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More "Irreligion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was that slander against the university for irreligion was confined almost entirely to very narrow circles, of waning influence; and my hope is that, as its formative ideas have been thus welcomed by various leaders of thought, and have filtered down through the press among the people at ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... thus fluctuated, during his whole reign, between irreligion, which he more openly professed, and Popery, to which he retained a secret propensity, his brother the duke of York, had zealously adopted all the principles of that theological party. His eager temper and narrow understanding made him a thorough convert, without any ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... Canada. So the call of the West is like the frantic S.O.S. on the high seas, that snaps from the masts of a ship in danger. It is the cry of thousands of Catholics sinking into the sea of unbelief and irreligion. In the wreckage there is still a gleam of hope. Great numbers yet cling to a remnant of the old faith of their fathers; it will keep them afloat until helping hands come to ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... domination of conquering races, and the practice of attributing to all reformers designs against property and its owners, though the changes they recommend may really be of a nature calculated to make the tenure of property more secure than ever. Even the charge of irreligion has not been found more effective against the advocates of improvement or change than that of Agrarianism,—by which is meant hostility to existing property institutions, and a determination, if possible, to subvert them. Of the two, the charge of Agrarianism is the more serious, as it implies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... one think that irreligion is advocated in this book. With respect to religious tenets, I wish to observe that I am a member of the Church of England, into whose communion I was baptised, and to which my forefathers belonged. Its being the religion in which I was baptised, and of my forefathers, would be a strong inducement ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... senseless ambition of immortalizing their names by edifices of an enormous magnitude, and a boundless expense. It is remarkable, that those stately pyramids, which have so long been the admiration of the whole world, were the effect of the irreligion and merciless ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... side with the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventura, there was working among those who influenced fashion and opinion, among the great men, and the men to whom learning was a profession, a spirit of scepticism and irreligion almost monstrous for its time, which found its countenance in Frederick's refined and enlightened court. The genius of the great doctors might have kept in safety the Latin schools, but not the free and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been noted in these newer institutions. While the theological way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with the American colleges and universities during the last forty-five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only as regards morals, but as regards ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... each decade has its poet Bunn," remarked Amarinth. "We have our Bunn in Mr. Joseph Bennett, but where are his plums? Religion dwells in the arts, Mr. Smith, as irreligion so often, unhappily, lurks in ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Scrofula,' 'On the Carpenter Bee (Apis Centuncularis),' 'Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees,' 'Contributions to ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... with which Burns sometimes spoke of things sacred, had been obliquely touched upon by his good and anxious friend Mrs. Dunlop: he pleads guilty of folly, but not of irreligion.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the offer of a military post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a-posteriori argument, and was brief, perhaps eloquent. Some passages of his discourse might pass unchallenged in the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding His abundance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... what is recollected of his conversations, it appears that he often explicitly declared that, if powerful measures were not adopted to prevent it, a revolution in France would take place, both in church and state. He thought irreligion, and a general corruption of manners, gained ground everywhere. On the decay of piety in France, he once mentioned in confidence to the editor a circumstance so shocking, that even after what has publicly ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... is exchanged for learning, obstinacy for docility, and precipitation for patience, rashness for prudence, lying for truth, cowardice for bravery, and avarice for generosity, tyranny for justice, irreligion for piety, deceitfulness for sincerity, hatred for affection, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... recognized. We were following the King at a slight distance and could judge very well of it. It was easy to read in all eyes that the people were hurt at seeing the King humbly following the priests. There was in that not so much irreligion as jealousy and animosity toward the role played by ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... characters of the actors were loose, exceedingly so; and if the audience could learn something of human nature there, it was only the debasing side of it. It is generally true that actors lend their influence to intemperance, licentiousness, and irreligion. They do not patronize Sabbath schools, churches, and other Christian institutions, but they patronize bars, gambling saloons, and houses of ill-fame. Many of those men even who go to the theatre, would be quite unwilling to introduce actors to the society ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... of Boccaccio's gives so admirable an answer to the charge of irreligion which some might make against us if they mistook our intentions, that as we shall not offer any other reply, we have not hesitated to present it entire as it stands to the eyes of ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the charge of atheism and irreligion are those so often heard against monism, that it destroys the poetry of life and fails to satisfy the spiritual wants of human nature; we are told, in particular, that aesthetics—certainly a most important department both in theoretical ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... the Unitarians were called, after him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to "fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... my sorrow, and innumerable protestations of everlasting regard, he at last found that I was more affected with the loss of my innocence, than the danger of my fame, and that he might not be disturbed by my remorse, began to lull my conscience with the opiates of irreligion. His arguments were such as my course of life has since exposed me often to the necessity of hearing, vulgar, empty, and fallacious; yet they at first confounded me by their novelty, filled me with doubt ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... the simple, touching story of Alvira has brought a charm and a balm. Seeking to impart to others its interest, its amusement, and its moral, we cast it afloat on the sea of literature, to meet, probably, a premature grave in this age of irreligion and presumptuous denial of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... enter one of these sanctuaries without reflecting on the rapid progress of irreligion among a people who, six months before, were, on their knees, adoring the effigies which, at that period, they were eager to mutilate and destroy. Iron crows and sledge-hammers were almost in a state of requisition. In the beginning, it was a contest who should first aim a blow at the nose of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... continuing their painful struggle in you. You were too young at the time, you couldn't know what went on. But I knew them both very wretched: he, wretched through her, who treated him as if he were one of the damned; and she, suffering through him, tortured by his irreligion. When he died, struck down by an explosion in this very room, she took it to be the punishment of God. Yet, what an honest man he was, with a good, great heart, what a worker, seeking for truth alone, and desirous of the love and happiness of all! Since ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Church!" exclaimed the missionary, crushing the paper in his excitement. "If the ministers of God become the creatures of the king, despotism and irreligion must inevitably ensue. How long will virtue be accounted a crime? Shall every faithful shepherd be supplanted, to make room for the wolf of lay investiture, the instrument of a lustful tyrant, raised by simony, and upheld ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... in the Conservative direction, for it promised religious liberty. There was to be no favour to churches, but also no persecution. Practically, the advantage was for the Christian part of the population, and irreligion, though not proscribed, was discouraged. The Revolution appeared to be turning backwards, and to seek its friends among those who had acquired their habits of life and thought under the fallen order. The change was undoubted; and it was a change imposed by the will of one man, unsupported ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... are of indispensable consideration to the legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in that general and moral view, in which ignorance in the lower orders is beheld the cause of their vice, irreligion, and consequent misery, that the subject is attempted, imperfectly and somewhat desultorily, to be illustrated in ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Domesday, he supposes a Celtic saint named Chebran or Kevran. Tin has never been successfully worked in this parish, and there was a local saying that "no metal will run within sound of St. Keverne's bell," supported by a tradition that the saint cursed the district because of the irreligion of its people. Piran, the patron saint of tinners, would hardly have called down such a curse, though he might have done so if greatly provoked. But if not metalliferous, much of the parish is exceptionally ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... degradation in the life of irreligion. The things which the wanderer tried to live on were not husks only. They were husks which the swine did eat. Degradation means the application of a thing to purposes lower than that for which it was intended. It is degradation to a man to live on husks, because these are not his true food. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... badly in the kingdom before he ascended the throne. Although it was only about twenty years since the death of Solomon, irreligion and vice had corrupted the nation. The truth is that evil spreads faster than good in this world, which is evidence that it has fallen. We have embodied this truth in a familiar proverb—"Ill weeds grow apace." If we neglect a garden, we are soon confronted with weeds, not with flowers. Valuable ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... tenderness, a fine eye for nature, and a delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterwards displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ... the renascence. In her irreligion, as well as in her brilliancy and fancy, Elizabeth might fitly be called the child or product of the Pagan renascence or new birth, as the return to the freedom of classic literature, so powerful in the England ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... I should think, as nearly a freethinker as anyone could be whose mind seldom turned upon the subject. She went to church, but disliked equally those who aired either religion or irreligion. I remember once hearing her press a late well-known philosopher to write a novel instead of pursuing his attacks upon religion. The philosopher did not much like this, and dilated upon the importance of showing people the folly of much ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... whole enchantment, and leaves the reader in a state of cold and anxious scepticism. This most lame and impotent conclusion has been variously imputed to the taste or irreligion of Virgil; but, according to the more elaborate interpretation of Bishop Warburton, the descent to hell is not a false, but a mimic scene; which represents the initiation of AEneas, in the character of a law-giver, to the Eleusinian mysteries. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... enter in,' whether to join in the worship or to disturb it. It was drawing a different line from that which had been fixed by the recent Parliament, whose Acts also the new Queen had evaded ratifying. Knox's passion against 'idolatry,' beyond all other forms of false religion or irreligion, was fully shared by the mass of his followers, and he tells us that, on this occasion, he worked in private 'rather to mitigate, yea to sloken, that fervency that God had kindled in others.' But in the pulpit 'next Sunday' he said that 'one Mass was more fearful to ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... we cannot if we would. That old prophecy, however long delayed, still finds an involuntary echo in our souls. And now, in this hope of a true and brotherly society, its fulfilment seems at hand. Say it is enthusiasm, say it is a mistake, say it is irreligion, if you will, and still I reply that the time is not distant. It is in the combined order, where men are held together by inward laws only, and not by outward constraint and outward necessities, that the kingdom of God is to come down and possess ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... swarmed with ruffians; and brutal sports and brutal language existed to a frightful degree. Criminals were hanged, five or six together, at Tyburn. Gibbets existed at all the cross-roads throughout the country. The people were grossly ignorant, and altogether neglected. Scepticism and irreligion prevailed, until Wesley and Whitfield sprang up to protest against formalism and atheism. They were pelted with rotten eggs, sticks, and stones. A Methodist preacher was ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... but a slight acquaintance with these compositions to enable the reader to recognize in the Galdrakinna of the Scalds the Stryga or witch-woman of more classical climates. In the northern ideas of witches there was no irreligion concerned with their lore. On the contrary, the possession of magical knowledge was an especial attribute of Odin himself; and to intrude themselves upon a deity, and compel him to instruct them in what they desired to know, was accounted ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... of late shown much less laxity of opinion than in his younger and more argumentative days; and there was little comfort in supposing that these were not real honest doubts at all, only apologies for general carelessness and irreligion. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... living a life so pure and strict that, young as he was, men held him to be the equal of the aged Zacharias.— He could not bear that judgment so unjust should go forth against us, and, moved with indignation, he asked leave to defend his brethren, and to prove that there was in them no kind of irreligion or impiety. Those present at the tribunal, amongst whom he was known and celebrated, cried out against him, and the governor himself, enraged at so just a demand, asked him no more than this question, 'Art thou a Christian?' ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... him in Jerusalem; reverence for Mosaic rites was discouraged. Both by his example and his active exertions, Jason, the unworthy successor of Aaron, sought to obliterate the distinction between Jew and Gentile, and bring all to one uniformity of worldliness and irreligion. In the words of the historian:[1] "The example of a person in his commanding position drew forth and gave full scope to the more lax dispositions which existed among the people, especially among ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in Brooklyn, Says: "The American theater is a concrete institution, to be judged as a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We, therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this testimony: "Being aware of the fact that the drama, like every thing ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success in life to something out of joint in the thoughts and customs of society, rather than to their own shortcomings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way did them ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... did not—the whole language might have been preserved to us, and the Cornish as a body might have been of the Church of England, instead of remaining (more or less) of the old religion until the perhaps unavoidable neglect of its authorities caused them to drift into the outward irreligion from which John Wesley rescued them. {12} But it is said by Scawen and by Bishop Gibson in his continuation of Camden’s Britannia, that they desired that the Prayer-book might not be translated, and, though the statement ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... bad, is not the worst; my father deceives himself in the hopes of the very child he has brought into the world; he suffers his house to be the seat of drunkenness, riot, and irreligion, who seduces, almost in my sight, the menial servant, converses with the prostitute, and corrupts the wife! Thus I, who from my earliest dawn of reason was taught to think that at my approach every eye sparkled with pleasure, or was dejected as conscious of superior charms, am excluded from society, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... John Miller, in 1695, speaks of "the wickedness and irreligion of the inhabitants, which abounds in all parts of the province, and appears in so many shapes, constituting so many sorts of sin, that I can scarce tell which to begin withal." The reverend ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... the root of the social structure, and tend, so far as I am able to judge of their tendency, to throw society into entire confusion and to renew, under the sanction of religion, scenes of anarchy and license that have generally hitherto been the offspring of the rankest infidelity and irreligion." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... battle of existence that really occupied his full attention. He would cling to it until the last snap of the thin string. This cavern of oblivion that was awaiting him, that he must enter—it was black and now more than ever his deep, simple irreligion refused to let fairy tales pacify him with the belief that beyond it was everlasting daylight. Scepticism was not only in his conscious thought but in the very ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... Shantung Protestant University, with its union of the best educational methods and the highest ideals of Christian character, will do more for the real enlightenment of China than a dozen provincial colleges where gambling, irreligion and opium smoking are freely tolerated and a failure to worship the tablet of Confucius is ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... requires me to read and interpret my Bible. In it I find such touching paragraphs as, 'Cursed be Canaan!' Canaan is of course the negro slave of our Southern States. Curse him! then, I say. Let us have no weak and illogical attempts to elevate his condition. Such sentimentalism is rank irreligion. I view the negro as a man permanently upon the rack, who is to be punished just as much as he will bear without diminishing his pecuniary value. And the allotted method of punishment is hard work, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... elsewhere, attracted and refuted those communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and to say to them, "You are communists, you desire to abolish property." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of personal interest and of pillage, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that great Body of Writers who have employed their Wit and Parts in propagating Vice and Irreligion, I did not question but I should be treated as an odd kind of Fellow that had a mind to appear singular in my Way of Writing: But the general Reception I have found, convinces me that the World ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... All influences conspired to elevate the man whom no one could hope successfully to rival. Revolt was madness, and treason absurdity. Nor did the Emperors attempt to check the gigantic social evils of the empire. They did not seek to prevent irreligion, luxury, slavery, and usury, the encroachments of the rich upon the poor, the tyranny of foolish fashions, demoralizing sports and pleasures, money-making, and all the follies which lax principles of morality allowed; they fed the rabble with corn, oil, and wine, and thus encouraged idleness and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... this view of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... himself on his heterodoxy is often equally guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies himself with the cant phrase of irreligion. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... the degeneration of the church, both in its own organization and in public esteem. The upper classes of society, as a rule, were lukewarm and insincere in any form of belief. Statesman and nobles in the most prominent positions combined professed irreligion with open profligacy, while the lower classes were left, through the indolence and selfishness of the clergy, almost without religious teaching. Montesquieu found that people laughed when religion was mentioned ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... he had braved the cholera with sacrilegious impiety. In consequence of the indisposition that kept me at home, and of another circumstance, I only received to-day the certificate of the death of this victim of intemperance and irreligion. I must proclaim it to the praise of his reverence"—pointing to Rodin—"that he told me, the worst enemies of the descendants of that infamous renegade would be their own bad passions, and that the might look to them as our allies against the whole impious ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... youth Critias had been a companion of Socrates, and his later conduct was used as a proof that Socrates corrupted his surroundings. But it is always Critias's political crimes which are adduced in this connexion, not his irreligion. On the other hand, posterity looked upon him as the pure type of tyrant, and the label atheist therefore suggested itself on the ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horrour; the wise and the pious caught the alarm; and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... great the Mischiefs are that spring from thence; which if a Man should take a View of, it would perhaps, be one of the most Melancholy Prospects that ever he beheld. To look into our Modern Plays, and there to see the Differences of Good and Evil confounded, Prophaneness, Irreligion, and Unlawful Love, made the masterly Stroaks of the fine Gentleman; Swearing, Cursing, and Blaspheming, the Graces of his Conversation; and Unchristian Revenge, to consummate the Character of the Hero; Sharpness and ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... in 1648. His property had before this been confiscated, but he had secured favourable terms by an arrangement with the Parliament. This time it was again confiscated, and he narrowly escaped death by flight to the Continent. He was a prominent member of the exiled Court; but his open irreligion, his flighty character, and his continual plotting as an adherent of Prince Rupert, alienated him from the party of Hyde. His wit and personal charms won for him many friends, but his life was one perpetual succession of reckless schemes and bitter quarrels, in which his ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... for our Lady's sake, and for the honour of the white lily, Smockface may bundle himself between decks—till the next time that we pump ship; and then he must over board with the bilge water. We must be charitable now and then for our Lady's sake. But let us have no irreligion. Let all be handsome, lovely, Bourbonish, and religious. What the d—-l! An irreligious dog aboard Captain le Harnois? But I shall overhaul his principles: for that's what my commission says: else ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... had on his conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and hypocrisy." ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... against success: the root of failure lies in irreligion. Pride, conceit, disobedience, malice, evil-speaking, covetousness, idolatry, vice, oppression, injustice, and lack of truth and honor fight more strongly against one's career than any other foe. No sin is without its lash; no experience of evil but has its rebound. To expect a higher moral insight ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... as a cloak for their personal ends. Absalom talking about his vow is a spectacle that might have made the most unsuspecting sure that there was something in the wind. Such a use of religious observances shows more than anything else could do, the utter irreligion of the man who can make it. A son rebelling against his father is an ugly sight, but rebellion disguised as religion adds to the ugliness. David suspects nothing; or, if he does, is too broken to resist, and, perhaps glad at any sign of grace in his ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have recourse to, namely, the square cap they wear on their head, which they take off, and put on again with inconceivable rapidity. One of them imputed to Voltaire, and particularly to Rousseau, the irreligion of the age. He threw his cap into the middle of the pulpit, charging it to represent Jean Jacques, and in this quality he harangued it, saying; "Well, philosopher of Geneva, what have you to object to my arguments?" ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... pension; but both his works were condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular synonym for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist philosophy must necessarily have whether on ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... may be met by saying that its chief influence was exerted on those whose habits of dissipation, immorality, and irreligion kept, them aloof from the religious instruction of the priest. But to those who know the Irish heart, it is not necessary to say that many a man addicted to drink is far from being free from the impressions of ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... agency is allied with them. After much sad brooding, I cannot but conclude that a fervent religious faith is the only thing that will give complete security; and it will be a bitter day for England and the world if ever flippancy and irreligion become general. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... ripe fruit of republican civilization, which, in times of danger, can with safety and security overleap, for the moment, the mere forms of law, in order to secure its beneficial results. They seem to resemble each other; but are as wide apart as irreligion and that highest religious life which, transcending all external observances, seems to the mere religious formalist ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... energies. If Providence were to unfold to us all the horrours which we have escaped; if all the blood which would have followed the assassin's dagger were to roll in reeking streams before us; if the full display of irreligion, flight, massacre, confiscation, imprisonment and famine, which would have graced a revolutionary triumph in these realms, were to be unbarred to our view, how should we recoil from the ghastly spectacle! With what emotions of admiration and ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... husband, and the gay husband, though his gayety may not be commendable, will always accuse his wife if she lacks a social disposition to a great extent. The religious wife will never excuse a tendency to irreligion in her husband, and though he may be far from being immoral, she is unhappy if he does not participate in her devotions. The one devoted to children will never be happy with one having a natural repugnance for them. In this ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in—or disgraced by the irreligion, and contempt of things holy, found in the writings of scores of French authors whom we could name, were they worth the naming. It is undeniable that the ingenious plots of his very entertaining books turn, for the most part, on matters difficult to touch upon with propriety, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world,"—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... experiences; insurrection was putting the hand to the plough; actual rebellion, fighting the good fight; and regicide, doing the great work of the Lord. This vocabulary became grievously unfashionable at the Reformation, and was at once swept away by the torrent of irreligion, blasphemy, and indecency, which were at that period deemed necessary to secure conversation against the imputation of disloyalty and fanaticism. The court of Cromwell, if lampoons can be believed, was not much less vicious than ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... a dark closet that must be explored before men could receive the message of religion and self-control. So in 1843 he organized the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, which ever since has remembered how Hartley found alcoholism back of irreligion, and how back of alcoholism and poverty and ignorant indifference he found indecent housing, unsanitary streets, unwholesome ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... age, one sort of 'culture' is more favourable to the occurrence of, or belief in, these phenomena than another. Accidental circumstances, an increase, or a decrease of knowledge and education, an access of religion, or of irreligion, a fashion in intellectual temperament, may bring these experiences more into notice at one moment than at another, but they are always said to recur, at uncertain intervals, and are ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the cast of Athens, wisdom with madness, rage for novelty with a bigotry for antiquity, the politeness of a monarchy with the roughness of a republick, refinement with coarseness, independence with slavery, haughtiness with servile compliance, severity of manners with debauchery, a kind of irreligion with piety. We shall do this in reading; as, in travelling through different nations, we make ourselves masters of their characters by combining their different appearances, and reflecting upon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... bitter, than Ben-Hur. He was stirred by recollections of his countrymen, their triumphs and vicissitudes, their history the history of God. The city was of their building, at once a lasting testimony of their crimes and devotion, their weakness and genius, their religion and their irreligion. Though he had seen Rome to familiarity, he was gratified. The sight filled a measure of pride which would have made him drunk with vainglory but for the thought, princely as the property was, it did not any longer belong to his countrymen; the worship in the Temple was by permission ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... enter into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justification, even though I regard it as justifiable. In my religious experience I am taking something for granted; in other words I ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... devoid of living faith. All the exercises and practices of the Christian life participate in the baneful effects. Prayer and the use of the sacraments are either seriously neglected or gradually given up, and the blighting influences of irreligion rapidly spread and overrun all the departments of life. The view one takes of God, the faith or lack of faith and trust one has in Providence, have their effect on the character and give a direction to all one's ways of thinking, feeling, acting, in regard to the world we live in, in ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... foundation of Rome, and raised altars to Romulus, but openly expressed his contempt for the Christian religion, which this visionary declared was only fit for barbarians; but this extravagance and irreligion, observes Niceron, were common with many of the learned of those times, and this very Pomponius was at length formally accused of the crime of changing the baptismal names of the young persons whom he taught for pagan ones! "This was the taste of the times," says the author we have just ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of these lives of 'Wits and Beaux' are, it is admitted, just: vice is censured; folly rebuked; ungentlemanly conduct, even in a beau of the highest polish, exposed; irreligion finds no toleration under gentle names—heartlessness no palliation from its being the way of the world. There is here no separate code allowed for men who live in the world, and for those who live out of it. The task of pourtraying such characters as the 'Wits and Beaux of Society' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... to justify our faith in the principles of spiritual life—may yet, as it becomes aware of its own nature and the might which dwells in it, find beauty and goodness, nay, God himself, in the world. We should at least hesitate to condemn man to choose between irreflective ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle. Poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have something to tell the world that science, which is often ignorant of ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... fiction—romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... added, upon the head of his irreligion, that to Minerva, who once offered him her advice, he replied with indignation: "Trouble not yourself about my conduct; of that I shall give a good account; you have nothing to do but reserve your favor and assistance ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... occupation of "coaching." He could not be said to be absolutely unintellectual. As he had not profited by the experience of life, so he had not been contaminated by it. He was moral, chiefly in a negative sense, and was not inclined to irreligion. The faith of his parents sat, perhaps, uncomfortably upon him; and he had not sufficient strength of mind to adopt a new pattern. He was in short an amiable mathematician, and a feeble classic; and I think that is all that could be said of ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... of his brother, and grieved for his irreligion, but hoped that grace would eventually bring him back to the fold of the Church. His brother encouraged him in his hopes, while laughing at them in private, but as they were both sensible men they never ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Europe; and so strong were they, that his life was continually in danger. Lord Brougham, in his "Men of Letters of the Time of George III.." says:—"Voltaire's name is so intimately connected in the minds of all men with Infidelity, in the minds of most men with irreligion, and, in the minds of all who are not well-informed, with these qualities alone, that whoever undertakes to write his life and examine his claims to the vast reputation which all the hostile feelings excited by him against ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... ferocious sermon, however, and the wincing Pepperalls felt that it was aimed directly at them. When Doctor Brearley denounced modern parents for their own godlessness and the irreligion of their homes, William took the blame to himself. On his way home he announced his determination to resume the long-neglected family custom of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Epicureans entered, as others, into the temples. They did so; they defied all subscription; they defied all sorts of conformity; there was no subscription to which they were not ready to set their hands, no ceremonies they refused to practise; they made it a principle of their irreligion outwardly to conform to any religion. These atheists eluded all that you could do: so will all freethinkers forever. Then you suffer, or the weakness of your law has suffered, those great dangerous animals to escape notice, whilst you have nets that entangle the poor fluttering silken wings ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... country dancing: the young man, 'too old and too young to be in love,' was to make his way as a wit. He did so, in the approved way in that day of irreligion, in a political squib. On July 14th, 1742, he writes in his Notes, 'I wrote the "Lessons for the Day;" the "Lessons for the day" being the first and second chapters of the "Book of Preferment,"' Horace was proud ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the public. We want such men to rescue this enlightened age from general irreligion." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... virulence, yet he imparted his kindness to those who were not supposed to favour his principles. He was an early encourager of Pope, and was at once the friend of Addison and of Granville. He is accused of voluptuousness and irreligion; and Pope, who says that "if ever there was a good Christian, without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth," seems not able to deny what he is angry to hear and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... provocative of philosophic scorn, is its forwardness of faith, its eagerness of acquiescence; but to this sort of reproach I expect to be able to show that none are more obnoxious than those very philosophers by whom it is most freely cast. That nothing is more unphilosophical than uncompromising irreligion, nothing more credulous than its credulity, no other beliefs more monstrous than those by which it strives to fill up the void created by its own unbelief: this is my present thesis, and this I propound, not unaware what formidable antagonists I am thereby challenging, but not without ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... all moral or physical distinctions. But if, as I think may be demonstrated, the purposes of even this life, viewing the whole, are subverted by practical rules built upon this ignoble base, I may be allowed to doubt whether woman was created for man: and though the cry of irreligion, or even atheism be raised against me, I will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses's beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I could not believe what my reason ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... the gods on human affairs: ix. 1, 11, 'cum rerum humanarum maximum momentum sit, quam propitiis rem, quam adversis agant dis.' Superior to the gods is necessitas (ix. 4, 16), and fortuna is also powerful (ix. 17, 3; v. 37, 1). He condemns the irreligion of his own day (x. 40, 10, 'iuvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus'), cf. iii. 20, 5; viii. 11, 1. He retains the old belief in prodigies and portents, every war being introduced by a list of them, but recognizes that many reported instances were fictitious: ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... smile of calm superiority at this vehement outburst of natural irreligion. 'You must certainly be bored to death with it all, Selah,' he said, laughingly. 'What a funny sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people use to render your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... of these institutions are not satisfied with providing a remedy for the evil which exists, but they do much to prevent the ills of irreligion and immorality, by supplying seamen with instructive and devotional books, and by employing agents to go among them and to tell them where the offices of religion are performed. The countenance which admirals and captains, prelates and ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... then: go to your doom, both of you. There is only one religion for me: that which my soul knows to be true; but even irreligion has one tenet; and that is the sacredness of marriage. You two are on the verge of deadly sin. Do ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... that religion is so uncommon among the Parisians, as to awaken the surprise of all candid observers; that gallantry is so common as to create no remark, and to be considered as a matter of course. With us, at least, the converse of the proposition prevails: it is the man professing irreligion who would be remarked and reprehended in England; and, if the second-named vice exists, at any rate, it adopts the decency of secrecy and is not made patent and notorious to all the world. A French gentleman thinks no more of proclaiming that he has a mistress ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... When I think of the mischief she's always done here, by her example and her irreligion—I can't forgive her. I don't believe you'll make any impression on Mr. Freeland; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen—each severally in his own age—with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken, concerning each of which some excellent writer may be cited to prove that it had reached a maximum of atrocity, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... of the word "wherefore," as connected with the passage in the Psalm, "Wherefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee," for their own purposes, let these novices in Scripture and masters in irreligion know that, as before, the word "wherefore" does not imply reward of virtue or conduct in the Word, but the reason why he came down to us, and of the Spirit's anointing, which took place in him for our sakes. For he says not, "Wherefore he anointed thee in order to thy being God or King ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... are infallibly produced on the minds of their hearers, after they come to detect the frauds and falsehoods which the parsons inculcate on them when children; but they are in the cause, and morally responsible for that doubt, irreligion, and downright infidelity which are the well-known characteristics of the male and female youth of our great country, and which threaten such disastrous ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Clarke and Jortin and Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed—the great parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with amazement ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... spreading rapidly, and which, sooner or later, we must look steadily in the face. Nor is it confined to those who are its direct victims. Those who still cling, and cling firmly, to belief are in an indirect way touched by it. Religion cannot fail to be changed by the neighbourhood of irreligion. If it is persecuted, it may burn up with greater fervour; but if it is not persecuted, it must in some measure be chilled. Believers and unbelievers, separated as they are by their tenets, are yet in these days mixed together in all the acts and relations of life. They are united by ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... had the ostrich was having the feathers that were not falling. He did use something. He saw the difference when it was a turkey. He needed all that inclination. He said some were useful. He did not mind irreligion. He had ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... fraud in all its shapes, and some species of lying, are manifestly, and in an eminent degree, injurious to social happiness. How different accordingly, in the moral scale, is the place they hold, from that which is assigned to idolatry, to general irreligion, to swearing, drinking, fornication, lasciviousness, sensuality, excessive dissipation; and in particular circumstances, to pride, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... secretly a Papist, had sold his country for gold to England's hereditary foe, whose army he had engaged to come and crush the last remnants of national freedom, should his Protestant people dare to resist the monarch's traitorous proceedings. The profligacy and irreligion of the court was widely imitated by all classes, till patriots, watching with gloomy forebodings the downward progress of their country, began to despair of her future fate. Such was the state of things ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... insisted on the sin and sacrilege of sodomy as the ground for its punishment.[269] It was doubtless largely as a religious offense that the Code Napoleon omitted to punish it. The French law makes a clear and logical distinction between crime on the one hand, vice and irreligion on the other, only concerning itself with the former. Homosexual practices in private, between two consenting adult parties, whether men or women, are absolutely unpunished by the Code Napoleon and by French law of today. Only under three conditions does the homosexual act come under the cognizance ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Lucretius' irreligion is too strong, For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food; I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong, Although no doubt his real intent was good, For speaking out so plainly in his song, So much indeed as to be downright rude; And then what proper person can be partial To all ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... there is a sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy. That part of the poem is representative. It is the end of such a society as is drawn in The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church. That ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Irreligion had produced an enormous public evil. The religious laws having been abolished at the same time that the civil laws were overthrown, the minds of men were entirely upset; they no longer knew either to what to cling or where ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... him neither moderation nor devotion, his new strength turned his head. He forsook the law of the Lord. The dreary series, so often illustrated in the history of Israel, came into operation. Prosperity produced irreligion; irreligion brought chastisement; chastisement brought repentance; repentance brought the removal of the invader—and then, like a spring released, back went king and nation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... (a part of her creed) cannot be obtained in France but through sentiments due to Catholicism, and none of you are Catholics! Here am I, a priest, obliged to leave my own ground and argue with arguers. How can you expect the masses to become religious and obedient when they see irreligion and want of discipline above them? All peoples united by any faith whatever will inevitably get the better of peoples without any faith at all. The law of public interest, which gives birth to patriotism, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the essential elements, which may serve to the future elaboration of both. You will find deposited in it the rough materials, which some abler hands will perhaps one day employ in constructing an edifice, in which our youth may find a safe refuge from the storms of doubt, unbelief, and irreligion. I have purposed to avoid all exuberant ornaments of style, all pompous parade of erudition, and contented myself with a plain diction, and a strict laconism. I have not quoted authors who preceded me in the same field; I have ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... Physical Memoirs. By Charles Caldwell, M. D., Professor, &c. Containing, 1. An Introductory Address, intended as a Defence of the Medical Profession against the charge of Irreligion and Infidelity; with Thoughts on the Truth and Importance of Natural Religion. 2. A Dissertation in answer to certain Prize Questions, proposed by his Grace, the Duke of Holstein Oldenburg, respecting the "Origin, Contagion and general Philosophy ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... upon this production as the height of irreverence and irreligion, and proposed to excommunicate the authors of it. Hence the dissenters declared themselves seceders, and took immediate steps to form ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... will be honest) to what I have been saying. Unrest; panting, desperate thirst, deceiving itself as to where it should go; slaking itself 'at the gilded puddles that the beasts would cough at,' instead of coming to the water of life!—that is the state of man without God. That is nature. That is irreligion. The condition in which every man is that is not trusting in Jesus Christ, is this—thirsting for God, and not knowing whom he is thirsting for, and so not getting ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... observation Mr. Hanway founds his confidence in the governours of the Foundling Hospital, men of whom I have not any knowledge, but whom I entreat to consider a little the minds, as well as bodies, of the children. I am inclined to believe irreligion equally pernicious with gin and tea, and, therefore, think it not unseasonable to mention, that, when, a few months ago, I wandered through the hospital, I found not a child that seemed to have heard of his creed, or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... but it suffers no decline. The old religion then excites enthusiastic attachment or bitter enmity in either party; some leave it with anger, others cling to it with increased devotedness, and although persuasions differ, irreligion is unknown. Such, however, is not the case when a religious belief is secretly undermined by doctrines which may be termed negative, since they deny the truth of one religion without affirming that of any ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... pulpit. I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these - and fewer women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called 'the public,' God save me from such irreligion! - that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... own, which his friend Steele warmly applauds. They dream together of the future; Addison sage, but speculative, and Steele practical, if rash. Each is disposed to find God in the ways of life, and both avoid that outward show of irreligion, which, after the recent Civil Wars, remains yet common in the country, as reaction from an ostentatious piety which laid on burdens of restraint; a natural reaction which had been intensified by the base influence of a profligate King. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... thrown himself heart and soul—that is to say, as far as he has a heart to throw—into what he calls the cause of the people; and which I consider to be the cause of revolution, of confiscation, of irreligion, and abomination generally. ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... energy of his utterance. On had gone the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous assertions of God's mind and purposes. The lash that was wielded was far-reaching; all the vices of the age—irreligion, blasphemy, drunkenness, extravagance, vainglory, loose living—fell under its sting. The condemnation was general, and each man looked to see his neighbor wince. The occurrence at the ball last night,—he was on that for final ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... part of the book. It attempts to demonstrate that all supernatural religions have been harmful to society and that the only useful religion is natural religion or morals. The book was refuted by Guidi, in a "Lettre a M. le Chevalier de... [Barthe] entran dans l'irreligion par un libelle intitul Le Militaire philosophe ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence—upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that he must ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and of never speaking of his love-affairs, though his smiles and his airs and graces were delightfully indiscreet. The worthy gentleman used his privilege as a Voltairean noble to stay away from mass; and great indulgence was shown to his irreligion because of his devotion to the royal cause. One of his particular graces was the air and manner (imitated, no doubt, from Mole) with which he took snuff from a gold box adorned with the portrait of the Princess ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... such nations, two cases, at the least, where the uses of a religion would be indispensable; viz. for the sanction of oaths, and as a channel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, the answer is easy: religion was degrading: but heavier degradations would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous peoples, viz. the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very use of their word religlo, their testimony to the degradation wrought by any religion that Paganism could yield. Rarely indeed is this ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... against the twelve chapters of the celebrated Cyril, and the epistle which was said to have been written by Ibas to Maris the Persian—without alteration this synod renews in all points the ancient decrees of religion, chasing away the impious doctrines of irreligion. And this our holy and ecumenical synod, inspired of God, has set its seal to the creed of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, and again religiously confirmed by the one hundred and fifty, which also the other holy synods gladly received and ratified for the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... There is, however, another most interesting feature in the policy of Venice which will be often brought before us; and which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have already alluded, closed by ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... in the Netherlands had sadly depleted the treasury, the credit of the country was far from good, and gradually, as a natural reaction after the religious exaltation which had marked the whole of the sixteenth century, a spirit of irreligion and licentiousness became prevalent in all classes of society. As Philip had grown older and more ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in 1598, the last restraint was ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the most earnest manner, to consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those audacious crimes of Robbery and Violence which are now become so frequent...and which have proceeded in great Measure from that profligate Spirit of Irreligion, Idleness, Gaming, and Extravagance, which has of late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the Dishonour of the Nation, and to the great Offence and Prejudice of the sober and industrious Part of the People." Six weeks later the first number of the Journal, makes comment on the need ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... and men of science were at the same time directed to meet round the table and found a new Religion: German Religion. How can such people appreciate art; how can they appreciate religion—nay, how can they appreciate irreligion? How does one invent a message? How does one create a Creator? Is it not the plain meaning of the Gospel that it is good news? And is it not the plain meaning of good news that it must come from outside oneself? Otherwise I could make myself happy this moment, by inventing an enormous ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... philomaths—then numerous, but now only represented by Zadkiel. This Essay was one of those, which gave rise to "The Tatler." He wrote about the same time, "An argument against Christianity"—an ironical way of rebuking the irreligion ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... philosophy is based on practical art, and that practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners, machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the love of life in the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... to which a thinker of eminence may be led away by an ambiguity of language, is afforded by this very case. I refer to the famous argument by which Bishop Berkeley flattered himself that he had forever put an end to "skepticism, atheism, and irreligion." It is briefly as follows: I thought of a thing yesterday; I ceased to think of it; I think of it again to-day. I had, therefore, in my mind yesterday an idea of the object; I have also an idea of it to-day; this idea is evidently not another, but the very same idea. Yet an intervening ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... driven to irreligion through its abuses. I have often thought it a misfortune that we Americans are under the necessity of meeting the infidel literature of the old world, for the simple reason that it is evolved out of the circumstances peculiar to state churches. In America ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... achievements, ruthless causes, the triumph of evil, the defeat of good, the depth and intensity and prevalence of sin, the all-degrading idolatries, the all-defiling corruptions, the monstrous superstitions, the dreary irreligion—is not the whole a picture dreadful to look upon, capricious as chance, rigid as fate, pale as malady, dark as doom? How shall we face this fact, witnessed to by innumerable men in all ages and times, as the natural lot of their kind? Much more so when suffering falls ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... that Ennius scientifically inculcated the same irreligion in a didactic poem of his own; and it is evident that he was in earnest with this freethinking. With this trait other features are quite accordant—his political opposition tinged with radicalism, that here and there appears;(46) his singing ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... concern with them is new. The Karshish, the Clean, and the Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... his parish, refused to provide for a priest of their own, and Abbe Godard, in order to perform Mass, had to walk each Sunday the three kilometres which separated the two communes. He was a short, stout man of hasty temper, who was disgusted with the indifference and irreligion of his parishioners, and his services were the shortest and baldest possible. In spite of his temper, he had, however, a passion for the miserable, and to these he gave everything—his money, his linen, almost the clothes off his back. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ground had a man of sense for astonishment— that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sincerely pious, should decline to place such a man upon an Episcopal throne? This argues, beyond a doubt, that Swift was in that state of constitutional irreligion, irreligion from a vulgar temperament, which imputes to everybody else its own plebeian feelings. People differed, he fancied, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulations. And, therefore, it seemed to him scandalous that a princess, who must, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... shocked me profoundly. I! I! And Rawdon didn't find me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Felix, not irreligion, but indifference to matters of religion. Like most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great naturalists, he had subjected religion to reason; he recognized a problem in it as insoluble as ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... after one of his weeks of retreat, at the close of vesper service, that Dr. Leigh came to him. He had been saying in his little talk that poverty is no excuse for irreligion, and that all aid in the hardship of this world was vain and worthless unless the sinner laid hold on eternal life. Dr. Leigh, who was laboring with a serious practical problem, heard this coldly, and with a certain contempt for what seemed to her a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... other leaders of the dominant party of that time, were sure to be singled out for personal attack. They were also made to feel the chilling effects of social exclusiveness. The cry against them was that of ignorance, irreverence, irreligion, republicanism, disloyalty, etc. These charges were repeated in every form; and that, too, by a section both of the official and religious press, a portion of which was edited with singular ability; a press which prided itself ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms to heaven and dare a God, if he existed, to vindicate his insulted majesty, and crush them with his thunderbolts. Over the entrance ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... popular consent is indispensable, and will be impossible until the statesman can appeal to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... bigots of Europe; and so strong were they, that his life was continually in danger. Lord Brougham, in his "Men of Letters of the Time of George III.." says:—"Voltaire's name is so intimately connected in the minds of all men with Infidelity, in the minds of most men with irreligion, and, in the minds of all who are not well-informed, with these qualities alone, that whoever undertakes to write his life and examine his claims to the vast reputation which all the hostile feelings excited by him against himself have never been able to destroy, or even materially to impair, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Netherlands had sadly depleted the treasury, the credit of the country was far from good, and gradually, as a natural reaction after the religious exaltation which had marked the whole of the sixteenth century, a spirit of irreligion and licentiousness became prevalent in all classes of society. As Philip had grown older and more ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed committing the Socialist movement to atheism as part of its programme.[54] In short, he was a man of fine spiritual instincts, splendidly religious in his irreligion. ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Many of the Unitarian churches refused to "fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was {444} stigmatized as a "boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by pretending that he was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is too spontaneous to be called philosophic doubt; ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... this conversation. While she regarded Paul Stepaside with a certain amount of admiration because of his strong personality and the position he had, in spite of difficulties, obtained in Brunford, she had a certain horror of his irreligion and his apparent vindictiveness. She recalled the words he had spoken to her on the two occasions on which they had met, words which revealed the passionate nature of the man. She was sorry she had spoken to him at all. She ought to have treated him with the scorn and contempt he deserved. ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... University, with its union of the best educational methods and the highest ideals of Christian character, will do more for the real enlightenment of China than a dozen provincial colleges where gambling, irreligion and opium smoking are freely tolerated and a failure to worship the tablet of Confucius is deemed ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... cannot if we would. That old prophecy, however long delayed, still finds an involuntary echo in our souls. And now, in this hope of a true and brotherly society, its fulfilment seems at hand. Say it is enthusiasm, say it is a mistake, say it is irreligion, if you will, and still I reply that the time is not distant. It is in the combined order, where men are held together by inward laws only, and not by outward constraint and outward necessities, that the kingdom of God is to come down and ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... great consequence to the welfare of the community. Some of these are of indispensable consideration to the legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in that general and moral view, in which ignorance in the lower orders is beheld the cause of their vice, irreligion, and consequent misery, that the subject is attempted, imperfectly and somewhat desultorily, to be illustrated in the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... are driven to irreligion through its abuses. I have often thought it a misfortune that we Americans are under the necessity of meeting the infidel literature of the old world, for the simple reason that it is evolved out of the circumstances peculiar ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... religion, morals, nor principles. He wants to make a noise in the world, and he will succeed. Julian, the Apostate, did the same." "I never saw the King so animated before," observed Madame, when he was gone out; "and really the comparison with Julian, the Apostate, is not amiss, considering the irreligion of the King of Prussia. If he gets out of his perplexities, surrounded as he is by his enemies, he will be one of the greatest men ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these - and fewer women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called 'the public,' God save me from such irreligion! - that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I would ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whatever about public affairs, and that the storm will pass quietly over his head. My brother has thrown himself heart and soul—that is to say, as far as he has a heart to throw—into what he calls the cause of the people; and which I consider to be the cause of revolution, of confiscation, of irreligion, and abomination generally. ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities, the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death. Such were the calamities that marked the course of these devastating hosts. And yet the evils inflicted ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in—or disgraced by the irreligion, and contempt of things holy, found in the writings of scores of French authors whom we could name, were they worth the naming. It is undeniable that the ingenious plots of his very entertaining books turn, for the most part, on matters difficult ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... republic could not be reestablished because the old love for virtue and liberty had died out from among the people—had been overwhelmed by the rising tide of vice, corruption, sensuality, and irreligion that had ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the public. We want such men to rescue this enlightened age from general irreligion." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... When they were gone off the stage, the people again apostatized, neglected the worship and ordinances of God, and became vicious and corrupt. This prophet, who lived several ages after their return to Canaan, was sent to reprove their irreligion and the immoralities, which abounded among them and had infected ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... we know, may be met by saying that its chief influence was exerted on those whose habits of dissipation, immorality, and irreligion kept, them aloof from the religious instruction of the priest. But to those who know the Irish heart, it is not necessary to say that many a man addicted to drink is far from being free from the impressions of religion, or uninfluenced by ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... dares say a word. That is not practiced at Manila, and the religious are not so absolute there as they are in the provinces; and, besides, one is able at times not to attend mass on Sunday without that act of irreligion reaching the ears of the religious or ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... and Epictetus contrasted,—these two authors Pascal acknowledged to be the ones most constantly in his hand,—said gently of Montaigne, "Montaigne is absolutely pernicious to those who have any inclination toward irreligion, or toward vicious indulgences." We, for our part, are prepared, speaking more broadly than Pascal, to say that, to a somewhat numerous class of naturally dominant minds, Montaigne's "Essays," in spite of all that there is good in them,—nay, greatly because of so much good in them,—are, by their ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... upon what observation Mr. Hanway founds his confidence in the governours of the Foundling Hospital, men of whom I have not any knowledge, but whom I entreat to consider a little the minds, as well as bodies, of the children. I am inclined to believe irreligion equally pernicious with gin and tea, and, therefore, think it not unseasonable to mention, that, when, a few months ago, I wandered through the hospital, I found not a child that seemed to have heard of his creed, or the commandments. To breed up children in this manner, is to rescue ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... have done little to enforce religious teaching amongst her acquaintances. Her moral and religious principles were known by the firm stand she took against common incentives to dissipation and irreligion—such as card-playing and Sunday entertainments—against the introduction of questionable topics, unseemly language, and vacuous frivolity into conversation. Her religious influence, thus far, was almost a silent or negative one; but it had its effect on others, and laid the foundation of ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... of the actors were loose, exceedingly so; and if the audience could learn something of human nature there, it was only the debasing side of it. It is generally true that actors lend their influence to intemperance, licentiousness, and irreligion. They do not patronize Sabbath schools, churches, and other Christian institutions, but they patronize bars, gambling saloons, and houses of ill-fame. Many of those men even who go to the theatre, would be quite unwilling ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... wonder that the fair tender plant of beautiful childhood refuses to grow in such a vitiated atmosphere. Here all distinctions between good and evil are speedily lost, if they were ever known; and men, women, and children become unnatural in vice, in irreligion, in manners and appearance. Such spots as these act like cankers, yearly spreading further and further their vitiating influences, preparing for all those fearful retributions in the shape of fever and pestilence which continually come down. Yet, lamentable ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Supper according to the rites and usage of the said church, &c. is founded on falsity in matter of fact, is repugnant to the laws of England, contrary to the charter of the Proprietors, is an encouragement to atheism and irreligion, destructive to trade, and tends to the depopulation and ruin of ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... abominable orgies, in which he had braved the cholera with sacrilegious impiety. In consequence of the indisposition that kept me at home, and of another circumstance, I only received to-day the certificate of the death of this victim of intemperance and irreligion. I must proclaim it to the praise of his reverence"—pointing to Rodin—"that he told me, the worst enemies of the descendants of that infamous renegade would be their own bad passions, and that the might look to them as our allies against the whole impious ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... preach, to christen, marry, and bury you, necessarily coexisted with the right to sell you the ground to be buried in and to take tithe in kind; on which last point, of course, there was a little grumbling, but not to the extent of irreligion—not of deeper significance than the grumbling at the rain, which was by no means accompanied with a spirit of impious defiance, but with a desire that the prayer for fine weather ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... be observed here that John Wesley prescribed at this period for madness, as well as for irreligion.[112] One of his remedies was that the patient should be exclusively fed on apples for a month—a regimen which recalls the starving treatment of epilepsy prescribed, at a recent date, by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. Wesley's prescriptions for "lunacy" ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... ago testified, that "if they are sceptical, it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or church formularies for a life of devotion." Now to call such a state of mind irreligious or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The real infidels are they who reject the revelation ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... most wretched life; but what reasonable ground had a man of sense for astonishment— that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sincerely pious, should decline to place such a man upon an Episcopal throne? This argues, beyond a doubt, that Swift was in that state of constitutional irreligion, irreligion from a vulgar temperament, which imputes to everybody else its own plebeian feelings. People differed, he fancied, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulations. And, therefore, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... stood single, had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horror. The wise and the pious caught the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly taught at ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... dancing: the young man, 'too old and too young to be in love,' was to make his way as a wit. He did so, in the approved way in that day of irreligion, in a political squib. On July 14th, 1742, he writes in his Notes, 'I wrote the "Lessons for the Day;" the "Lessons for the day" being the first and second chapters of the "Book of Preferment,"' Horace was proud of this brochure, for he ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... perjuring himself in the name of God, since it was impossible to feel that the new bishop followed or intended to follow either. He experienced a wild impulse to spring to his feet and protest; he wondered if he only of all the persons in this crowded church recognized the shocking irreligion of that vow. He reflected that in the Catholic communion it would have been impossible for popular suffrage to raise to the bishopric a man like this, a ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... one of her books has a lofty moral purpose. That is the justification of fiction. The novelist has a high vocation, if he could only see it; he can inculcate submission to authority, hope, charity, obedience—in fact, all the higher virtues; he can become a handmaid of the Church. And now, when irreligion, and immorality, and scepticism are rampant, we must not ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... contracted, regardless of all moral or physical distinctions. But if, as I think may be demonstrated, the purposes of even this life, viewing the whole, are subverted by practical rules built upon this ignoble base, I may be allowed to doubt whether woman was created for man: and though the cry of irreligion, or even atheism be raised against me, I will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses's beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I could not believe what my reason ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... remarkable fact, that, in the foulest of all the many libels that were published against him, he was slandered under the name of Cicero. As his abilities could not be questioned, he was charged with irreligion and immorality. That he was heterodox all the country vicars and foxhunting squires firmly believed; but as to the nature and extent of his heterodoxy there were many different opinions. He seems to have been a Low Churchman of the school of Tillotson, whom he always loved and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sometimes spoke of things sacred, had been obliquely touched upon by his good and anxious friend Mrs. Dunlop: he pleads guilty of folly, but not of irreligion.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... later by the English poet; for who could escape the threefold danger of "ordinary law, martial law, and flat fighting." Nor was the state of religious affairs at all more promising. The Deputy describes the kingdom as "overwhelmed by the most deplorable immorality and irreligion;"[427] the Privy Council, in their deliberations, gives a similar account. "As for religion, there was but small appearance of it; the churches uncovered, and the clergy scattered."[428] An Act of Parliament was ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... very fond of his brother, and grieved for his irreligion, but hoped that grace would eventually bring him back to the fold of the Church. His brother encouraged him in his hopes, while laughing at them in private, but as they were both sensible men they never discussed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of his countrymen, their triumphs and vicissitudes, their history the history of God. The city was of their building, at once a lasting testimony of their crimes and devotion, their weakness and genius, their religion and their irreligion. Though he had seen Rome to familiarity, he was gratified. The sight filled a measure of pride which would have made him drunk with vainglory but for the thought, princely as the property was, it did not any longer belong to his ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... brought Hobbes a pension; but both his works were condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular synonym for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist philosophy must necessarily ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... ardent longings are overruled; he knows that until he can discount or conciliate that which commands his fortunes his condition is precarious and miserable. And through his eagerness to save himself he leaps to conclusions that are uncritical and premature. Irreligion, on the other hand, flourishes among those who are more snugly intrenched {215} within the cities of man. It is a product of civilization. Comfortably housed as he is, and enjoying an artificial illumination behind drawn blinds, the irreligious ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... no one think that irreligion is advocated in this book. With respect to religious tenets I wish to observe that I am a member of the Church of England, into whose communion I was baptized, and to which my forefathers belonged. Its being the religion in which I was baptized, and ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... view of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and boldly. He takes the position ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... simultaneously, and John was actually preparing the poison when the police happened to turn aside their hideous designs by attacking the castle. John denied the charges with pretended horror, saying humbly that he had committed quite enough mortal sins of debauchery and irreligion without having these added to his list. As it was difficult to take Antony's word for them without further investigation; as this investigation was almost impossible, and as the clergy were too powerful and too much interested in preventing a scandal to allow it, John Mauprat ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and the Cornish as a body might have been of the Church of England, instead of remaining (more or less) of the old religion until the perhaps unavoidable neglect of its authorities caused them to drift into the outward irreligion from which John Wesley rescued them. {12} But it is said by Scawen and by Bishop Gibson in his continuation of Camden’s Britannia, that they desired that the Prayer-book might not be translated, and, though the statement is disputed, it is quite possible that the upper classes, ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... becomes me, at a distance. In the next place, I will ingenuously confess, that the helps I have used in this small treatise, were many of them taken from the works of our own reverend divines of the Church of England: so that the weapons with which I combat irreligion, are already consecrated; though I suppose they may be taken down as lawfully as the sword of Goliah was by David, when they are to be employed for the common cause against the enemies of