"Polemical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoroughly with weapons than before. Soon afterwards, the intemperate zeal of another individual, armed to the teeth—not, however, like the martial sheriff and his forces, with arquebus and javelin, but with the still more deadly weapons of polemical theology,—was very near causing a general outbreak. A peaceful and not very numerous congregation were listening to one of their preachers in a field outside the town. Suddenly an unknown individual in plain ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that a new star in Danish literature ascended at this time. Heinrich Hertz published his "Letters from the Dead" anonymously: it was a mode of driving all the unclean things out of the temple. The deceased Baggesen sent polemical letters from Paradise, which resembled in the highest degree the style of that author. They contained a sort of apotheosis of Heiberg, and in part attacks upon Oehlenschl ger and Hauch. The old story about my orthographical errors was again revived; my name ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its stead conceded as possible only a provisional opinion sufficient for practical needs, presented mainly a polemical aspect, seeing that it caught every proposition of positive faith or of philosophic dogmatism in the meshes of its dilemmas. So far it stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists; except that, as may ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... readers the foregoing section will appear superfluous, polemical, sophistic—three bad things. I wrote it, and I let it stand, however, because it serves as preface to what I have to say in general about Michelangelo's ideal of form. He was essentially a Romantic as opposed to a Classic artist. That is to say, he sought ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is a "sort of contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare say, class ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... the mountains on foot; and after having made arrangements to that effect, I commenced sauntering along the road. Near Mountpleasant, I stopped to dine at the house of a Dutchman by descent. After dinner, the party adjourned, as is customary, to the bar-room, when divers political and polemical topics were canvassed with the usual national warmth. An account of his late Majesty's death was inserted in a Philadelphia paper, and happened to be noticed by one of the politicians present, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... Chandler, a learned prelate, and author of various polemical works. He had been raised to the see of Durham in 1730, as it was then said, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... he was a bitter satirist made bitter by the earnestness of his conviction, and ridiculing the gods only as a reductio ad absurdum of their pretensions, the fact is indubitable, that he ridiculed them in a polemical spirit, and not to excite the vulgar laughter of the vulgar crowd. But we, who do not believe in those gods, need no such warfare. To us they are beautiful images associated only with high thoughts, until the burlesque writer, in his beggary of wit and invention, takes them as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... reproached with his letter to Crellius. Grotius had written against Socinus, and Crellius, to vindicate his master, answered Grotius with a politeness and good-breeding seldom found in a polemical divine. Grotius thought it his duty to reply to him, and the measures he kept with this adversary were looked on by his enemies as a betraying of the truth. Here follows the letter, which has been so much talked of. "I was so far from being offended, most learned Crellius, with ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... remote and dimly known periods, critics are perhaps most apt to show their defects of temper, and Scott often commented on the acerbity of spirit which such studies seem to induce. "Antiquaries," he said, "are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and which are least valuable if the truth could be ascertained; and which therefore we would gladly have seen handled with more diffidence and better temper in proportion ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant trash," "impertinent puppy," and "audacity of impudence;" and other samples from the polemical vocabulary of the personage who, by the irony of fate, filled the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. The substance of Professor Wilson's attacks consisted in little more than the reiteration ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... style is so brilliant, that he discloses points of view which give it fresh interest to those who most cordially disagree with him. The brilliancy of his journalistic powers is not confined, however, to his leaders. The Standaard has another and more purely polemical feature, its 'Driestars'—short paragraphs, separated in the column by three asterisks, whence their name. These 'Driestars' are the pride and the wonder of the Dutch Press, on account of their trenchant, clever, courageous wording, a wording which is sure to incite the opponent to bitter ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... in those reverend Divines, mention'd in the foregoing Article, to use Irony, Drollery, Ridicule, and Satire, in any Case; or if the Fault lies in an exorbitant Use thereof, or in any particular Species of Drollery; as, for example, such Drollery as is to be found in the polemical Writings and Sermons of Dr. South; it is fit some Remedy should be employ'd for the Cure of this Evil. And the Remedy I would propose, should not be to have the Authors punish'd by the Magistrate, any more than for any other ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... importance than the struggle (for it is nothing better) to change those descriptions by means which put to hazard objects which, in my poor opinion, are of more importance to religion and to the state than all the polemical matter which has been agitated among men from the beginning of the world ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... almost thrown into the shade by the noble magnanimity and Christian heroism of the man in the hour of defeat and death. Without wishing, in any degree, to revive a controversy long maintained by writers of opposite political and polemical opinions, it may fairly be stated that Scottish history does not present us with a tragedy of parallel interest. That the execution of Montrose was the natural, nay, the inevitable, consequence of his capture, may be freely admitted ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... Lienhard Groland also frequently forgot the fresh salmon and young partridges, which were served in succession, to share this brilliant novelty. The Abbot of St. AEgidius, too, showed his pleasure in the fortunate discovery, and did not grow quieter until the conversation turned upon the polemical writing which Reuchlin had just finished. It had recently appeared in Frankfort under the title: The Eye Mirror, and assailed with crushing severity those who blamed him for opposing the proposal to destroy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was considering whether he should choose—to enter political life, it would certainly have made him a great power, possibly a leader, in that sphere. Next, what constantly appears in his writings, even those of the most polemical kind—a singular candour in recognising truths which might seen to militate against his own position, and a power of understanding and respecting his adversaries' opinions, if only they were strongly and conscientiously held. I remember his saying on one occasion that in his earlier experience ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... into Pehlevi in the reign of Chosroes, and from that watershed floated off into the literatures of all the great creeds. In Christianity alone, characteristically enough, one of them, the Barlaam book, was surcharged with dogma, and turned to polemical uses, with the curious result that Buddha became one of the champions of the Church. To divest the Barlaam-Buddha of this character, and see him in his original form, we must take a further journey and seek him in his home beyond ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... says, "George was the more plausible preacher, Robert the greater scholar; George the abler statesman, Robert the deeper divine. Gravity did frown in George, and smile in Robert." As one might infer from so strong an opponent of Laud, amid the large number of his published works most are polemical and Anti-Romish. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... destructive poetry of the mad, red-haired Australian poet, Lingwood Evans, appeared. Illowski's philosophy of anarchy was now complete, his belief in a social, aesthetic, ethical regeneration of the world, fixed. Yet he was no militant reformer; he would bear no polemical banners, wave no red flags. A composer of music, he endeavored to impart to his work articulate, emotion-breeding and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... polemical Erasmus nor the witty humorist had been lost in the erudite divine and the disillusioned reformer. The paper-warrior we would further gladly have dispensed with, but not the humorist, for many treasures of literature. But the two are linked ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... of showing that the most brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But, in any case, prudence should have restrained him from encountering Collier. The nonjuror was a man thoroughly fitted by nature, education, and habit, for polemical dispute. Congreve's mind, though a mind of no common fertility and vigour, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art of polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest effulgence, and setting them neatly in easy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mind was anything but polemical; he cared not to spend time even over those authors whose attacks on the outposts of science, or whose elaborate reconcilements of old and new, might have afforded him some support. On the other hand, he altogether ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of wisdom was in the taste of the time; witness Ralegh's Instructions to his Son, and that curious collection "of political and polemical aphorisms grounded on authority and experience," which he called by the name of the Cabinet Council. Harrington's Political Aphorisms, which came a generation later, are not moral sentences; they are a string of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... replied his nephew; and began to recite simply, but with feeling, the lines now so well known, but which had then obtained no celebrity, the fame of the author resting upon the basis rather of his polemical and political publications, than on the poetry doomed in after days to support the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... underlines the malicious content of this polemical pamphlet, a pungent libel on Swift's character that includes cutting observations on Swift's chief fiction as well. Obviously, the author's intent is to vilify Swift in retaliation for attacks on the writer's friends. Inspired by the publication of ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... most zealous of their supporters in this country cannot but consider as fair, while the result would be that the Question should not be granted at all under such guarantees; but I think this is scarce to be done by inflaming the topic with all mutual virulence of polemical discussion." ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... face took on all the different colors that are generally supposed to express anger. She had been attacked more openly than the others, it is true; but her attitude toward the prayer-class would go to show that she was naturally polemical. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Poland manifested at that time a tendency similar to the one which had prevailed during the Quadrennial Diet.[1] Scores of pamphlets and magazine articles discussed with polemical ardor the Jewish problem, the burning question of the day. The old Jew-baiter Stashitz, a member of the Warsaw Government who served on the Commission of Public Instruction and Religious Denominations, resumed his attacks on ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... these are strange times,' observed the President, 'when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there he no encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... communion was but for a favored few. Mr. Hale believed that the greater the sinfulness of the individual soul the greater the need and the greater the title to be taken into the fellowship and the brotherhood of the Saviour of souls. So, without polemical discussion, or any heat of controversy, he set the example which has been so widely followed. This meant a great deal more than the abolition of a ceremonial or the change of a rubric. It was an ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... this and a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Rizal, note 4, p. 82, for extracts and abstracts of a document written by Father Alexander Valignano, visitor of the Society of Jesus in Japan, dated October 9, 1598. This document states that three Jesuits were crucified by mistake with the others. The document is polemical in tone, and explains on natural grounds what the Franciscans considered and published as miraculous. The above letter to Morga is published by Santa Ines, ii, ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... the period, it would be fatuous to expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical character alone that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of art, which must choose its point of view, and include only the things that fall within a certain scope. One of Zola's polemical delusions was to suppose that a fiction ought not to be selective, and that his own fictions were not selective, but portrayed the fact without choice and without limitation. The fact was that he was always choosing, and always ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... need not repeat in detail those various points on which we have already dwelt. Spite of all the ghastly sufferings the War is bringing in its train, nay, in a sense, because of them, it has linked together the Empire in the closest bonds, allayed political and polemical strife, evoked a wealth of heroism, self-sacrifice, prayer, and benevolence, and braced up the ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... organized system of criticism which is science, than a brigand at large on a mountain has to the machinery of law and police, by which finally he will be hanged. Among such raiding theorists none at present are in quite such urgent need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the heedless general reader that every social failure is necessarily a "degenerate," and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that unfortunate ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words," which, however appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find a still more appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly ask those who have honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer lustre on this collection, by permitting me to present their lucubrations along with my own; and since it would be a manifest wrong to them to deprive their, by no means rare, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... been so fortunate as to discover an element, better still probably the most important of all the elements! It was certainly a rare good fortune! It couldn't help but make him the observed among observers. This may have occasioned the hue and cry against his polemical essays on government and church to become more frequent and in some instances ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... courtesy; the great man was the great lover, and the great author the romancer. It was from his own age that MILTON derived his greatest blemish—the introduction of school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the sovereign, reflected the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Majesty's hand. [Letter undated (datable "Lutzelburg, March, 1708,") is to be found entire, with all its adjuncts, in Erman, pp. 246-255. It was subsequently translated by Toland, and published here, as an excellent Polemical Piece,—entirely forgotten in our time ( A Letter against Popery by Sophia Charlotte, the late Queen of Prussia: Being, &c. &c. London, 1712). But the finest Duel of all was probably that between Beausobre and Toland himself ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... for polemical discussion, and we will therefore leave those painful arguments unrecorded. Suffice it, that Marie's intimate acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures in their original tongue—the language of her own people—gave her so decided an advantage over the old monk, that, after nearly ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... of his writings from whose main principles we do not dissent, there is hardly one which is not better fitted to sustain his character as a thinker than this last, in which the fatal charms of the goddess Necessity seem to have betrayed her champion into an unusual excess of polemical zeal, coupled, it must be added, with an unusual deficiency of ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... the preacher had adopted from motives of safety, and the monk from the common custom of the convent, had prevented the possibility of their hitherto recognizing each other in the opposite parts which they had been playing in the great polemical and political drama. But now the Sub-Prior exclaimed, "Henry Wellwood!" and the preacher replied, "William Allan!"—and, stirred by the old familiar names, and never-to-be-forgotten recollections of college studies ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... be written, but declined the controversy on the plea of reverence for the memory of his deceased master. This plea the King considered as the subterfuge of a vanquished disputant. [47] Had he been well acquainted with the polemical literature of the preceding century and a half, he would have known that the documents to which he attached so much value might have been composed by any lad of fifteen in the college of Douay, and contained nothing which had not, in the opinion of all Protestant divines, been ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... made Bishop of Chichester in 1605, Bishop of Ely in 1609, and moved to Winchester nine years later. As a pious and austere man, a powerful preacher (an "angel in the pulpit," he was called), a scholar versed in patristic literature, and a polemical writer, he is well known. Milton's elegy suffices to prove the great respect and admiration which he inspired in his contemporaries, and he held a considerable influence over James I.; but his "Manual of Devotion" is the only volume of all his writings that can fairly be said to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... on the site of the present Royal Hospital, and was founded by Matthew Sutcliffe, Dean of Exeter in 1610, as a school for polemical discussion. It was nicknamed by Laud "Controversy College." King James I. called it after himself, and gave all the timber required for building purposes from Windsor Forest free of charge, and, according to the manner of Princes in those ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... of that very work, wrote a deistical treatise in prose, bearing the same title, and ascribed it with great testimony of respect to "his much-honoured friend, John Dryden, Esquire."[3] Mr. Blount, living in close habits with Dryden, must have known perfectly well how to understand his polemical poem; and, had he supposed it was written under a deep belief of the truth of the English creed, can it be thought he would have inscribed to the author a tract against all revelation?[4] The inference ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... fate predicted against Babylon was delayed for five centuries, so as to lose all moral meaning as a divine infliction on the haughty city.—On the whole, it was clear to me, that it is a vain attempt to forge polemical weapons out of these old prophets, for the service of ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... he has only given the history of the Jews; and there is too much truth in the observation. He never got out of the fetters of his ecclesiastical education; the Jews were the centre round which he supposed all other nations revolved. His mind was polemical, not philosophic; a great theologian, he was but an indifferent historian. In one particular, indeed, his observations are admirable, and, at times, in the highest degree impressive. He never loses sight of the divine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... fourth, heaved a deep sigh, and turning to his companion said, "I wish that note was out of my book." Had he foreseen the noise his several friends continued to make, even after his death, about this purely imaginary offence on the part of Adam Smith, the poet would not improbably wish the polemical prefaces out of his book. Smith did not think much of Mickle's translation of the Lusiad, holding the French version to be much superior,[279] but if he happened to express this unfavourable opinion ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, that snarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Goethe was only sixteen years old. It derives additional interest from the fact of its being the very earliest piece of his that is preserved. The few other pieces included by Goethe under the title of Religion and Church are polemical, and devoid of interest to the ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... of those mystifications which make the French polemical literature of the eighteenth century the despair of bibliographers, Diderot cites as his authority a Life of Saunderson, by Dr. Inchlif. He sets forth the title with great circumstantiality, but no such book exists or ever did exist. The Royal Society of London, however, took the jest of fathering ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... portly, rosy, well-fed parson, whom I observed ogling several mouldy polemical writers through an eyeglass. He soon contrived to slip on the voluminous mantle of one of the old fathers, and having purloined the gray beard of another, endeavored to look exceedingly wise; but the smirking commonplace of his countenance set at naught all the trappings ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the POLEMICAL handling of the metaphysical subjects. We owe to the Greeks the study of philosophy through methodised debate; and the state of scientific knowledge in the age of the early Athenian schools was favourable to that ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... every thing, has had the daring effrontery to vomit forth a mass of rancorous scurrility against the whole Dissenting body, especially its teachers, applying to them epithets proscribed in almost every species of polemical warfare, except that carried on by Carlile and his party, detailing disgusting anecdotes thinly veiled in the decency of a Latin translation, excluding them from the pale of Christianity, and proclaiming that "the curse of God rests heavily upon them!" It is to be regretted that ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... reducible to any Mood or Figure in Aristotle. It was called the Argumentum Basilinum (others write it Bacilinum or Baculinum) which is pretty well express'd in our English Word Club-Law. When they were not able to confute their Antagonist, they knock'd him down. It was their Method in these polemical Debates, first to discharge their Syllogisms, and afterwards to betake themselves to their Clubs, till such Time as they had one Way or other confounded their Gainsayers. There is in Oxford a narrow [Defile, [1] (to make use ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... time he supplied the political ability needed by a deputy who had become a minister, but, convinced of his disloyalty, he overthrew him, only to restore him for a short time. He once more entered into polemical controversy; saw the newspapers which had sparkled with his forceful, high-minded criticism die; and lived miserably upon a daily allowance of thirty sous, earned by copying for the Palais. Marcas lived at that time, 1836, in the garret of a furnished house on rue Corneille. His thankless ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... unopened packet—marked "Religious Society's Tracts;" it served as a stand for a large telescope, whose clumsiness betrayed the ingenuity of home manufacture. The theological contents of the library was a vast mass of polemical literature, orthodox and heterodox, including all faiths, all variations of sect. Mahomet and Swedenborg, Calvin and the Talmud, lay side by side; and on the farthest shelf was the great original of ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... being dedicated to him, if he were now living, I cannot, of course, say. I never heard him speak of the late Mr. Darwin in any but terms of warm respect, and am by no means sure that he would have been well pleased at an attempt to connect him with a book so polemical as the present. On the other hand, a promise made and received as mine was, cannot be set aside lightly. The understanding was that my next book was to be dedicated to Mr. Tylor; I have written the best ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Monday at ten, when it passed without any alteration. And just the week after, he went over to Fife, where he died. He was not full ten years in the ministry. He had all his sermons in England, part polemical, part practical prepared for the press, and but one copy of them, which he told the printer's wife he used to deal with, and bade her have a care of them. And she was prevailed on by some money from the Sectaries, who were mauled by him, to suppress them. He was very clear in all his ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... imaginations, Cain is only a polemical controversy, the doctrines of which might have been better discussed in the pulpit of a college chapel. As a poem it is greatly unequal; many passages consist of mere metaphysical disquisition, but there are others of wonderful scope and energy. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... polemical expression beamed from Father Beret's eyes, and a very expert physiogomist might have suspected duplicity from certain lines about the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... human nature, he can hardly distinguish or disentangle the appeal to his reason from the lure to his interests—here a text, and there a dowry!—here Protestantism, there Jemima!—Own, my friend, that the soberest casuist would see double under the inebriating effects produced by so mixing his polemical liquors. Appeal, my good Mr. Dale, from Philip drunken to Philip sober!—from Riccabocca intoxicated with the assurance of your excellent lady, that he is about to be "the happiest of men," to Riccabocca accustomed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... that the leading features of his doctrine on this subject were already fixed. With it should be read the chapter in the Large Catechism (1519), and the treatise Von der Wiedertaufe (1538).[2] The treatment is not polemical, but objective and practical. The Anabaptist controversy was still in the future. No objections against Infant Baptism or problems that it suggested were pressing for attention. Nothing more is attempted than to explain in a very plain and practical way how every one who has been ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... their opposite sects, is a certain proof that they have never reached any serious persuasion with regard to these remote and sublime subjects. Even those who are the most impatient of contradiction in other controversies, are mild and moderate in comparison of polemical divines; and wherever a man's knowledge and experience give him a perfect assurance in his own opinion, he regards with contempt, rather than anger, the opposition and mistakes of others. But while men zealously maintain what they neither clearly comprehend nor entirely ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume |
