"Religious belief" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and whole knave," subjoined the Varangian. "With the mask of apparent good-humour he conceals his pandering to the vices of others; with the specious jargon of philosophy, he has argued himself out of religious belief and moral principle; and, with the appearance of the most devoted loyalty, he will, if he is not checked in time, either argue his too confiding master out of life and empire, or, if he fails in this, reason his simple associates ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... discoveries, certain or probable, have in matter of fact an indirect bearing upon religious opinions, and the question arises how are the respective claims of revelation and of natural science to be adjusted. Few minds in earnest can remain at ease without some sort of rational grounds for their religious belief; to reconcile theory and fact is almost an instinct of the mind. When then a flood of facts, ascertained or suspected, comes pouring in upon us, with a multitude of others in prospect, all believers in revelation, be they Catholic or not, are roused to consider their bearing upon themselves, both ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... humble distrust of his own judgment, that rendered him singularly indisposed to rely on his personal views, in any matter of conscience, and he was truly become a child in all that pertained to his religious belief. In good hands, and under more advantageous circumstances, the moral improvement of Peter would have been great; but, situated as he was, it could not be said to amount to much more than a very ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... man whose religious belief was shattered in childhood and restored to him by the little white lady, many years older than himself, to whom ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... some curious connection with her thoughts about office economy, and served also as a sign that she should get into trim for meeting Mr. Clacton, or Mrs. Seal, or whoever might be beforehand with her at the office. Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Puritans who settled New England, and later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presbyterians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American education. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anglican Church, known in America as ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... themselves without restraint to their instincts. The violence of the Revolution, its massacres, its need of propaganda, its declarations of war upon all things, are only to be properly explained by reflecting that the Revolution was merely the establishment of a new religious belief in the mind of the masses. The Reformation, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the French religious wars, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror are phenomena of an identical kind, brought about by crowds animated by those ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... they could not possibly exist at all during these last seasons and pay the rent which was laid on them in consequence of the improvements done by their own labor. I find by the most conclusive proof that a difference of religious belief did not enable the settlers any more than the natives to pay a rent that could not be produced from the soil. The desire to change the nationality and religion of his tenants was so strong in one landlord that, in the words of my informant, "A scene of ruthless havoc began among his tenantry. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Its antiquity.] The system of religious belief which is generally called Hinduism is, on many accounts, eminently deserving of study. If we desire to trace the history of the ancient religions of the widely extended Aryan or Indo-European race, to which we ourselves belong, we shall find in the earlier writings of the Hindus ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... The storm which shook the kingdom to its centre came anon; the strife which dethroned a monarch was reserved for the succeeding reign. These were not effected by the king's profligacy, indolence, or extravagance, but because of a change in the religious belief of the heir-apparent to ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Perfect religious liberty is guaranteed to everyone in the United States. There is equal religious liberty in England, but the King is compelled to belong to a particular section of the Christian Church, whereas in the United States no restriction is placed on the religious belief of the President; thus one President was a Baptist, another a Unitarian, and a third a Congregationalist; and, if elected, a Jew, a Mohammedan, or a Confucianist could become the President. Several Jews have held high Federal offices; they have even been Cabinet ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... propose to embark at this late hour on what ethnologists know as the "Hamitic" problem. But it is a fact that many striking parallels to Egyptian religious belief and practice have been traced among races of the Sudan and East Africa. These are perhaps in part to be explained as the result of contact and cultural inheritance. But at the same time they are evidence of an African, but non-Negroid, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... utmost social freedom, and expect the result from the maintenance of their religious belief, from the observance of their obligations, from submission to law, order and right, and ...
— Selected Official Documents of the South African Republic and Great Britain • Various
... They had little business headship. At the least discouragement and misfortune they melted away. Only religious communism, the facts seem to prove, can be successful."[1072] Only the communism of the convent and of the monastery, the equality of all based on a fervent religious belief, on a firm discipline, on an equal and absolute poverty, and on the almost insurmountable difficulty of re-entering the world, has hitherto proved practicable from the time of the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... condition we can only form conjectures. Among them religion arose, in circumstances of which we are necessarily ignorant. Thus I only venture on a surmise as to the germ of a faith in a Maker (if I am not to say "Creator") and Judge of men. But, as to whether the higher religious belief, or the lower mythical stories came first, we are at least certain that the Christian conception of God, given pure, was presently entangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Marchen about the Deity, the Madonna, her Son, and the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... more, such he still remains, speaking the same tongue, leading the same life, cherishing the same habits, entertaining the same wholesome or unwholesome hatred of all civilisation, and now, as then, utterly devoid of even the simplest rudiments of religious belief. His whole attitude of mind is negative. To him all who are not Gipsies, like himself, are 'Gorgios,' and to the true Gipsy a 'Gorgio' is as hateful as is a 'cowan' to a Freemason. It would be interesting to speculate whether, when the Romany folk first ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... world is but the reflex of the real world," said Marx,[74] and the phrase has been used, both by disciples and critics, as an attack upon religion itself; as showing that the Marxian philosophy excludes the possibility of religious belief. Obviously, however, the passage will not bear such an interpretation. To say that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" is by no means to deny that men have been benefited by seeking an interpretation of the forces ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... arguments to such a person, we believe he would himself have felt a more human, real, and hearty interest in his subject. He would more earnestly have endeavoured to find out the good elements in every form of religious belief. No sensible missionary could bring himself to tell a man who has done all that he could do, and more than many who have received the true light of the Gospel, that he was excluded from all hope of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... a man may be thoroughly religious, and may, nevertheless, have reflected very little upon his religious belief and the foundations upon which it rests. This does not mean that his belief is without foundation. It may have a firm basis or it may not. But whatever the case may be, he is not in a position to ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... was afflicted and confounded by the information which they gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship. He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians, and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... command respect. It should be remembered that the rigid line which is drawn in most families between mistress and servant, is not simply because such relations exist, but because there is generally absolutely nothing in common between them save sex alone; no community of nationality, religious belief, intelligence—nothing which can excite mutual sympathy, or move to homogeneity. The American girl who lives out at service need not fear that she will occupy a position in all respects corresponding to that occupied by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was to embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine. This was the essay Nature, which was published in 1836. By its conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... individuality. This is a deeper generalization than that which says, "A man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." But it is put forward as a mere statement of fact. And the previous history of religious belief in India would tend to show that emphasis was laid on the fact, less as an explanation of the origin of evil, than as a protest against a then current pessimistic idea that salvation could not be reached on earth, and must therefore ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... reputation not a little for the weight it gave, among skeptics, to his arguments in support of his religious belief. He found that all the philosophers in Paris were unbelievers. They looked at him with mild astonishment when they learned that he was not of the same mind. They may even have thought him a phenomenon which required scientific ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... argued in great detail (adv. Marc. I. 9-19) that every God must, above all, have revealed himself as a creator. In opposition to Marcion's rejection of all natural theology, he represents this science as the foundation of all religious belief. In this connection he eulogised the created world (I. 13) and at the same time (see also the 2nd Book) argued in favour of the Demiurge, i.e., of the one true God. Irenaeus urged a series of acute and weighty objections to the cosmogony of the Valentinians ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... religious belief and practice, for the first time found in this colony, had, as its first effect, the banishment of all forms of sectarian persecution, so that the maxim of the Broad Church—"Freedom in non-essentials"—was here put in practical activity to an extent probably never before known in ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the threads, thin indeed yet sufficient, which formed the links between the Israel of the present and its better future. Over against the vain confidence of the multitude Isaiah had hitherto brought into prominence the darker obverse of his religious belief, but now he confronted their present depression with its bright reverse; faint-heartedness was still more alien to his nature than temerity. In the name of Jehovah he bade King Hezekiah be of good courage, and urged ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... fancy, she did not weigh his remarks very heavily. She guessed why Stewart might have been angry at the presence of Padre Marcos. Madeline supposed that it was rather an unusual circumstance for a cowboy to be converted to religious belief. But it was possible. And she knew that religious fervor often manifested itself in extremes of feeling and action. Most likely, in Stewart's case, his real manner had been both misunderstood and exaggerated. However, Madeline had a curious desire, which she did not wholly ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... in his faith, from the time when his feelings were awakened by the just view of his own insignificance, as compared to the power of God! He then learned the first, great lesson in religious belief, that of humility; without which no man can be truly penitent, or truly a Christian. He no longer thought of measuring the Deity with his narrow faculties, or of setting up his blind conclusions, in the face of positive ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... defenders interested him exceedingly. By reason of residence in New England and his life abroad, he was not familiar with the negro, especially his Southern type. Their innocent guile and preposterous religious belief amused him. He both smiled and wondered at their faith in "Linkum," whom at that time he regarded as a long headed, uncouth Western politician, who had done not a little mischief of interfering with ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... have borne with this old man for eighty years, and you could not bear with him for two days!" After that, so the story goes, Abraham helped everyone who came along, no matter what his religious belief might be. ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... gentle poet of religious England: born 1731; died 1800. Cowper was an elegant humorist, despite the gloominess of his religious belief. It is said, however, that his most comic effusions were written during periods ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... hovered over him, and patted him like a very daughter, insisting that he should nurse the baby, and talking of him to her husband as though he were manifestly the wisest man in Cambridgeshire. She forgot even that little flaw in his religious belief. To her thinking at the present moment, a man who would believe that her baby was the honest son of an honest father and mother had almost religion enough for ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... The religious belief of the North-American Indians seems, on a first view, anomalous and contradictory. It certainly is so, if we adopt the popular impression. Romance, Poetry, and Rhetoric point, on the one hand, to the august conception ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Howard, his cure for national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... needed, 'Faith is one thing needful.' Mark, 'how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; how, without it, worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury.' Of how much else, 'for a pure moral nature, is not the loss of Religious Belief the loss?' 'All wounds, the crush of long-continued Destitution, the stab of false Friendship and of false Love, all wounds in the so genial heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... now loomed up on the horizon. He was an English Quaker who had been expelled from Oxford and jugged in Cork also for his religious belief. He was the son of Admiral Sir William Penn, and had a good record. He believed that elocutionary prayer was unnecessary, and that the acoustics of heaven were such that the vilest sinner with no voice-culture could be heard in the ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... into her mind. Into her exultant, fearful, dizzy happiness there crept a fear of the future. She clung with all her soul to the ideas of the life she wished to live; she knew that he, in all sincerity, was militantly opposed to those ideas. Difference in religious belief had brought bitterness, tragedy even, into the lives of many a pair of lovers. The difference in their case was no less firmly held to on either side, and she realized that the day must come when their ideas must clash, when they two must fight it out. Quivering with love though she was, she could ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... resembling a rabbit or hare. The oriental noticing this figure, his poetical fancy developed the myth-making faculty, which in process of time elaborated the legend of the hare in the moon, which has left its marks in every quarter of the globe. In Asia it is indigenous, and is an article of religious belief. "To the common people in India the spots look like a hare, i.e. Chandras, the god of the moon, carries a hare (sasa), hence the moon is called Sasin or Sasanka, hare mark or spot." [75] Max Mueller also writes, "As a curious coincidence it may be mentioned ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... of the state—the guarding and directing power in the multitudinous affairs of the British Empire—an empire that extends over every possible variety of country and climate, and includes under its powerful, yet mild and beneficent sway, tribes of every colour of skin, and of every shade of religious belief. Such a survey, in fact, tends to impress one more fully and immediately than could well be fancied, with the magnitude of the business of the British legislature, and the consequent weighty responsibilities imposed upon its members. But, great as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... London School, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a first-class man (both in 'Mods' and 'Greats'), proxime accessit for the Hertford, and a Fellow of Pembroke. He learnt German, and specialised in metaphysics. A review which he wrote of Mr Balfour's 'Foundations of Religious Belief' showed how much more deeply than the average journalist he had studied the subjects about which philosophers doubt; and his first book—'Monologues of the Dead'—established his claim to scholarship. Some critics called them vulgar, and they certainly were frivolous. But they proved two things—that ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... to common sense that any attempt on the part of the clergy or the laity of Upper Canada to crush the free exercise of religious belief, would be met not only with difficulties absolutely insurmountable, but by the withdrawal of all support from the home government; for, as the Queen of England is alike queen of the Presbyterian and of the Churchman, and is forbidden ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... "Whatever was, was right" at the time—I trust we are now far on the way to being agreed that the civil and the religious are no longer to be identified; that the State, as a state, is not concerned to uphold any one