consequently, he assigns to himself the monopoly of public instruction; he ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Vertue, you are not daily mending like Dutch Watches, and plastering like old Walls; they are not Gentlemen, that with their secret sins increase our Surgeons, and lie in Foraign Countries, for new sores; Women are all these Vices; you are not envious, false, covetous, vain-glorious, irreligious, drunken, revengeful, giddie-eyed like Parrots, ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... many on similar grounds; and that he had himself been repeatedly attacked for his anti-Christian teachings. He seems not to have perceived that, just as his antagonists were wrong in condemning as irreligious, theories which he saw were not irreligious; so might he be wrong in condemning, on like grounds, the Theory of Evolution. In brief, he fell short of that highest faith which knows that all truths must harmonize; and which is, therefore, content trustfully to follow the evidence ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... were driven back upon being much more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting things which men's normal imagination does not necessarily doubt. But certainly the most final and forcible fact is that this war ended like the battle of Sheriffmuir, as the poet says; they both did fight, and both did beat, and both did run away. They have left to their descendants ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... that their own actions are governed by reasonable or moral motives? Can the gluttonous father expect a self-denying son? With how ill a grace must a man who will often be disguised in liquor, preach sobriety? a passionate man, patience? an irreligious man, piety? How will a parent, whose hands are seldom without cards, or dice in them, be observed in lessons against the pernicious vice of gaming? Can the profuse father, who is squandering away the fortunes of his children, expect to be regarded in a lesson of ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Alas, what can be expected of him that has nothing in him to teach him to manage that knowledge of grace which he has, but his flesh, his lusts, and lustful passions? Can these teach him to manage his knowledge well? Will they not rather put him upon all tricks, evasions, irreligious consequences and conclusions, such as will serve to cherish sin? What Judas did with Christ, that a graceless man will do with grace, even make it a stalking horse to his fleshly and vile designs; and rather than fail betray both it, and the profession of it, to the greatest enemies ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... others a system of Cartesian philosophy, where a chapter on "Angels" revives the methods of the schoolmen. His chief opponent was Samuel Parker (1640-1688), bishop of Oxford, who, in his attack on the irreligious novelties of the Cartesian, treats Descartes as a fellow-criminal in infidelity with Hobbes and Gassendi. Rohault's version of the Cartesian physics was translated into English; and Malebranche found an ardent follower in John Norris ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... all? Have not we, of a later and more critical day, got into so inveterate a habit of digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example. The Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an irreligious people. They say so themselves. Writes one of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion." A score of like pronouncements might be quoted from other ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... the mind of Europe: it is the belief or want of belief, the religious or irreligious views, the grasping ambition, the headlong desire of an impossible or unholy happiness, the reckless sway of unbridled passions, which try to spread themselves among all nations, and bring them all up, or rather down, to the level ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... "Ever since I knew him he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... heaven, the pains of mortality with the blessedness of the angelic bards. Oh, these are the flowers for a sickroom! How dreary and desolate does it seem without them! The strong and healthy may live on, careless and irreligious, but what would become of the poor, grief-stricken, despairing Soul if she could not repose quietly in the bosom her Beloved, and say with child-like simplicity, morning and evening, "Our Father who ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... stairs with the rocking chair, she thought, "Nothing could be more suiterble. We are both about the same age; I am most respecterbly connected—in fact, I regard myself as somewhat his superior in this respect; he is painfully undeveloped and irreligious and thus is in sore need of female influence; he is lonely and down-hearted, and in woman's voice there is a spell to banish care; worst of all, things are going to waste. I must delib'rately face ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... and anxiety with the proof before him. The indignation and stupefaction of the author can be well understood when he was told that the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper that his proof- reader—a young lady—had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless evidence of the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... a reaction of late years. This country has begun to be prosperous. We don't think much of religion; 'tis only when hard times come we turn our attention toward it. There are people in this country who say we are getting too irreligious, too scientific. Now, is it not a fact that we are happier today than at any period in our history? You live in a great country, though perhaps you do not know it. But live in any other country for a while, and you'll find it out. See, then, what we've got ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... incompetent performer experiences on the rare occasions when he does strike a winning vein. As stroke follows stroke, and he continues to hold his opponent, a wild exhilaration surges through him, followed by a sort of awe, as if he were doing something wrong, even irreligious. Then all these yeasty emotions subside and are blended into one glorious sensation of grandeur and majesty, as ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'is no more than this. A few fashionable men make a noise in the world; and this clamour being echoed on all sides from the shallow circles of their admirers, misleads the unwary into an opinion that the irreligious spirit is universal and uncontrollable.' A strong proof of the absence of any real sympathy with the Deists is afforded by the violent outcry which was raised against them on all sides. This outcry was not confined to any one class or party either in the political or religious world. We may ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... tenets. "I have always respected religion," said he; "the morality of the Gospel is the noblest gift ever bestowed by God on man." The Jesuits strenuously urged him to put into their hands a corrected copy of the Lettres Persanes, in which he had expunged the passages having an irreligious tendency, but he refused to give it to them; but he gave the copy to the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, and Madame Dupre de St Maur, who were in the apartment, with instructions for its publication, saying, "I will sacrifice every thing to religion, but nothing to the Jesuits." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Booker Washington did look "upon his task as an economic one instead of a theological one" he was at first regarded with suspicion by most of the preachers of his race and by some openly denounced as irreligious and the founder of an irreligious school. Like so many men of greater opportunity in all ages and places, many of these Negro ministers confounded theology and religion. Finding no theology about Booker Washington or his school, they assumed there was no religion. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... articles might be written on the subject of "London out of Church," dealing with the manners and customs of those people who patronize no sort of religious establishment on the Sunday. I have seen pretty well all the typical phases of religious London and London irreligious; but these would rather be characterized as non-religious than as irreligious folks. They do not belong to any of the varied forms of faith; in fact faith is from their life a thing apart. It is in this negative way that they are ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... hell, had filthie pleasure no other pillowe to leane vpon but his spreaded limmes? On thy flesh my fault shall bee imprinted at the day of resurrection. O beauty, the bait ordained to insnare the irreligious: rich men are robd for theyr welth, women are dishonested for being too faire. No blessing is beautie but a curse: curst bee the time that euer I was begotten: curst be the time that my mother brought me forth to tempt. The serpent in paradice did no more, the serpent in paradice is ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... quite a respectable theological library at hand for private use. The tenacity with which he clung to orthodox creeds and Catholic forms was not only strengthened by study but rooted in the depths of his character. To devout but fundamentally irreligious men, like Henry VIII. and Louis XIV., rites and ceremonies are a great consolation; and Henry seldom neglected to creep to the Cross on Good Friday, to serve the priest at mass, to receive holy bread and holy water every Sunday, and daily to use ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... home will be unfit for its high vocation. Hence parents, in their marriage alliance as well as in their individual character, should qualify themselves for the responsible mission of home. Can the ungodly wife or husband fulfill this mission? Can the irreligious parent bring up his offspring "in the nurture and admonition of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... things as truths which we cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... they avoid the faults of public worship in the west. The practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes the whole performance resemble a ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... have sometimes amused the pens of foreign and domestic antiquaries: for our own country has participated as keenly in these irreligious fooleries. In the feast of asses, an ass covered with sacerdotal robes was gravely conducted to the choir, where service was performed before the ass, and a hymn chanted in as discordant a manner as they could contrive; the office was a medley of all ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Churchmen, of any school of thought, ever again take exception to the irreligious character of playhouse entertainments. Let them read the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre in The Times for March 13:—"During Holy Week this theatre will be closed, re-opening on Saturday, March 28, with The Bells, which will also be played on Easter Monday night." Could any arrangement be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is, what ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... present to inquire. It is certain, at least, that the whole is not covered. And nothing more lends confidence to the method than this. For one thing, room is still left for mystery. Had no place remained for mystery it had proved itself both unscientific and irreligious. A Science without mystery is unknown; a Religion without mystery is absurd. This is no attempt to reduce Religion to a question of mathematics, or demonstrate God in biological formulae. The elimination of mystery from the universe is the elimination of ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the abolitionists as a party, and as such they are a small minority of the people. They have never included in their ranks either the controlling intellect or moral feeling at the North. Their fundamental principle is anti-scriptural and therefore irreligious. They assume that slaveholding is sinful. This doctrine is the life of the sect. It has no power over those who reject that principle, and therefore it has not gained ascendency over those whose faith is governed by ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... no distinction between those who professed religion and those who made no profession. Their own religion was national. There was no division between the religious and irreligious. All were religious. In other words, they were all educated in the same faith, all united in observing the same religious rites, and all entertained the same religious belief, as had been handed down to them from their forefathers. This was salutary in promoting among them many ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... to church sometimes: I am sorry to see the young men of the present day so irreligious. Perhaps you could get my old friend, Madame De—, to choose the Cachemire—take care of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such an answer as he wanted. It was well known that Philip of Macedon bought what responses he wished at Delphi. Anybody with plenty of money, who would quietly "see" the priests, could have such a response as he chose. Or, if he was a bull-headed, hard-fisted, fighting-man, of irreligious but energetic mind, the priests gave him what he wished, out of fear. When Themistocles wanted to encourage the Greeks against the Persians, he "fixed" Delphi by bribes. When Alexander the Great came to consult the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... for answer, I produced this book. A Calvinist minister of Orleans Writ this, to justify the admiral For taking arms against the king deceased; Wherein he proves, that irreligious kings May justly be deposed, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... fault as Stella's, arising from her strong feeling against cultivating intimacy with any one who was "of the world." It was almost the only practical point on which she and Lucy disagreed, for Lucy tried to persuade her that she might do real good if she would come more in contact with her irreligious schoolmates. But Mary replied that this might do for some, but she did not feel strong enough,—she might herself be led away. She was not yet fully persuaded in ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... intended to secure the respectability of the Order, because, by the worthiness of its candidates, their virtuous deportment, and good reputation, will the character of the institution be judged, while the admission of irreligious libertines and contemners of the moral law would necessarily impair its dignity ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... two months' notice. As my new engagement did not commence for three months or more, I had the happiness of spending some time in the bosom of my family. As usual, the influences to which I was subject there were all calculated to abate my faith in irreligious principles, and to dispose me to look with less disfavor and prejudice on Christianity. In August I started again for Philadelphia. I left my family with sadness and tears, and I proceeded on my journey with a feeling that ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... letter is a mixture of pious demureness and querulous selfishness. She tells the Pope that all her life she has intensely desired to be a nun: that she is, unhappily, in the irreligious position of a matron, and, moreover, is the suffering wife of an impious husband. This sinful man requires of her—of her, a soul devoted to religion— that she shall behave as if she belonged to the wicked world which holds himself ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... 1787 the free colored people of Philadelphia, through two distinguished representatives, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, "two men of the African race," as the chroniclers say, "saw the irreligious and uncivilized state" of the "people of their complexion," and finally concluded "that a society should be formed without regard to religious tenets, provided the persons lived an orderly and sober life," the purpose of the society being "to support one another in sickness and for the benefit ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... another occasion. But no one who knew Mr. Gladstone could fail to see that it was the essence, the savor, the motive power of his life. Strange as it may seem, I can not doubt that while this attracted many to him, it alienated others, others not themselves irreligious, but who suspected the sincerity of so manifest a devotion, and who, reared in the moderate atmosphere of the time, disliked the intrusion of religious considerations into politics. These, however, though ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... with the talk of unseen Bugbears; and would encourage them, if they would be men indeed, to labour after the attainment of this his excellent art. He would often- times please himself {90a} with the thoughts of what he could do in this matter, saying within himself; I can be religious, and irreligious, I can be any thing, or nothing; I can swear, and speak against swearing; I can lye, and speak against lying; I can drink, wench, be unclean, and defraud, and not be troubled for it: Now I enjoy my self, and am Master of mine own wayes, and not they of me. This ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... how could any body live? Right feeling is shown by considering such points, and making for the demise of others even more preparation than for our own. Otherwise there is a selfishness about it by no means Christian-minded. You look at things always from such an intense and even irreligious point of view. But such things are out of my line altogether. Your ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... both much piety and much impiety; but, with very few exceptions, neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn of Protestantism. The religious Italians desired a reform of morals and discipline, but not a reform of doctrine, and least of all a schism. The irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity, without hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than in any other. It was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the glass away with contempt for its virtue of comfort; and I laughed, I think, in a disagreeable way, so that the old man, unused to manifestations as harsh and irreligious as this, started ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... sensible of, and very thankful for; I began to talk to them of the scandalous life they led, and gave them a full account of the notice the clergyman had already taken of it; and arguing how unchristian and irreligious a life it was, I first asked them if they were married men or bachelors? They soon explained their condition to me, and shewed me that two of them were widowers, and the other three were single ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... but with shouts and laughter We drenched the altars of Love's sacred grove, Shaking to earth green fruits, impatient after The launching of the colored moths of Love. Love's proper myrtle and his mother's zone We bound about our irreligious brows, And fettered him with garlands of our own, And spread a banquet in his frugal house. Not yet the god has spoken; but I fear Though we should break our bodies in his flame, And pour our blood upon his altar, here Henceforward is a grove without a name, A pasture to the shaggy ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... be held at our selection. It was the first occasion, in fact, that the Gospel had come to disturb the contentedly irreligious mind of our neighbourhood. Service was to open at 3 p.m.; at break-of-day we ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... surprised that almost every wide-spread religious revival, every renewed application of reason to religion, which almost necessarily gives prominence to its ethical or social side, has been followed by an uprising of the masses against what they had come to regard as the irreligious tyranny and oppression of the ruling privileged classes. The teachings of Wyclif in England, in the fourteenth century, were followed by the insurrection associated with the name of Wat Tyler; the teachings of Luther and ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... calumniated; for what innocence can be so generally acknowledged as not to suffer contamination from the daring aspersion of a society of men scattered throughout the world, who, under religious habits, cover irreligious minds; who perpetrate crimes as they concoct slanders—not against, but in conformity with, their own maxims? No one can blame me, surely, for having destroyed the confidence which you might otherwise have inspired, since it is far more just to vindicate for so many good people whom ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... I believe, on some knowledge of facts and some observation. If I could be scared out of them, let me add in all good humour, by such easily-impressed words as "antichristian" or "irreligious," I should think that I deserved them in ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... mind signing cheques, in the least; but wills have an irreligious appearance, in my eyes. There are a good many Wychecombes, in England; I wonder some of them are not of our family! They tell me a hundredth cousin is just as good an heir, as a ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was but one way to get rid of this irreligious crew. The chiefs agreed to be satisfied with five thousand golden florins. This sum was paid, and the knights companions, laden with plunder and absolved from their sins, set out in the highest spirits, singing the praises ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any established denomination. I may go further and admit ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... was himself so fierce an unbeliever, and so bitter an enemy to the Christian religion, that he was very fond of asserting that other men believed as little as himself. It was almost always Allen who gave an irreligious turn to the conversation at Holland House when these subjects were ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... a hardy plant growing very far north, though an inhabitant of our own kitchen gardens. The passage containing the reference to the three tears and Trinity Sunday was at first deemed irreligious by the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent in European ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... and, as a king, he brought upon his people deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise. War against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to undergo. The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as ecclesiastical teaching. St. Louis joined, so far, with sincere conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... trusted with the formation of his own opinions!" This latter passage is characteristic, and many who do not like Jefferson will read between the lines the exultation of a man who was not always careful to draw the line between religious liberty and irreligious license.] ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... of nature, and in its subordination to the authority that protected it from above, was naturally religious, the debt-broken allotment, on the contrary, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond its own narrow bounds, becomes as naturally irreligious. Heaven was quite a pretty gift thrown in with the narrow strip of land that had just been won, all the more as it makes the weather; it, however, becomes an insult from the moment it is forced upon the farmer as a substitute ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... soonest followed, vices entertained, if they be profane, irreligious, lascivious, riotous, epicures, factious, covetous, ambitious, illiterate, so will the commons most part be, idle, unthrifts, prone to lust, drunkards, and therefore poor and needy ([Greek: hae penia stasin empoiei kai kakourgian], for poverty begets sedition and villainy) upon all ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... although they are, That my report is iust and full of truth: But soft, me thinkes I do digresse too much, Cyting my worthlesse praise: Oh pardon me, For when no Friends are by, men praise themselues, Marc. Now is my turne to speake: Behold this Child, Of this was Tamora deliuered, The issue of an Irreligious Moore, Chiefe Architect and plotter of these woes, The Villaine is aliue in Titus house, And as he is, to witnesse this is true. Now iudge what course had Titus to reuenge These wrongs, vnspeakeable ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... even the most irreligious or most careless among us, the words, under the influences of our situation, come fraught ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... human history" were events so striking "that men would be liable to term them providential in a pre-scientific age." On this Mr. Spencer remarks that "in common with the ancient Greek Mr. Gladstone regards as irreligious any explanation of Nature which dispenses with immediate Divine superintendence." And as an instance of the partnership "between the ideas of natural causation and of providential interference," he instances ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the world itself might every moment be expected to be burned up by fire. It deduced all the families of the earth from one primitive pair, and made them all morally responsible for the sin committed by that pair. It rejected the doctrine that man can modify his own organism as absolutely irreligious, the physician being little better than an atheist, but it affirmed that cures may be effected by the intercession of saints, at the shrines of holy men, and by relics. It altogether repudiated the improvement of man's physical state; to increase his power or comfort ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... in the holy synod what had been done touching the deposition of the irreligious Pelagians and Celestinians, of Celestius, Pelagius, Julianus, Praesidius, Florus, Marcellinus, and Orontius, and those inclined to like errors, we also deemed it right that the determinations of your holiness concerning them ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... "Whereas, irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; this way of acting being contrary to their own ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... inclined to brood about things like shimmys. They were just starting to do the—maxixe, wasn't it, Jimmy?—when he became a monk, and it haunted him his whole first year. You'd see him when he was peeling potatoes, putting his arm around the bucket and making irreligious motions ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... three published by GREGOIRE, ex-bishop of Blois, claim particular distinction no less on account of the taste and zeal which they exhibit for the advancement of literature and the fine arts, than for the invective with which they abound against the madness of irreligious barbarism. This last stroke, aptly applied, was the means of recovering many articles of value, and of preserving the monuments still ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... a heathenish country by sending to it an illiterate, degraded and irreligious population, belongs exclusively to the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... said Eylwin Jones. "Pay they ought for this, the irreligious couple. As the English proverb—'There's no gratitude in ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... command penitence and faith, and that all the other feelings of religion will come to them whenever they choose to summon them. But does experience lead us to believe this? Are not the occasions, on the contrary, very rare when religion really moves irreligious men ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... and not tell you? It's you I've tried to shield. I married Josephine Derry, and Fran is our child. You know Fran. Well, her mother was just like her—frivolous, caring only for things of the world—irreligious. And I was just a boy—a mere college youth. When I realized the awful mistake I'd made, I thought it best just to go away and let her live her own life. Years after, I put all that behind me, and came to Littleburg. I married ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... not be in her sister's company for a month without discovering that Lady Fareham's whole life was given up to the worship of the trivial. She was kind, she was amiable, generous, even to recklessness. She was not irreligious, heard Mass and went to confession as often as the hard conditions of an alien and jealously treated Church would allow, had never disputed the truth of any tenet that was taught her—but of serious views, of an earnest consideration of life ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... Signior Caraccioli, who was as ambitious as he was irreligious, had, by this Time, made a perfect Deist of Misson, and thereby convinc'd him, that all Religion was no other than human Policy, and shew'd him that the Law of Moses was no more than what were necessary, as well for the Preservation ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... had brought hours of torment, and at last remorse. She realised the duplicity of her lover, she knew that he meant to desert her for her daughter, she saw what wrong she had done that daughter, she suspected even that Marie and Vitalis were poisoning her. Irreligious till now, her thoughts turned to religion. As soon as she could leave her bed she would go to Mass and make atonement for her sin; she would recover her power of attorney, get rid of Vitalis for good and all, and send her daughter back ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... shallow secular education, without the learning of religious truth, or the moral obligations that it teaches. The child taught and trained for this world's vocations only, without a deep inculcation of the love and fear of God, and the penalty hereafter of an irreligious and wicked life, will have but one leading idea—self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence, and will be checked by no restraint of conscience in the way and means of securing them. Gigantic frauds will be perpetrated, if riches ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... dreadful alternative. A remarkable instance of this is furnished by a clause in the will of the late Colonel Thomas, of the Guards, written the night before he fell in a duel, Sept. 3, 1783:—'In the first place, I commit my soul to Almighty GOD, in hopes of his mercy and pardon for the irreligious step I now (in compliance with the unwarrantable customs of this wicked world) put myself under the necessity of taking.