piety. I intend not by this to entitle them to any of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... it to ourselves; the satisfaction of seeing all our favourite and selfish ideas dressed up in a garb so becoming, that we persuade ourselves that our false pride is proper dignity, our ferocity courage, our cowardice prudence, our irreligion liberality, and our ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... irreligion is too strong, For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food; I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong, Although no doubt his real intent was good, For speaking out so plainly in his song, So much indeed as to be downright rude; ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. "We may pray," says Jonathan Edwards, "concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the end, Burns' great charity is ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of not repeating his personal bons mots and of never speaking of his love-affairs, though his smiles and his airs and graces were delightfully indiscreet. The worthy gentleman used his privilege as a Voltairean noble to stay away from mass; and great indulgence was shown to his irreligion because of his devotion to the royal cause. One of his particular graces was the air and manner (imitated, no doubt, from Mole) with which he took snuff from a gold box adorned with the portrait of the Princess Goritza,—a charming Hungarian, celebrated for ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... "The American theater is a concrete institution, to be judged as a totality. It is responsible for what it tolerates and shelters. We, therefore, hold it responsible for whatever of sensual impurity and whatever of irreligion, as well as for whatever of occasional and sporadic benefit there may be bound up in its organic life. Instead of helping Christ's kingdom, it hinders; instead of saving souls, it corrupts and destroys." Dr. Buckley gives this testimony: ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... spoken of as free-thinkers and frequently as anti-religious in temper and conviction. The charge of irreligion seems based upon the misconception or the misrepresentation of their orthodox critics. It is, at any rate, undeserved, as far as Gutzkow, the leader of the school, is concerned. It is true that they were ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... cities swarmed with ruffians; and brutal sports and brutal language existed to a frightful degree. Criminals were hanged, five or six together, at Tyburn. Gibbets existed at all the cross-roads throughout the country. The people were grossly ignorant, and altogether neglected. Scepticism and irreligion prevailed, until Wesley and Whitfield sprang up to protest against formalism and atheism. They were pelted with rotten eggs, sticks, and stones. A Methodist preacher ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... and innumerable protestations of everlasting regard, he at last found that I was more affected with the loss of my innocence, than the danger of my fame, and that he might not be disturbed by my remorse, began to lull my conscience with the opiates of irreligion. His arguments were such as my course of life has since exposed me often to the necessity of hearing, vulgar, empty, and fallacious; yet they at first confounded me by their novelty, filled me with doubt and perplexity, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... progress among his subjects: and as he is accused of open profaneness [y], and was endued with a sharp wit [z], it is likely that he made the romantic chivalry of the crusaders the object of his perpetual raillery. As an instance of his irreligion, we are told, that he once accepted of sixty marks from a Jew, whose son had been converted to Christianity, and who engaged him by that present to assist him in bringing back the youth to Judaism. William ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... utterance. On had gone the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous assertions of God's mind and purposes. The lash that was wielded was far-reaching; all the vices of the age—irreligion, blasphemy, drunkenness, extravagance, vainglory, loose living—fell under its sting. The condemnation was general, and each man looked to see his neighbor wince. The occurrence at the ball last night,—he was on that for final theme, was he? There was a slight movement throughout the congregation. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... us warmth? And will not the days of the years of our pilgrimage be as short as theirs? It is an offence to Religion, an injury to Providence, to suppose That vast tract of land wholly seized by evil spirits; though licentiousness, rapacity, ambition, and irreligion have given rulers to it, of late, ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... are open for the instruction of the children of all denominations there are many whose religious education is neglected by their parents, and who will grow up in vice and irreligion, unless they receive it from the common school teacher. It seems to us to be the duty of the state, to provide for the education of all the children, morally as well as intellectually; and to require all teachers of youth, to train the ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... former, they held that some parts of the Catholic system were contrary to reason. The conclusion was obvious. Two propositions, each of which separately is compatible with the most exalted piety, formed, when held in conjunction, the groundwork of a system of irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation is affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced by logical ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... game of chess; they gave it its taste for works of fiction—romances and novels. In the graver domains of literature they took delight: they had many admirable compositions on such subjects as the instability of human greatness; the consequences of irreligion; the reverses of fortune; the origin, duration, and end of the world. Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves have originated in our own times. Thus our modern doctrines of evolution and development were taught in their schools. In fact, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... years ago a pamphlet was published in which we find detailed the efforts made in France to spread irreligion by means of bad education. The letters of eighty of the Prelates of France are appended to the pamphlet. Alas! the sad forebodings of that noble episcopate have been too soon ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... end. Cycles of ruin and renovation, and of renovation and ruin, vast cycles, if you will, but evermore ending in dire catastrophies to gods and men—an everlasting succession of death and destructions—is the fearful vista which all the religions of man, and thine own irreligion, present to thy terrified vision. But thou wast created in the image of the living God, and durst not rest satisfied with any such prospect. Now I come in the name of the Lord to tell thee, that "God so loved the world that he gave his ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... multitudes of men, merely to gratify a senseless ambition of immortalizing their names by edifices of an enormous magnitude, and a boundless expense. It is remarkable, that those stately pyramids, which have so long been the admiration of the whole world, were the effect of the irreligion and merciless cruelty ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... much sad brooding, I cannot but conclude that a fervent religious faith is the only thing that will give complete security; and it will be a bitter day for England and the world if ever flippancy and irreligion become general. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... direct communion with its Maker, rejecting the intervention of a priesthood or a sacramental system. Unlike the previous revivals in England, they warred not against the rulers of the Church or State, but only against vice or irreligion. Consequently in the characters which they produced, as compared with those produced by Wycliffism, by the Reformation, and notably by Puritanism, there was less of force and the grandeur connected with it, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... ambition, only one conclusion can be drawn from this silence. He could not categorically deny Cartwright's accusation and at the same time satisfy his own unsparing conception of honesty. That there was no real truth in the charge of irreligion, the allusions in the Speed letters abundantly prove. The tone is too sincere to be doubted; nevertheless, they give no clue to his theology. And for men like Cartwright, religion was tied up hand and foot in theology. Here was where Lincoln had parted company from his mother's world, and ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of natural science with theology. He chose, of course, the a-posteriori argument, and was brief, perhaps eloquent. Some passages of his discourse might pass unchallenged in the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... me indispensable either. I felt I was suddenly repudiated by the universe and threatened with effacement, that in some positive and emphatic way I must at once assert myself. There was no balm in the religion I had learnt, or in the irreligion I had adopted, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... offices, honors, and emoluments emanated from him. All influences conspired to elevate the man whom no one could hope successfully to rival. Revolt was madness, and treason absurdity. Nor did the Emperors attempt to check the gigantic social evils of the empire. They did not seek to prevent irreligion, luxury, slavery, and usury, the encroachments of the rich upon the poor, the tyranny of foolish fashions, demoralizing sports and pleasures, money-making, and all the follies which lax principles of morality ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... another most interesting feature in the policy of Venice, which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... morose race. It was converted into a goblet, and used at Odin-like orgies. Though the affair was but a whim of youth, more odious than poetical, it caused some talk, and raised around the extravagant host the haze of a mystery, suggesting fantasies of irreligion and horror. The inscription on the cup is not remarkable ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... difference between the policy of the Church of England and that of the Church of Rome, with regard to the utilization of religious enthusiasts. In the end Newton was ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln, and threw himself with the energy of a newborn apostle upon the irreligion and brutality of Olney. No Carthusian's breast could glow more intensely with the zeal which is the offspring of remorse. Newton was a Calvinist of course, though it seems not an extreme one, otherwise he would probably have confirmed Cowper in ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... tendency, to throw society into entire confusion and to renew, under the sanction of religion, scenes of anarchy and license that have generally hitherto been the offspring of the rankest infidelity and irreligion." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... said, "New York has been overrun by a peculiar sort of freebooters." He laid emphasis on the word freebooters. "There is a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion. This growing immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills the sails of those pirates. The disease is not of American origin. It has come to us from the dens of vice in the large ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... of lying, are manifestly, and in an eminent degree, injurious to social happiness. How different accordingly, in the moral scale, is the place they hold, from that which is assigned to idolatry, to general irreligion, to swearing, drinking, fornication, lasciviousness, sensuality, excessive dissipation; and in particular circumstances, to pride, wrath, malice, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... be obtained in France but through sentiments due to Catholicism, and none of you are Catholics! Here am I, a priest, obliged to leave my own ground and argue with arguers. How can you expect the masses to become religious and obedient when they see irreligion and want of discipline above them? All peoples united by any faith whatever will inevitably get the better of peoples without any faith at all. The law of public interest, which gives birth to patriotism, is destroyed by the law of private interest, which it sanctions, but which gives ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the late Triennial Convention, took up and determined to make a more vigorous effort to deal with the problem presented by the irreligion of the poor and the dishonesty of church-members. It is an unfortunate and, at first sight, somewhat puzzling circumstance, that so many of the culprits in the late cases of fraud and defalcation should have been professing Christians, and in some cases persons of ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... Laws rest on a religious foundation; in this respect they bear the stamp of primitive legislation. They do not escape the almost inevitable consequence of making irreligion penal. If laws are based upon religion, the greatest offence against them must be irreligion. Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, might ...
— Laws • Plato
... wou'd become a Convert? And who wou'd turn Parson to be drunk and beat the Watch? Or who wou'd be proud of an Imitation of any of his Heroes? Has any Body brought themselves under his Character, in hopes to recommend them to the World? It would be happy if the World had learnt no more Irreligion from the Pulpit than it has from the Stage; at least, the Consequence of the first has been more fatal. What dismal Effect has the holy Cant had upon the Multitude: What Rebellion, Blood-shed and Mischief have been encourag'd under the Name of Sanctity, ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous
... developement of every subject that his acute intellect chose to dilate upon." His conversation was ever egotistical in the extreme: the bold assertion that his Lacon was the most clever work in the English language, was ever on his lips, and I regret to add, obscenity and irreligion too often supplied the place of wit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... Memoirs. By Charles Caldwell, M. D., Professor, &c. Containing, 1. An Introductory Address, intended as a Defence of the Medical Profession against the charge of Irreligion and Infidelity; with Thoughts on the Truth and Importance of Natural Religion. 2. A Dissertation in answer to certain Prize Questions, proposed by his Grace, the Duke of Holstein Oldenburg, respecting the "Origin, Contagion and general Philosophy of Yellow Fever, and the Practicability of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... relations with the Recollets. No one ever accused him of being a bad Catholic. He was exact in the performance of his religious duties, and such trouble as he had with the ecclesiastical authorities proceeded from political aims rather than from heresy or irreligion. ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... enchantment, and leaves the reader in a state of cold and anxious scepticism. This most lame and impotent conclusion has been variously imputed to the taste or irreligion of Virgil; but, according to the more elaborate interpretation of Bishop Warburton, the descent to hell is not a false, but a mimic scene; which represents the initiation of AEneas, in the character of a law-giver, to the Eleusinian mysteries. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... say he must. It is easy to complain that the clergy in every age and country have tried to obtain influence over women. They have been forced to do so, because otherwise they could obtain no influence at all. And if a priesthood should arise hereafter, whose calling was to teach not religion but irreligion, not the good news that there is a good God, and that we can know Him; but the bad news that there is no God, or, if there is, we cannot know Him; then would that priesthood find it necessary to appeal like all other priesthoods, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... impossible until the statesman can appeal to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is countered by ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the religious culture that it gives. Doubtless, to the superstitions that pass under the name of religion, science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these superstitions merely hide; doubtless, too, in much of the science that is current there is a pervading spirit of irreligion, but not in that true science which has passed beyond ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... heterodoxy is often equally guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies himself with the cant phrase of irreligion. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... responsibility? There is something so touching in the simple faith of childhood,—its utter dependence,—its willingness to believe in the perfection of those to whom it looks for protection—that to betray that faith, to shake that dependence, seems almost akin to irreligion. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... relieved the painful situation. Turning his head, David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence—upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that he ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... soul, are converted into their corresponding virtues. Thus, Ignorance is exchanged for learning, obstinacy for docility, and precipitation for patience, rashness for prudence, lying for truth, cowardice for bravery, and avarice for generosity, tyranny for justice, irreligion for piety, deceitfulness for sincerity, hatred ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... respect the direct contrary of that of our Blessed Redeemer should fancy that they are Christians of singular attainments; and it is more woful still, that many young people should be scared away into irreligion or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... things that would brand them as apostates if they meant what they said. This or that one, in the midst of an orgy of sin, or after long practical irreligion, in order to strangle remorse that arises at an inopportune moment, may seem to form a judgment of apostasy. This is treading on exceedingly thin glass. But it is not always properly defection from faith. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Potter looked upon this production as the height of irreverence and irreligion, and proposed to excommunicate the authors of it. Hence the dissenters declared themselves seceders, and took immediate steps to form ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... ground for its punishment.[269] It was doubtless largely as a religious offense that the Code Napoleon omitted to punish it. The French law makes a clear and logical distinction between crime on the one hand, vice and irreligion on the other, only concerning itself with the former. Homosexual practices in private, between two consenting adult parties, whether men or women, are absolutely unpunished by the Code Napoleon and by French law of today. Only under three conditions does the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... if it were not for this fall in illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise in the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent persons therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and so forth, either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge beyond my ken. England is, as a matter of fact, becoming not only more hygienic and rational, but more moral and more temperate. The highly moral, healthy, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... men cannot bear to be deprived long together of anything they are used to, not even of their fears; and, by a reaction of the mind appertaining to our nature, new stimulants were looked for, not on the side of pleasure, where nothing new could be expected or imagined, but on the opposite. Irreligion is followed by fanaticism, and fanaticism by ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... life so pure and strict that, young as he was, men held him to be the equal of the aged Zacharias.— He could not bear that judgment so unjust should go forth against us, and, moved with indignation, he asked leave to defend his brethren, and to prove that there was in them no kind of irreligion or impiety. Those present at the tribunal, amongst whom he was known and celebrated, cried out against him, and the governor himself, enraged at so just a demand, asked him no more than this question, 'Art thou a Christian?' ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... as to where it should go; slaking itself 'at the gilded puddles that the beasts would cough at,' instead of coming to the water of life!—that is the state of man without God. That is nature. That is irreligion. The condition in which every man is that is not trusting in Jesus Christ, is this—thirsting for God, and not knowing whom he is thirsting for, and so not getting the supply that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... above all, temperance of feelings. And even if these should effect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... contemptible they are! Miserable poetry; not a new thought, nor an old one newly expressed.(60) I say nothing of the folly of publishing his aversion to the English, at the very time they are ruining themselves for him; nor of the greater folly of his irreligion. The epistle to Keith is puerile and shocking. He is not so sensible as Lord Ferrers, who did not think such sentiments ought to be published. His Majesty could not resist the vanity of showing how disengaged he can be even ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... among the Parisians, as to awaken the surprise of all candid observers; that gallantry is so common as to create no remark, and to be considered as a matter of course. With us, at least, the converse of the proposition prevails: it is the man professing irreligion who would be remarked and reprehended in England; and, if the second-named vice exists, at any rate, it adopts the decency of secrecy and is not made patent and notorious to all the world. A French gentleman thinks no more of proclaiming that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appearance and reality are inextricably mingled and yet sublimely and significantly separate. In short, the naturalist, the pagan, takes the world as it stands; it is just what it appears; the essence of his irreligion is that he perceives nothing in it that needs to be explained. But the religionist knows that the world which lies before our mortal vision so splendid and so ruthless, so beautiful and so dreadful, does really ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... latter; for if the Maxims, that were most instrumental in bringing about the Reformation, had been continued, they certainly would have prevented, at least in a great Measure, not only this Evil, but likewise another, which is worse, I mean the Growth of Irreligion and Impiety: Nay, I don't question but the same Maxims, if they were to be tried again would have that ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... underneath, but the deuce himself would never have suspected this. So the innocent-faced madam has not been winding herself round the Lady Adelaide for nothing—the she-wolf in sheep's petticoats! Something was said, too, that I could not catch, about her irreligion. The hypocrite dare not go to confession, probably, and so keeps away. The letter of the wedding night is explained now, and that changing, as they both did, to the hue of a mort-cloth at sight of each other. May ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... money-making at the expense of their traditional integrity. Religion had fallen into a controversial wrangle between contradictory dogmas; the most earnest of the Reformers have given us the blackest pictures of the prevailing irreligion and moral anarchy, rampant products of theological acrimony. It is true that the Moralists of all ages have usually been engaged in expressing a vehement conviction that the decadence of their own age exceeds that of any ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... impostor,) I (meaning said Reynolds,) took all prudent means to have him (meaning said William,) exposed, and stopped in his (meaning said William,) race of guilt, (meaning that said William had been guilty of immorality, dishonesty, irreligion, offences and crimes;) these men, (meaning one Joseph Snelling and one Norris,) were earnestly importuned to investigate his (meaning said William,) conduct, and enforce the discipline (meaning the discipline ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... hope shall at last enjoy the object of it, or the thing hoped for. This must of necessity be concluded, else we overthrow the whole truth of God at once, and the expectation of the best of men; yea, if this be not concluded, what follows, but that Atheism, unbelief, and irreligion, are the most right, and profane and debauched persons ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies were dying or ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and that there are good men in Scotland as well as in England; but this is an after-thought. Again, a careless person, nominally a Churchman, falls among serious-minded Dissenters, and they reclaim him from vice or irreligion; on this he joins their communion, and as time goes on, boasts perhaps of his right of private judgment. At the time itself, however, no process of inquiry took place within him at all; his heart was "opened," whether for ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... truth. One and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen—each severally in his own age—with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken, concerning each of which some ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... in the influence of the gods on human affairs: ix. 1, 11, 'cum rerum humanarum maximum momentum sit, quam propitiis rem, quam adversis agant dis.' Superior to the gods is necessitas (ix. 4, 16), and fortuna is also powerful (ix. 17, 3; v. 37, 1). He condemns the irreligion of his own day (x. 40, 10, 'iuvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus'), cf. iii. 20, 5; viii. 11, 1. He retains the old belief in prodigies and portents, every war being introduced by a list of them, but recognizes that many reported instances ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
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