form of religious belief. Modern civilized communities are believed capable of existing without an official religion; the citizens being free to form themselves into self-governed religious bodies, as various as the prevailing modes ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... after the purity, not of any desire to join in the 'Holy! Holy! Holy!' of the burning spirits, but 'Woe is me, for I am undone; for mine eyes have seen the King; for I am a man of unclean lips.' Ah, brethren! whenever the commonplaces of our professed religious belief are turned into realities for us, and these things that we have all been familiar with from our childhood, flame before us as true and real, then there comes something analogous to the experience of that other Old Testament character—'I have heard of Thee by the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tried in Wyoming, and ample testimony of its beneficial results has been furnished, but it is a far distant territory, and those not especially interested will not examine the evidence. It has been tried in Utah, but with great opposition on account of the peculiar religious belief and customs of the people. But the District of Columbia is directly under the eye of congress. It is the capital of the nation, and three-fifths of the property of the District belongs to the United States. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... attendance. In the course of the nineteenth century these and other restrictions have fallen away except for a very small part. For the Union the exercise of political rights is made entirely independent of religious belief by Art. VI of the Constitution, and also by the famous First Amendment the establishment of any religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof is forbidden. On the present condition in the separate states, cf. ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine Right, they ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... little skirmishes of wit, and any one who tacked a thesis on the door had to fight for it. Luther Burbank rightly says that children should not be taught religious dogma. The souls of the Rossettis were not water-logged by religious belief formulated by men with less ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 1644 to Roger Williams. The charter was very liberal, and in religion and politics the people were absolutely free. The general assembly, in a code of laws adopted in 1647, declared that "all men might walk as their conscience permitted them—every one in the name of his God." Almost every religious belief might have been encountered there; "so if a man lost his religious opinions, he might have been sure to find them in some village in Rhode Island." Society was kept in a continual healthful agitation, and though the disputes were sometimes ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... Greeks and what we ourselves should mean by Religion, this division is very serviceable. The Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief; the Christian religion is an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorized code and of a settled system of faith. Let it not be supposed, however, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... LAW OF NATURE.—The question of the influence of religious belief upon a theory of morals I shall discuss elsewhere. [Footnote: See chapter xxxvi.] Here it is only necessary to point out that, if there is vagueness in the appeal to human nature, it can scarcely be dissipated satisfactorily by simply turning to Nature in a broader sense. Shall we, when ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... better to live in this world with no religion at all or with a narrow and violent form of religious belief? People will judge the deceased teacher and chief, in respect of his theological and propagandist work, in accordance with the views which they hold upon this alternative. As regards his social labours, his passionate efforts to help the 'submerged tenth,' his widespread helpfulness ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself? Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... theory—much discussed at that time, but almost forgotten now—was formed in 1875 with the aim of harmonising the results of evolution and ever-advancing Darwinism with religious belief. The spirited struggle that Darwin had occasioned by the reformation of the theory of descent in 1859, and that lasted for a decade with varying fortunes in every branch of biology, was drawing to a close ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the temptations of the world." A strong ascetic tendency in human nature, particularly active in the Orient, undoubtedly explains in a general way the origin and growth of the institution. Various forms of philosophy and religious belief fostered this monastic inclination from time to time by imparting fresh impetus to the desire for soul-purity or by deepening the sense ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... an act of individual resistance and not a system, and when the secular Powers were engaged in supporting the authority of the Church, the authors of the movement were compelled to claim impunity for their opinions, and they held language regarding the right of governments to interfere with religious belief which resembles that of friends of toleration. Every religious party, however exclusive or servile its theory may be, if it is in contradiction with a system generally accepted and protected by law, must necessarily, at its first appearance, assume ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... ancient philosopher averred that the gods existed solely in the apprehensions of their votaries, and the moderns have asserted that "fear is the father of religion, love her late-born daughter;"[292-1] that "the first form of religious belief is nothing else but a horror of the unknown," and that "no natural religion appears to have been able to develop from a germ within itself anything whatever of real ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... reserving esoteric truths). Isaac Williams on Reserve in Religious Teaching, No. 80 of Tracts for the Times, made a great sensation; see R. W. Church's comments in The Oxford Movement. Strictly, accommodation (2) or (3) modifies, in form or in substance, the content of religious belief; reserve, from prudence or cunning, withholds part. "Economy'' is used in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... House of Hamilton generally approved of the deed. Let not those, however, who see in the Archbishop's conduct the natural effect of Catholicism, be in too great hurry to attribute his conduct to his religious belief; for there were Protestant assassins in Scotland in those days, and later. Only a few years before, a very eminent Catholic, Cardinal Beaton, who was Archbishop of St. Andrews, was murdered by Norman Lesley; and John Knox associated himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Nelson had a fervent, religious belief in the Eternal, and never went to battle without casting himself on the mercy of the Infinite Pity which alone can give solace. He was fearless and strong in the affairs of his profession, and it may be safely assumed that, even if it went no deeper, he had a mystic fear of God, and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... dollar. They are no believers in cleanliness; but daub their bodies with paint and grease, especially the women. Their only weapons are knives and bolas, the latter of which they throw with a surprising accuracy of aim. That they possess even the rudest form of religious belief, or perform any religious ceremonies, has never yet been ascertained. Their food consists chiefly of the flesh of mares, and troops of these animals accompany them always on their excursions. They also eat ostrich flesh, as an exceptional bonne bouche, and birds' eggs, and fish, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... off their heads, with the exception of a tuft on the top, by which they expect Mohammed will draw them up to paradise. I have seen it remarked that Mohammed, who had very erroneous notions on scientific subjects, fixed the articles for the religious belief of his followers according to them, thereby entirely disproving their divine origin; whereas the writers of the Bible, guided by inspiration, made numerous statements which, with the knowledge then possessed by mankind, would have been impossible for ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... of assured victory and inspired by the belief that it has been written that he is the chosen force which is to regenerate misgoverned nationalities. Order out of chaos; moderation in the hour of victory; no interference with any one's religious belief; stern discipline—these were some of the behests of this young Titan, whose startling and victorious campaigns were amazing an astonished world and causing significant apprehension in the minds of the Directory, who decided to check the swift process of ascendancy by giving instructions ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... brother came to me with tears in his voice, if not in his eyes, worried seriously as to my own religious belief because I had asserted in a public address that I believed the earnest prayer of a good Indian woman reached the ear of God as surely as did my own prayers, or those of any man, woman, minister, or priest ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... responsibility; and sometimes I am not exactly easy over the account of my stewardship I must render to my poor dead Marcia. The more I see of your lover, the more I dread your marriage. A man who makes no profession of religious belief, is an unsafe guardian of any woman's peace of mind. You who have been reared almost in the shadow of the altar, accustomed to hearing grace at your meals, to family prayers, to strict observance of our ritual, will feel isolated indeed, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have hardly raised this question, and have accepted the credible and incredible with equal complacency. I have done this because credibility is a subjective condition, as the evolution of religious belief clearly shows. Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that the miracles occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take part in ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... who have healed themselves of a serious diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food, almost as a matter of religious belief. They have become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they'll consume raw ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... worship were tolerated in Genghis Khan's dominions, and the emperor was accustomed to take good officers into his service wherever he could find them, without paying any regard to the nature of their religious belief so far as their general duties were concerned. But now, in sending this deputation to the sultan, he selected the embassadors from among the Mohammedans at his court, thinking that it would please the sultan better to receive ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... religious belief the Persians bear a close resemblance to the Hebrew, but the poetical part of their mythology is more similiar to the Northern theology, while their manners bear a strong resemblance to the Germans. The spiritual worship of nature, light, fire, and of other pure ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... sometimes occur, in the course of the existence of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken, whilst the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... religion in the two remaining centuries till the close of the republic: one, mythology, directly affecting the forms of the cult and the beliefs concerning the individual gods; the other, philosophy, attacking the whole foundation of religious belief in general. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... they are about to exclude Southern institutions from the territories, and to make the Supreme Court sectional. "All hope of redress is rendered vain by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of a more erroneous religious belief." So, from a partnership of which the letter has been broken and the spirit destroyed, South ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to make up religious belief. It often decides to what church we shall go, and what religious tenets we shall adopt. It goes into the pulpit, and decides the gown, and the surplice, and the ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... cannot accede to your request. It would interfere with the general usefulness of our magazine if we were to introduce the subject of politics into it. We do not even discuss vexed questions of religious belief, because our paper is meant for persons of all denominations, whose feelings should be respected. We limit our teaching to the broad principles of ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... which, however, he clothed in a vesture quite un-Grecian. At least, the symposia or brotherly feasts of his society, their give-and-take of questions and answers, their aversion to the rule of mere physical force, to compulsory religious belief, and to creed hatred, as well as their mild and tolerant disposition and their brotherly regard for one another, remind one of the spirit and habits of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... congenial expression for the tortures of his soul in the imagery provided by the sternest of Christian sects. But neither can this circumstance be alleged as in itself disparaging to the doctrines thus misapplied. A religious belief which does not provide language for the darkest moods of the human mind, for profound melancholy, torturing remorse and gloomy foreboding, is a religion not calculated to lay a powerful grasp upon the imaginations ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... formed no part of his scheme of happiness to employ it in promoting the pleasures, or relieving the necessities of others, except in so far as such pleasures were connected with his own gratification. He was absolutely devoid of religious belief or opinions, but he left to all others the unquestioned liberty of rendering that homage to religion from which he gave himself a plenary dispensation. His general conduct was stained with no gross immorality, and as he was placed far above the necessity of committing dishonourable ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... affairs in this island, and what we were to encounter, I would have implored him not to come to Trinidad; however, as we are here, we must seek for guidance how to act should we, as I fear we shall, be questioned as to our religious belief." ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely right in thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main purpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose, or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences of our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world, determining ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the periodical manifestations of religious belief to which I refer are intimately and indissolubly connected with the staid and funereal solemnity which marks an Englishman's dress, conversation, and conduct on Sunday. He is a different being for the nonce, and must sustain ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... is a class whose religious teaching is that when one of them kills seven white men he will go to a better country when he dies. He thus makes sure of his entrance to what is heaven in their religious belief. ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman
... a man's religious belief (which is of course the ground of his religious life) should be supposed to come to him without the trouble of learning, any more than any other body of truths and principles on which people act," Mr. Andrewes went on. "And yet what religious instruction do young people ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... belief of Christianity is not included among the qualifications of school-masters; and I am credibly informed that there have been instances of candidates for schools disavowing all religious belief. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... without religion. Un-belief is more widely professed than here, and many people who call themselves Christians openly reject certain vital doctrines of Evangelical faith,—are Unitarians, in fact, but will not say so. But the whole question of religious belief in Germany is a difficult and contentious one, for according to the people you meet you will be told that the nation lacks faith or possesses it. If you use your own judgment you must conclude that there is immensely more scepticism there ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Craven, "I want to say a word. I hope each one of you will respect the other's religious belief. Our country has been founded on the corner-stone of liberty in this matter, and one ought to be noble enough not to ridicule or sneer at any honest, sincere faith, remembering that we ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... domestic tyrant would overcome her by the fear of denunciation, which would terrify her soul even though she had dared to declare to herself that in her stress of misery she would throw overboard all consideration of her soul's welfare. Though she intended no longer to live in accordance with her religious belief, she feared what religion could say to her,—dreaded to the very marrow of her bones the threats of God's anger and of Satan's power with which her aunt would harass her. If only she could rid herself of it all! Therefore, though she perceived that the ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... to do without hope; but it is possible that I have no longer the strength for it, and that, like other men, I must be sustained and consoled by a belief, by the belief in pardon and immortality—that is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type. Reason and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They must have their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the tradition of childhood, into the common hope. It takes so much effort to maintain one's self in an exceptional ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... philosophy. We must beware of any attempts to run Bergson's thought into moulds for which it was never intended, and guard against its being strained and falsely interpreted in the interests of some special form of religious belief. Intuition is not what the religious mind means by Faith, in the accepted sense of belief in a doctrine or a deity, which is to be neither criticized nor reasoned about. Religion demands "what passeth knowledge." Furthermore, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... preferred to get away from if possible, and he was just preparing to "hedge," when, fortunately, they ran into the Dean, and the conversation deviated to a discussion concerning the effect the pursuit of scientific research was likely to have upon religious belief. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... air a new man, with head erect, his brain clear, swept clean of many sickly phantoms. His virility was renewed, he looked out once more upon life with eyes militant and brave heart. He was full of the sense of having passed through some purging and beneficent experience. It was not that his religious belief or disbeliefs had been affected, or even quickened by anything he had heard—yet, from first to last, those two hours had been full of delight to him. The vast, dimly-lit building, with its imposing array of statuary, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... almost all thinkers of the theory of Evolution, which, partly formulated by Lamarck early in the century, received definite statement in 1859 in Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' The great modification in the externals of religious belief thus brought about was confirmed also by the growth of the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... proposes to solve the problem in a different way. Her suggestion is that houses should be opened for the young and high-caste child-widows, where they can take shelter without the fear of losing their caste, or of being disturbed in their religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as regards caste rules. The whole account given by the Pundita of the life of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social reformer and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... muse: "Cain," and "Heaven and Earth." Both were admirably suited to his pen. He naturally treated them as a philosopher, but without any preconceived notion of making any religious converts. His enemies nevertheless seized hold of these pieces, to incriminate him and impugn his religious belief. I have spoken elsewhere[19] of that truly scandalous persecution. I will only add here that Moore, timid as he usually was when he had to face an unpopularity which came from high quarters, and alarmed by all the cries proceeding from party spirit, wrote to approve the beauty ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and repose in one, who has divested himself of all responsibility in matters of religious belief and practice, enjoying an entire immunity from the anxious and painful labour of trying for himself the purity and soundness of his faith, is often painted in strong contrast with the {8} lamentable condition of those who are driven about by every wind of novelty. The condition of such a man ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... in the year 1830 that the revelations of a celebrated chief, whose life was spared on condition of his denouncing his accomplices, laid bare the whole system. The basis of the Thuggee Society is a religious belief—the worship of Bowanee, a gloomy divinity, who is only pleased with carnage, and detests above all things the human race. Her most agreeable sacrifices are human victims, and the more of these her disciple may have offered up in this world the more he will be recompensed in the next by all ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... just and right, but its effect on Puritan character was hardly softening, and was another unconscious factor in that increasing ratio of hatred against all who opposed them, whether in religious belief, or in the general administration of affairs. In these affairs every woman was interested to a degree that has had no parallel since, unless it may be, on the Southern side during our civil war. Politics and religion were one, and removal to ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... at a time when the deepest religious feeling prevailed throughout Europe, when devotion to some religion was found in every one, when the Bible was a newly found and deeply loved treasure; when the very differences of religious belief and the formation of new sects made each cling more lovingly and more earnestly to his ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... has already been made to the spirits that belong to the higher phases of Mesopotamian culture,—those that have a share in the production of works of skill and art. We have seen that in accounting for these we are justified in assuming a higher phase of religious belief. The dividing line between god and spirit becomes faint, and the numerous protecting patrons of the handicrafts that flourished in Babylonia and Assyria can hardly be placed in the same category with those we have so far been considering. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... Imposing any disability, or conferring any privilege, advantage, or benefit, on account of religious belief, or raising or appropriating directly or indirectly, save as heretofore, any public revenue for any religious purpose, or for the benefit of the holder of any religious office ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... information can be obtained of them. Their aged men are fast falling into their graves, and they carry with them the records of the past history of their people; they are the initiators of the grand rite of religious belief which they believe the Great Spirit has granted to his red children to secure them long life on earth and life hereafter; and in the bosoms of these old men are locked up the original secrets of this their most ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... heart, I say it! Be converted, and be happy. Be happy, and you will be a good husband. I speak in your wife 's interest as well as in yours. People who are happy in each other's society, will yield a little on either side, even on questions of religious belief. And perhaps there may follow a more profitable result still. So far as I have observed, a good husband's example is gladly followed by his wife. Don't think that I am trying to persuade you against your will! I am only telling you, in my own justification, from what motives of love for yourself, ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... is a desperate attempt to save Orthodox doctrines from the objections of reason, not by replying to those objections and pointing out their fallacy, but by showing that similar objections can be brought against all religious belief. For example, when reason objects to the Trinity, that it is a contradiction, Mr. Mansel does not attempt to show that it is not a contradiction, but argues that our belief in God is another contradiction of the same kind. His inference therefore is, that as we believe in God, notwithstanding ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... they looked abroad on the pestilent jungle of Superstition, and hoped to clear the earth of it forever. This little glow, so alloyed, so contaminated with pride and other poor or bad admixtures, was the last which thinking men were to experience in Europe for a time. So it is always in regard to Religious Belief, how degraded and defaced soever: the delight of the Destroyer and Denier is no pure delight, and must soon pass away. With bold, with skilful hand, Voltaire set his torch to the jungle: it blazed aloft to heaven; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... which they have been modified, to see whether natural causes of evolution have changed them, and have originated their earliest beginnings at the very outset of human history. It has been stated above that every race of mankind, however primitive or advanced it may be, holds some form of religious belief based upon some conception of the supernatural powers back of the world; and what the universe is conceived to be must largely determine the particular characteristics of a theology, and through this the special form of its attendant religion. We have before us a wide array ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... head of the church for putting Protestants to death. Until, therefore, Rome repeals her exterminating decrees, she must submit to the heavy charge of maintaining the right to persecute men for their religious belief. ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... problem is that of maladjustment in thought. Protestantism is still suffering from the effects of extreme individualism in religious belief. Strong leaders, obsessed with some one variation in interpretation of the Scriptures, have pulled off from the main body of the church and have started independent organizations committed to the development of the particular interpretation ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... assent went round the meeting. "The terms are set forth in the memorandum before us, which you have already signed. Only one other point—a minor one—remains to be considered. I refer to the doctrines or the religious belief of ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... the intellectual as the house rests upon the foundation. Its mental pictures, its concepts, its beliefs, come out of it, and are marred, misshapen, untrue, just to the extent to which that is faulty. Intelligence is necessary to religious belief and religious life. And the intellectual, in its foundation laying, can not stop short at that point any more than a plant can stop growing when its roots are well developed. The process once well begun is pushed on by the force from behind and must enter the higher realm. So I am not surprised ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... ascendency of the House of Austria. On the other side, it was less a contest for the reformed doctrines than for national independence. Governments began to form themselves into new combinations, in which community of political interest was far more regarded than community of religious belief. Even at Rome the progress of the Catholic arms was observed with mixed feelings. The Supreme Pontiff was a sovereign prince of the second rank, and was anxious about the balance of power as well ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rule less comprehensive than this, that all persons are admissible witnesses who have the use of their reason, and such religious belief as to feel the obligation of an oath, who have not been convicted of any infamous crime, and who are not influenced ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Salvation Army fell under the laws of the municipalities against nuisances. The final judicial decision in this case was in effect that while persons of every religious belief are free to worship in Switzerland, none in doing so are free seriously to annoy ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... chief, Massasoit. In 1636 Roger Williams began building Providence. Providence was the first settlement in America which offered a home to all men without asking them anything whatever about their religious belief. ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... primary mission of the Christian was to "go, disciple all nations," they were soon brought, in their endeavors to fulfil this command, into contact with those who not only denied the authority of their Teacher, but who were sceptical about the very fundamentals of religious belief. For the sake of these, then, and occasionally for the further confirmation of the faith of believers, and for purposes of illustration, the patristic writers return again to the discussion of those ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... this remarkable man? and whoever has once met his eyes does not easily forget him. He does indeed rule over mysterious powers, and he used them in his intercourse with the young princess. It is his work if she cleaves to the religious belief of her people, if she who is a Hellene to the last drop of blood loves Egypt, and is ready to make any sacrifice for her independence and grandeur. She is called 'the new Isis,' but Isis presides over ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bend renders him obedient to the gods and men of authority in his city: courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal, but because he is mortal. 'Tis a doctrine ruinous to all government, and much more hurtful than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that a religious belief is alone sufficient, and without conduct, to satisfy the divine justice. Use demonstrates to us a vast distinction ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville |