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... It is a far more important matter that is at stake. The Court considers the atheistical irreligious 'attentats' have gone too far and ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... convictions, unless one is willing to adopt those of the other. Difference of faith is apt to divide families, and to produce great trouble in after life. A pious woman should beware of marrying an irreligious ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... you do for faith in Jesus Christ and love to Him. If you deeply feel the bond that knits you to Christ, and really live near to Him, you will be near to your brethren. You will feel that 'blood is thicker than water,' and however like you may be to irreligious people in many things, you will feel that the deepest bond of all knits you to the poorest, the most ignorant, the most unlike you in social position; ay! and the most unlike you in theological opinion, who love the Lord Jesus Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... nice boy; but he talked too much about the girl. He was also a well-educated boy and anxious to make the best of any opportunities which came his way. He told us that there was an interesting cathedral in the town and proposed that we should all go and see it after lunch. Thompson is not an irreligious man. Nor am I. We both go to church regularly, though not to excess, but we do not either of us care for spending week day afternoons in a cathedral. Thompson still hankered after a Turkish bath. I had a plan for getting a bedroom somewhere and going to sleep. We ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... taken a hammer and smashed the wretched old casts!" sobbed Diana. "I really didn't do them any damage; even the seccotine was easily sponged off Venus. But Miss Todd talked and talked as if I'd done something irreligious in church. I'd never do that, you know! Would I, now? She said I had 'an irreverent mind'. I don't believe she'll ever quite forgive me. And oh, Hilary has been so nasty! Thank goodness, dancing evening's done with! I've only Monday and Tuesday nights to go through now, then the ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... not to dip her hands in the bloody work of Europe. Our situation affords us a retreat from their cabals, and the present happy union of the states bids fair for extirpating the future use of arms from one quarter of the world; yet such have been the irreligious politics of the present leaders of the Quakers, that, for the sake of they scarce know what, they would cut off every hope of such a blessing by tying this continent to Britain, like Hector to the chariot wheel of Achilles, to be dragged through all the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... 1624, Pope Urban VIII. anathematized all snuff-takers, who committed the heinous sin of taking a pinch in any church; and so late as 1690, Innocent XII. excommunicated all who indulged in the same vice in Saint Peter's church at Rome. In 1625, Amurath IV. prohibited smoking as an unnatural and irreligious custom, under pain of death. In Constantinople, where the custom is now universal, smoking was thought to be so ridiculous and hurtful, that any Turk, who was caught in the act, was conducted in ridicule through the streets, with ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of woman's rights want, not the ballot so much as the dissolution of the marriage tie. They propose to form a tie for the term of five, six or seven years. Mark the men or women who are the most strenuous advocates of woman suffrage. They are irreligious ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... its new brick block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy's world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... sovereign; and kings are delegates from the people, with authority which they can only justly exercise so long as they remain in obedience to Rome. It follows from these positions that every nation must refuse fealty to an irreligious or contumacious ruler. In the last resort they may lawfully remove him by murder; and they are ipso facto in a state of mortal sin if they elect or recognize a heretic as sovereign. This theory sprang from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... irreligious," said her elderly friend. "Besides, there's nothin' amiss with him, settin' aside his foolishness. I've a-thought sometimes, now, o' buildin' a boat down here, an', when the time came, makin' believe to exchange. Boat-buildin' is slack just now, but I might trust to ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... own way," cried Fichta, "I would shut up these irreligious American schools. Religion is the base of the social life ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... favour of leaving a loose rein to the mutual inclinations of men and women, and laughed at the time 'wasted in quenching the darts of the flesh.'[6] It is true that at D'Holbach's house, the headquarters of the dogmatic atheism in which the irreligious reaction culminated, this was the only theme on which freedom of speech was sometimes curtailed. But the fact that such a restriction should have been noticed, suggests that it was exceptional.[7] One good effect followed, let us admit. The virtuousness of continence was not treated as a superstition ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... hands of the State, and the nomination and appointment of priests and bishops to place has been arrogantly wrested from those appointed by God to legislate in spirituals, and assumed by a class of irreligious despots. Though the State pays the clergy, still it owns the church property, and entirely cripples the power of the bishop, who cannot remove a bad and refractory priest, if it suits not the pleasure ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... its broad tolerance by that of the Rabbi Bloch of Lyons, who was shot at the battle of the Aisne whilst holding a crucifix to the lips of a dying Christian soldier. The soldier priests of France have earned the love and respect of even the most irreligious of the Poilus. They never hesitate to risk their lives, and have displayed sublime courage and devotion to their duty as priests and as soldiers. Behind the first line of trenches a soldier priest called suddenly to attend a dying comrade, took a small dog he was nursing ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... published in 1848, the twenty-sixth book to flow from Marryat's pen. It was completed after his death by a member of his family. It is intended for children, and its religious overtones are in contrast to Marryat's other works. He was far from irreligious, but this book is definitely in a ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to die?" resumed the Bishop. He a mortal like to US? Death was not for him intended, though communis omnibus: Keeper, you are irreligious, for to ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... um the address: 1658 Brimstone Avenue, Fiery Heights, Hell," Gunch chuckled, but the others felt that this was irreligious. And besides—"probably it was just Chum making the knocks, but still, if there did happen to be something to all this, be exciting to talk to an old fellow belonging ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... make use of a library which admitted works of irreligious and immoral tendency? It was an undoubted fact (the Mercury made it known) that of late there had been added to the catalogue not only the "Essays of David Hume" and that notorious book Buckle's "History of Civilization," but even a large collection of the writings ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... you alone are to blame for all the misery which the last year has brought upon Prussia! The irreligious pseudo-education of the masses is to be blamed for it, which you have been spreading under the name of true wisdom, and by which you have eradicated religious belief and loyalty from the hearts of my subjects ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... is a priest for ever; who, being raised from the dead, died no more; and who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God." Paul's Epist. to the Hebrews, ch. ix. 10. It was on account of this gross absurdity, and the irreligious application of it, that our first reformers suffered, and so many were put to death in the reign ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... mass of harm may have come of not believing in Apollo? Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as irreligious mania? Is there no such thing in the house at ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... characteristic, in the record of those observances which attested the public feeling, is this— that he who at that time had no bust, picture, or statue of Marcus in his house, was looked upon as a profane and irreligious man. Finally, to do him honor not by testimonies of men's opinions in his favor, but by facts of his own life and conduct, one memorable trophy there is amongst the moral distinctions of the philosophic Caesar, utterly unnoticed ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... illuminated with inner light,—he cast from him the ideals which he had hitherto cherished. As if for the first time seeing clearly, he felt that men should not be hampered by dogmas which cramp and restrain. A line he had seen somewhere, and which he had put aside as irreverent and irreligious, kept repeating itself over ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... to the immortal gods,—though a part too, majority by count of heads, were dragging him to Tartarus again. "Exquisite, unparalleled!" exclaimed good judges (as Fleury himself had anticipated, on examining the Piece):—"Infamous, irreligious, accursed!" vociferously exclaimed the bad judges; Reverend Desfontaines (of Sodom, so Voltaire persists to define him), Reverend Desfontaines and others giving cue; hugely vociferous, these latter, hugely in majority by count of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and heathen: "If ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the Gentiles the same?" There are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the Drumtochty postman, are familiar illustrations of ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... the little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, "And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher. Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: "Doubt had darkened into Unbelief," says he; "shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black." To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... your resolution concerning flight and death?" Brutus answered, "When I was young, Cassius, and unskillful in affairs, I was led, I know not how, into uttering a bold sentence in philosophy, and blamed Cato for killing himself, as thinking it an irreligious act, and not a valiant one among men, to try to evade the divine course of things, and not fearlessly to receive and undergo the evil that shall happen, but run away from it. But now in my own fortunes I am of another mind; for if Providence shall not dispose ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and a considerable number of muskets; and sent him some engineers from those who came on those ships, so that they might inspect his fortifications and reside in them or in his city. Some accepted that abode, and the loose and irreligious liberty of life permitted in that country. There, by reason of the many trading-posts and fleets from the north, they lived as if they were not outside their own countries, since they had intercourse with their kinsmen and friends, or at ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair |
