"Deist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt necessary to what we call love, but is not taste acquired? Would our daughters admire a handsome deist, if properly impressed with a horror of his doctrines, sooner than they now would admire a handsome Mahommedan? We would refuse our children to a pious dissenter, to give them to impious members of the establishment: we make the substance less ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Apology. It has been already twice answered in this country, or rather, the bishop has been as often abused; first, by a deist of New York, for speaking too favourably of the Bible; and secondly, by a hot-headed frantic of New England; who, in a work he calls The Bible needs no Apology, rails at his lordship for the opposite reason, and consigns him to eternal damnation, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... existence is totally impossible; since nothing is more evident, than that a being cannot possess qualities so unlike, so contradictory, so irreconcilable, as those, which every religion upon earth attributes to the Divinity. Is not the theologian's God, as well as that of the deist, a cause incompatible with the effects attributed to it? Let them do what they will, it is necessary either to invent another God, or to grant, that he, who, for so many ages, has been held up to the terror of mortals, is at the ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Method with the Deists, with a Letter from the Author to a Deist on his Conversion, ...
— The Annual Catalogue (1737) - Or, A New and Compleat List of All The New Books, New - Editions of Books, Pamphlets, &c. • J. Worrall
... the day also for the most egregious credulity and the most mystical superstitions,—the day in which magnetism and magic found converts amongst the disciples of Diderot; when prophecies were current in every mouth; when the salon of a philosophical deist was converted into an Heraclea, in which necromancy professed to conjure up the shadows of the dead; when the Crosier and the Book were ridiculed, and Mesmer and Cagliostro were believed. In that Heliacal Rising, heralding the new sun before which all vapours ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 squaring of the circle. Deist "in petto," he lived in the religion of most Frenchmen, not attaching more importance to it than he did to the new laws promulgated in July. It was necessary to have a God in heaven, just as they set up a bust of the king at the mayor's office. Felix Phellion, a worthy son of his father, had never ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... preceding the Revolution in France no one was ever persecuted for being an atheist, deist, infidel or Roman catholic, but all of these united in suppressing the general use of the Bible and the presence of Bible readers, to the great injury of the public welfare. If that country had not foolishly and wickedly exterminated the people, that were fast becoming ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Not one wise action had these triflers plann'd; There was, it seem'd, no wisdom in the land, Save in this patriot tribe, who meet at times To show the statesman's errors and his crimes. Now here was Justice Bolt compell'd to sit, To hear the deist's scorn, the rebel's wit; The fact mis-stated, the envenom'd lie, And, staring spell-bound, made not one reply. Then were our Laws abused—and with the laws, All who prepare, defend, or judge a cause: "We have no lawyer whom a man ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter—that no portion of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were animated ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... me, I was prevented from the discussion of the knotty point at which I had just made a full stop. All my fears and care are of this world: if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. I hate a man that wishes to be a Deist: but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man; but like electricity, phlogiston, &c., the subject is so involved ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... getting to be more and more in earnest on the subject of morality, if not of vital religion, when I formed an acquaintance with a new steward, who had just joined the hospital. This man was ready enough to converse with me about the bible, but he turned out to be a Deist, Notwithstanding my own disposition to think more seriously of my true situation, I had many misgivings on the subject of the Saviour's being the Son of God. It seemed improbable to me, and I was falling ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... MacGeoghegan published a history of Ireland, in French, in 3 volumes, quarto, dedicated to the Irish Brigade. Writing in France he was free from the English censorship; writing for "The Brigade," he avoided the impudence of Huguenot historians. The sneers of the Deist Voltaire, and the lies of the Catholic Cambrensis, receive a sharp chastisement in his preface, and a full answer in his text. He was a man of the most varied acquirements and an elegant writer. More full references and the correction of a few errors of detail would render his book ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... what I say, I don't mean of Libertines or Deist; but Men, that to all outward Appearance are Believers, that go to Church, receive the Sacrament, and at the Approach of Death are observed to be really afraid of Hell. And yet of these, many are Drunkards, Whoremasters, Adulterers, and not a Few of them betray ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... idea? This is now the question. In answering it I shall assume no ground but that which all parties say is true. The Christian, the Deist and Atheist will admit that we have learned all we know, and that we have learned only through the aid of the five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling are the porters of the mind. One or ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... rewards, but has no love in it. It is only dead, cold, hard, cruel, unrelenting law. Yet Buddhists are not atheists, any more than a child who has never heard of God is an atheist. A child is neither deist nor atheist: he ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... may be an artist expressing religious emotion without intellectual definition by means of poetry, music, vestments and architecture, also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist. Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are manifold, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... both before and since his death, what were his religious opinions, and while every man's religious opinions are his own, and no one has the right to question them, I will say he was a Deist something after the manner of Thomas Paine, and for the benefit of some of our professors and preachers, who do not know the difference between an Atheist and a Deist, I will say that a Deist is one who believes in one God, and rejects all forms of ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... specious sophistry of modern philosophers. It must be owned that at first I was rather pleased with the elegance of their language than the force of their reasoning; as, however, we are apt to believe what we eagerly wish to be true, in a short time I soon became a professed deist. My favourite author was the late celebrated David Hume. I constantly urged his exemplary behaviour in private as a strong argument in favour of his doctrines, forgetting that his literary life was uniformly employed in diffusing his pernicious tenets, and his utmost endeavours were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... I consider that the priests have objected to admit my former book, The Celtic Druids, into libraries, because it was antichristian; and it has been attacked by Deists, because it was superfluously religious. The learned Deist, the Rev. R. Taylor [already mentioned], has designated me as the religious ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... in peace; several pugnacious gentlemen up and down Europe expectorated much fiery wrath in dusting each other's jackets; and Warburton, the attorney, finally earned his bishoprick in the service of whitewashing a writer, who was aghast at finding himself first trampled on as a deist, and then exalted as a defender of the faith. Meantime, Mr. Schlosser mistakes Pope's courtesy, when he supposes his acknowledgments to Lord Bolingbroke sincere in their ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... painim[obs3], paynim[obs3]; giaour[obs3]; gentile; pantheist, polytheist; idolator. schismatic; sectary, sectarian, sectarist[obs3]; seceder, separatist, recusant, dissenter; nonconformist, nonjuror[obs3]. bigot &c. (obstinacy) 606; fanatic, abdal[obs3], iconoclast. latitudinarian, Deist, Theist, Unitarian; positivist, materialist; Homoiousian[obs3], Homoousian[obs3], limitarian[obs3], theosophist, ubiquitarian[obs3]; skeptic &c. 989. Protestant; Huguenot; orthodox dissenter, Congregationalist, Independent; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would be right in assuming that all morality is perfectly incompatible with the religious opinions of men. "Imitate God," is constantly repeated to us. Ah! what morals would we have if we should imitate this God! Which God should we imitate? Is it the deist's God? But even this God can not be a model of goodness for us. If He is the author of all, He is equally the author of the good and of the bad we see in this world; if He is the author of order, He is also the author ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... and sound divine, Of loud dissent the mortal terror; And when, by dint of page and line, He 'stablish'd truth, or startled error, The Baptist found him far too deep, The Deist sigh'd with saving sorrow; And the lean Levite went to sleep, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... professedly an allegoric story of the Protestant plan of salvation, is conceived in the large, wide spirit of humanity itself. Anglo-Catholic and Lutheran, Calvinist and Deist can alike read it with delight, and find their own theories in it. Even the Romanist has only to blot out a few paragraphs, and can discover no purer model of a Christian life to place in the hands of his children. The religion of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' is the religion which ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... federalist sheet, Hamilton's death called forth "the voice of deep lament" save from "the rancorous Jacobin, the scoffing deist, the snivelling fanatic, and the imported scoundrel." "Were I asked," said an apologist, "whether General Hamilton had vices, in the face of the world, in the presence of my God, I ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... somewhat on the side of the apologists; but the argumentative victory has seldom if ever been so decisive as quite to account for the comparatively undisturbed continuity of the religious life. It was in the height of the Deist controversy that Wesley and Whitfield began to preach, and they made more converts by appealing to the emotions than probably Butler did ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... d'Amabed[358] are the dirtiest and the dullest of the whole batch, and the Histoire de Jenni, though not particularly dirty, is very dull indeed, being the "History of a Good Deist," a thing without which (as Mr. Carlyle used to say) we could do. The same sort of "purpose" mars Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield, in which, after the first page, there is practically nothing about Lord Chesterfield or his deafness, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... The Deist thinks he stands on firmer ground; Cries [Greek: eureka], the mighty secret's found: God is that spring of good; supreme and best; We made to serve, and in that service blest; If so, some rules of worship must be given, Distributed alike to all by Heaven: Else God were partial, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of this nobleman, in the capacity of secretary. In the interval of this time he travelled in France, Germany, and Italy; cultivating in each capital the society of the leading statesmen and philosophers. Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, the first great English Deist, and Ben Jonson, the dramatist, were each his boon companions. In the year 1628, Hobbes again made the tour of the Continent for three years with another pupil, and became acquainted at Pisa with Galileo. In 1631 he was entrusted with the education of another youth of ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... the unbelief of his brother. So far as we know none of his ancestors were literary people. The Arouets had never written a line. The Abbe le Chaulieu was his godfather, and, although an abbe, was a deist who cared nothing about his religion except in connection with his salary. Voltaire's father wanted to make a lawyer of him, but he had no taste for law. At the age of 10 he entered the college of Louis le Grand. This was a Jesuit school, and here ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... de plume of Silvius, began his career of authorship by taking the side of Hoadley in this controversy against some of his High Church opponents. [v.03 p.0256] In 1726 he published A letter to a Deist concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the Support and Improvement which it receives from the Christian Religion, chiefly designed to show that, while a love of virtue for its own sake is the highest principle of morality, religious rewards and punishments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... into parliament. He began to write pamphlets against the ministry, and published many papers in the Craftsman. In 1733 he started a weekly periodical called the Bee, which he continued for more than a hundred numbers. By the will of Matthew Tindal, the deist, who died in 1733, a legacy of 2000 guineas was left to Budgell; but the bequest (which had, it was alleged, been inserted in the will by Budgell himself) was successfully disputed by Tindal's nephew and nearest heir, Nicholas Tindal, who translated and wrote a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the laws that bind ordinary men. He showed at the end no consciousness of his guilt. Being something of a philosopher, he had no doubt constructed for himself a philosophy of life which served to justify his own actions. He was a deist, believing in "one almighty Being the God of Nature," to whom he recommended himself at the last in the event of his "having done amiss." He emphasised the fact that his life had been unpolluted and his morals irreproachable. But his views as to the murder ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... spoke it in florid and unmeasured language and was himself of a figure and behaviour little likely to inspire permanent confidence. This was the famous Bishop of Derry, called by Charlemont a blasphemous Deist, by Wesley an exemplary Divine, by Fox a dishonest madman, and by Jeremy Bentham "a most excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred, and liberal-minded to the last degree." He was certainly vain and ostentatious, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... over the fences. He was a hireling whose own the sheep were not, who had usurped the crook of the good shepherd, and who might well be expected to leave the flock at the mercy of every wolf. He was an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, an Atheist. He had cozened the world by fine phrases, and by a show of moral goodness: but he was in truth a far more dangerous enemy of the Church than he could have been if he had openly proclaimed himself a disciple of Hobbes, and had lived as loosely as Wilmot. He had taught the fine gentlemen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... failure that life was! Standing by his grave one day, in the picturesque little churchyard at Newton, by a bend of the winding river, not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home of the famous Deist, Lord Herbert, the writer said to an old Welsh laborer, "But his life was a failure, was it not?" The old man gazed awhile at the grave, and then with a voice of unforgettable reverence and love answered, "I suppose it was, sir, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... of uncertainty exists as to Mr. Carlyle's religious opinions. I have heard him represented as a firm and entire believer in revelation, and I have heard it affirmed with equal confidence that he is a decided Deist. My own ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... very fine specimen of it too. A tall stout man with broad shoulders, and that division of lower limb which intervenes between the knee and the ankle powerfully developed. He would have knocked down a deist as soon as looked at him. It is told by the Sieur de Joinville, in his Memoir of Louis, the sainted king, that an assembly of divines and theologians convened the Jews of an Oriental city for the purpose of arguing with them on the truths of Christianity, and a certain knight, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... person to have a right to form themselves into a religious society without their [the Assembly's] leave. No,—not King George the Third himself would have liberty to worship God according to his conscience. [Yet] any Atheist, Deist, Arian, Socinian, a Prophane Drunkard, a Sorcerer, a Thief, if they have such a freehold (as the law demands), can vote to keep out a minister. [Such a] plan challenges the sole right of making religious societies and the government of ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... on a flat-boat at ten dollars per month) have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction." He was not only accused of being an aristocrat, he was called "a deist." He had fought, or been about to fight, a duel. His wife's relations were Episcopalian and Presbyterian. He and she attended a Presbyterian church. These influences alone could not be said to have defeated him, he wrote, but "they levied a tax of considerable ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... Franklin had avowed himself a deist, or theist, which must have grieved his parents, who were people of positive Christian faith. He loved to argue, and when he had learned the Socratic art of asking questions so as to lead one to confuse himself, and of answering ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... phenomena of evil {89} by God's supposed absence from the world is defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's remoteness, but ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... longings for forbidden joys are strong, has a natural kindliness toward nationalism, which befogs the serene light of God's holy law, and gives the directing power to his own inner liking. The sentimental young lady, who would recoil from the grossness of the Deist, is attracted by the poetry of Pantheism. Infidelity has had, in consequence, a degree of success very little suspected by simple-minded pastors and parents, and which is often discovered ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the divine nature, in favour of an actual revelation. It seems to me that, notwithstanding all the objections that are made to a supernatural and objective revelation, there is nothing half so monstrous as it would be to believe, with the pure deist or theist, that God, being what He is, righteous and loving, had never rent His heavens to say one word to man to lead him in the paths of righteousness. I can understand Atheism, and I can understand a revealing God, but not a God that dwells in the thick darkness, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... several primitive stocks. The Rev. E.S. Dixon (7/7. 'Ornamental and Domestic Poultry' 1848.) argues strongly on this side of the question; and one fancier even denounces the opposite conclusion by asking, "Do we not perceive pervading this spirit, the spirit of the DEIST?" Most naturalists, with the exception of a few, such as Temminck, believe that all the breeds have proceeded from a single species; but authority on such a point goes for little. Fanciers look to all parts of the world as the possible sources of their unknown stocks; thus ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... was, however, no atheist, as his enemies—and they have been many and bitter—have so often asserted. He believed in God, and at his country home near Geneva he dedicated a temple to Him. Like many of his contemporaries he was a deist, and held that God had revealed Himself in nature and in our hearts, not in Bible ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... bomb has fallen very successfully in America, and the list of killed and wounded is extensive. I have several quires of paper sent me every day, calling me monster, thief, atheist, deist, etc." ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of politics, and in its composition ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... he owed to Robespierre's wisdom was that of the crimes and infamies of atheism. Gamelin had never denied the existence of God; he was a deist and believed in a Providence that watches over mankind; but, admitting that he could form only a very vague conception of the Supreme Being and deeply attached to the principle of freedom of conscience, he was quite ready to allow that right-thinking ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... and these points of the face in all the Encyclopedists, in the orators of the Gironde, in the men of a period when religious ideas were almost dead, men who called themselves deists and were atheists. The deist is an ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... the remotest provinces of it, never illumined the mind of Daniel Webster. Upon coming of age, he joined the Congregational Church, and was accustomed to open his school with an extempore prayer. He used the word "Deist" as a term of reproach; he deemed it "criminal" in Gibbon to write his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, and spoke of that author as a "learned, proud, ingenious, foppish, vain, self-deceived man," who "from Protestant connections deserted to the Church of Rome, and thence ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the pure and simple profession of deism! The true deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavouring to imitate him in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... that are commonly heard in the haunts of wickedness, but actually putting his invention to the rack to originate expressions more revolting, if possible, than anything to be found in the acknowledged vocabulary of blasphemy. He has been through life an avowed infidel—not merely a deist, but a professed atheist,—laughing at the idea both of a God and a hereafter; though his skepticism, instead of being the result of inquiry or reflection, or being in any way connected with it, is evidently the product ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... sometimes let me into the secret of objections which might be made to it, and set me to scrutinizing the articles of my faith;" and she states that "this was the first step toward a skepticism at which I was destined to arrive after having been successively Jansenist, Cartesian, Stoic, and Deist." By this skepticism she doubtless meant merely skepticism as to creeds, for in her memoirs, written in daily expectation of death, and in most intense self-communion, she writes upon the great subjects of immortality, Deity, and providence in language of astonishing eloquence. "Can," ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... deist or monotheist and really liked the Jews, intimates that it was lucky for the Christians that Constantine didn't embrace Judaism instead of Christianity, for, if he had, the Jews would have treated the Christians ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... toleration, those who believe either more or less than the bulk of their fellow-countrymen and who boldly proclaim their belief usually find themselves at a political disadvantage. In America it never seems to have been so. Jefferson himself, a Deist (the claim sometimes made that he was a "Christian" seems to rest on nothing more solid than the fact that, like nearly all the eighteenth-century Deists, he expressed admiration for the character and teaching of Jesus ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... his funeral oration, using the words, "It is not wonderful that he only believed in the existence of matter, for all the spirit in the world was enclosed in his own body. No one but a king would venture on such a sally in a funeral oration. However, Frederick the Great was a Deist and not an Atheist; but that is of little consequence, since he never allowed the belief in a God to influence his actions in the slightest degree. Some say that an Atheist who ponders over the possible existence of a God is better than a Deist who never thinks of the Deity, but I will not venture ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavouring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of the devil, "For prey, and holes and corners tryin'," and in one instance goes so far as to take an old acquaintance of mine several steps from a crowd and, apparently weighed down with the importance of his business, gravely and solemnly asks him if "he ever heard Lincoln say he was a deist." ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... death in his awin death. For thow madest the falt, and he suffered the pane, and that for the luif he had to thee, befoir ever thow wast borne, when thow haddest done neither good nor evill. Now, since he hath payed thy debt, thow deist nott: no, thow canst nott, bot shouldest have bene damned, yf his death war not.[67] Bot since he was punished for thee, thow shalt not be punished. Fynallie, he hath delivered thee from thye condemnatioun, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... and he wrestled in vain. A century and a half ago, when the Lisbon earthquake destroyed forty thousand Portuguese, Voltaire attempted, with equal unsuccess, to vindicate Providence with the faint hope of the Deist. Modern science, prolonging the sufferings of living things over earlier millions of years, has made that problem one of the great issues of our age, and this dread spectacle of human nature red in tooth and ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... 'vindicate the ways of God to man,' but as regards logic chiefly demonstrates the author's inability to reason. He derived the ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather than ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his Busy-Body papers in the Philadelphia Weekly Mercury. He also read Locke and the English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of the Fable of the Bees, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called "The Horns," where the famous free-thinker ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... judgment, and depend on it: And he brought over so many to a submission to his opinion, that I never knew any man equal to him in the art of governing parties, and of making himself the head of them. He was as to religion a Deist at best: He had the dotage of Astrology in him to a high degree: He told me, that a Dutch doctor had from the stars foretold him the whole series of his life. But that which was before him, when he told me this, proved false, if he told ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... was the author apparently expressing an opinion which he did not himself hold in theory, however little he might have regarded it in practice. He takes up the same subject in another place, (p. 026) when speaking in his own person. "Would our daughters," he says, "admire a handsome deist, if properly impressed with the horror of his doctrines, sooner than they would now admire a handsome Mohammedan?" On the matter of Sunday observance the narrowest tenets of Puritanism were preached, and the usual ignorance was manifested that ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic; yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good man would certainly never admit, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will—essential Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism—he is consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of the problems of the world. One of the foremost ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a "Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling—chiefly in the fell district which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland, "Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district—which even now, though seamed with roads and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... him after he went to Washington. Lamon could not have seen very much of him—no one but his secretaries and his wife did. And his taciturnity must be borne in mind. Nicolay has recorded that he did not know what Lincoln believed. Lamon, 492. That Lincoln was vaguely a deist in the 'forties—so far as he had any theology at all—may be true. But it is a rash leap to a conclusion to assume that his state of mind even then was the same thing as the impression it made on so practical, bard-headed, unpoetical a character as Lamon; or on so combatively imaginative ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... of the ancient Greeks, the trinitarian God of the mediaeval school-man, the great First Cause of the eighteenth-century deist, the primordial Life-Force of the modern man of science, are all on common ground here in regard to the unfathomableness of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... only in the manner of their promulgation. Reason tries historical religion by the standard furnished by natural religion, and distinguishes actual from asserted revelation by the harmony of its contents with reason: the deist believes in the Bible because of the reasonableness of its teachings; he does not hold these teachings true because they are found in the Bible. If a positive religion contains less than natural religion it is incomplete; if it contains more ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... provoking coolness; "but then it makes no pretensions to any thing of the kind. It were strange if it did; for as the sceptic doubts if any truth can be certainly attained by man on those subjects on which the 'rational' or the 'spiritual' deist dogmatizes, it of course professes to be incapable of constructing ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... doctrine of the atonement were stricken from the scheme of Christianity, the injustice which is supposed to attend it would still continue to overhang and cloud the moral government of God. And hence, if the deist or the Socinian would escape from this frightful spectre of his own imagination, he must bury himself in the most profound depths and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... was prevented from the discussion of the knotty point at which I had just made a full stop. All my fears and cares are of this world; if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. I hate a man that wishes to be a deist; but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man; but, like electricity, phlogiston, etc., the subject is so involved in darkness, that we want ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Define difini. Definite difinita. Definitive definitiva. Deform malbonformigi. Deformed malbelforma. Defraud trompi. Defray elpagi. Defunct mortinto. Defy kontrauxstari. Degenerate degeneri. Degrade degradi. Degree grado. Deign bonvoli. Deism diismo. Deist diisto. Deity diajxo. Deject senkuragxi. Dejection malgxojeco. Delay (trans.) prokrasti. Delay (intrans.) malfrui, tromalfrui. Delay prokrasto. Delegate delegi. Delegate delegito. Delegation delegacio. Deliberate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... too fast in the same direction. The Red Army shot to death 500,000 men in Russia. The horrors of the French Revolution may be outdone, if we do not awake to our danger. Russia is cursed with a doctrine offensive alike to the Christian, the Jew, the Mohammedan and even the deist. In America the same condition may be brought about, more stealthily and more effectually in the name of science. Indeed, the Russian atheists feel the necessity of adopting the American method as more effective. An Associated Press dispatch ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... Except during a short time just preceding and during his stay in London he seems never to have been an atheist; neither was he ever quite a Christian; but as between atheism and Christianity he was very much further removed from the former than from the latter. He used to call himself a deist, or theist; and said that a deist was as much like an atheist as chalk is like charcoal. The evidence is abundant that he settled down into a belief in a personal God, who was good, who concerned himself with the affairs of men, who was pleased with good acts and displeased ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... in which man, without any reference to any higher being, or to any future state, is very deeply interested. Every human being, be he idolater, Mahometan, Jew, Papist, Socinian, Deist, or Atheist, naturally loves life, shrinks from pain, desires comforts which can be enjoyed only in communities where property is secure. To be murdered, to be tortured, to be robbed, to be sold ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for the Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed the committee of the new ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... compliment; the tone of dogmatism and the smile of contempt were equally unknown to him. Sometimes indeed he raised himself stronger and more lofty in his eloquence, then chiefly, when, fearful for his weaker brethren, he opposed the arrogance of the illiterate deist, or the worse jargon of sensual and cold-blooded atheism. He knew that the clouds of ignorance which enveloped their understandings, steamed up from the pollutions of their hearts, and, crowding his sails, he bore down upon them ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... himself a deist, she believed, and his praise of Bolingbroke made her mad to read his books, and then the rest followed easily. She also gave me an account of her private and domestic life; of her misery at home, her search of dissipation, and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the profession of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay your rates: don't be a vulgar deist—a fellow like Toland who is poor and has no social position. But, on the other hand, you need not be a fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of ridicule, insultingly reminds him of "his Master," Shaftesbury, and of that school which made morality an object of taste, shrewdly hinting that Akenside was "a man of taste;" a new term, as we are to infer from Warburton, for "a Deist;" or, as Akenside had alluded to Spinoza, he might be something worse. The great critic loudly protested against the practice of ridicule; but, in attacking its advocate, he is himself an evidence of its efficacy, by keenly ridiculing "the Poet" and his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... my twenty-first year; and it may be well to let you know the then state of my mind with regard to my principles and morals. My parents had brought me through my childhood piously in the dissenting way, but now I had become a thorough Deist. My arguments had perverted some others, but as each of these persons had afterwards wronged me greatly without the least compunction, and as my own conduct towards others had given me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... not, however, abolished by Christian feeling, or by greater humanity on the part of the Catholics; nor was it abolished through the ministers of justice, and still less by the order of the King. It was put an end to by the Stage! As Voltaire, the Deist, terminated the hanging of Protestants, so did Fenouillot, the player, put an end to their serving as galley-slaves. The termination of this latter punishment has a curious history attached ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... and demoralizing Dogmas and Mysteries of the Christian Religion. Now first translated from the French of Freret, but supposed to be written by Baron Holbach, author of the System of Nature, Christianity Unveiled, Common Sense, Universal Morality, Natural Morality. R. Carlile, The Deist, etc., Vol. II, 1819, etc. (8vo, pp. 185.) B. ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... infinite power and inexhaustible beneficence, mighty to devise and direct the universe, with knowledge reaching to the farthest confines of space, with ear to listen to the prayer of His lowest creatures. Her belief stopped short even of the Deist's faith in an Almighty Will. She saw in creation nothing but the inevitable development of material laws; and it seemed to her that there was quite as much hope of a heavenly world after death for the infusoria in the pool as for man in his ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... taken him into the house altogether, his home being at some distance; but I knew not how long he might be permitted to stay. The ravages of a dreadful fever among the poor, increased my solicitude to see my devout little Deist a Christian. I have, in a small memoir of this "Happy Mute," related the manner of his receiving the gospel, but I must not pass it over here. To the glory of God's rich grace it shall be recorded, as one of the most signal mercies ever vouchsafed to me. As before, the boy was led ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Eastern Jew prefers to die on the floor, not in bed, as was the case with the late Mr. Emmanuel Deutsch, who in his well-known article on the Talmud had the courage to speak of "Our Saviour." But as a rule the Israelite, though he mostly appears as a Deist, a Unitarian, has a fund of fanatical feelings which crop up in old age and near death. The "converts" in Syria and elsewhere, whose Judaism is intensified by "conversion," when offers are made to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that he swallowed luxuries beyond his means. A gentleman asked a child who made him. The answer was: "God made me so long—measuring the length of a baby—and I growed the rest." The mistake of the little deist in leaving out the God of his growth illustrates a conviction: We are what ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... experiences as fanatical delusions;—I say, I can scarcely conceive such a young man to make a serious study of the Fathers of the first four or five centuries without becoming either a Romanist or a Deist. Let him only read Petavius and the different Patristic and Ecclesiastico -historical tracts of Semler, and have no better philosophy than that of Locke, no better theology than that of Arminius and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and I should tremble for his belief. Yet why tremble for a belief ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rationalists. He combined (1) admiration for experimental science with (2) an exalted opinion of his own ability to reason out the "natural laws" which were supposed to lie at the base of human nature, religion, society, the state, and the universe in general. (3) He was a typical Deist, thinking that the God who had made the myriad stars of the firmament and who had promulgated eternal laws for the universe, would hardly concern Himself with the soul of Pierre or Jean. To him all priests were impostors, and sacraments meaningless ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the name and consequent privileges of a Christian. The title implies no more than a sort of formal, general assent to Christianity in the gross, and a degree of morality in practice, but little if at all superior to that for which we look in a good Deist, ...
— 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
... Presbyterians, that the vast majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the streets; and if a man had even seen a "Deist," he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. Against all this some ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... two Letters I have given the state of the argument as it would stand between a Christian, thinking as I do, and a serious well-disposed Deist. I will now endeavour to state the argument, as between the former and the advocates for the popular belief,—such of them, I mean, as are competent to deliver a dispassionate judgment in the cause. And again, more ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to France another man, after three years' absence: above all, he carried with him the then popular English way of thinking as to the supernatural, and became a somewhat cold, common-sense deist, opposed to the atheism of some and the dull bigotry of the established creed in the hands of others. God was to him conscious creator of the world, and only faintly, if at all, its ruler; he recognized ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of education, however, which is generally regarded as the foundation of all education—I mean religion—was never even mentioned to her. The Holy Scriptures were, indeed, given into the child's hands, but she was left to believe or reject whatever she liked. Her grandmother, who was a deist, hated not only the pious, but piety itself, and, above all, Roman Catholicism. Christ was in her opinion an estimable man, the gospel an excellent philosophy, but she regretted that truth was enveloped in ridiculous fables. The little ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... materialism. The austere devotion of Pascal was out of fashion. The spiritual teachings of Bossuet and Fenelon represented the out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. It was Voltaire who gave the tone, and even Voltaire was not radical enough for many of these iconoclasts. "He is a bigot and a deist," exclaimed a feminine disciple of d'Holbach's atheism. The gay, witty, pleasure-loving abbe, who derided piety, defied morality, was the pet of the salon, and figured in the worst scandals, was a fair representative of the fashionable clergy who had no attribute of priesthood but the name, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which seem to bear the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing mind from its result in nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... have sinned, and that th' offence Of man is made against Omnipotence, Some price that bears proportion must be paid, And infinite with infinite be weighed. See then the Deist lost; remorse for vice Not paid; or, paid, inadequate ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either the one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to go for me, because I belonged to no church, was suspected of being a deist, and had talked about fighting a duel. With all these things, Baker of course had nothing to do. Nor do I complain of them. As to his own church going for him, I think that was right enough, and as ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... name each Monster wou'd make Printing dear, Or tire Ned Ward, who writes six Books a-year. Such vicious Nonsense, Impudence, and Spite, Wou'd make a Hermit, or a Father write. Tho' Julian rul'd the World, and held no more Than deist Gildon taught, or Toland swore, Good Greg'ry[48] prov'd him execrably bad, And scourg'd his Soul, with drunken Reason mad. Much longer, Pope restrain'd his awful hand, Wept o'er poor Niniveh, and her dull band, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... meanness of his dress, seemed to distinguish him from the crowd of wretches who swarmed in those regions; and, above all, the sentiments which he had just declared very nearly coincided with those of Mr. Booth: this gentleman was what they call a freethinker; that is to say, a deist, or, perhaps, an atheist; for, though he did not absolutely deny the existence of a God, yet he entirely denied his providence. A doctrine which, if it is not downright atheism, hath a direct tendency towards it; and, as Dr Clarke ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Lord Bolingbroke, an avowed Deist, commended Foster for the false aphorism—"Where mystery begins religion ends." Dr. Foster attended Lord Kilmarnock before his execution. He wrote in defence of Christianity in reply to Tindal, the Freethinker, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... orders, cordially and heartily believing the truths taught by the church of which he is privileged to be an humble minister. Before doing so, he had read thoughtfully the great works of evidences of the last century, and knew directly or indirectly the character of the deist doubts against which they were directed. His own faith was one of the head as well as the heart; founded on the study of the evidences, as well as on the religious training of early years. But he perceived in the English church earnest men who held ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... of the old Pietism of his harsh father were visible in the son. Gathering around him such men as Voltaire, La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and others whom his gold could attach to him, he was the same king in faith and literature that he was in politics. Claiming to be a Deist, it is probable that he was a very liberal one. It is more than likely that he was truthful in his description of himself when he wrote to d'Alembert that he had never lived under the same roof with religion. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... He died on the 8th of February 1746. Chubb is interesting mainly as showing that the rationalism of the intellectual classes had taken considerable hold upon the popular mind. Though he acquired little renown in England he was regarded by Voltaire and others as among the most logical of the deist school (see DEISM). His principal works are A Discourse Concerning Reason (1731), The True Gospel of Jesus Christ (1739), and Posthumous Works, 2 vols. (1748), the last containing "The Author's Farewell to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... abroad, traceable chiefly to Aubrey and to Anthony Wood, that Hariot was unsound in religious principles and matters of belief; that he was, in fact, not only a Deist himself, but that he exerted a baleful influence over Raleigh and his History as well as over the Earl of Northumberland. Not to misstate this utterly unfounded imputation, the very words of Wood, as first ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... says: "The Christian that rejects the necessity of immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity; he has nothing to prove the goodness of his own Christianity, but that which equally proves to the Deist the goodness of his infidelity."[139-1] That by prayer the path of duty will be made clear, is a ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... their due, the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments—moral, intellectual, and material. Consequently they exclude, once for all, from political supremacy, all the different servants of God—Catholic, Protestant, or Deist—as being at once behind-hand and ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My arguments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having afterwards wrong'd me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting Keith's conduct towards me (who was another free-thinker), and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... of Sir Walter Rawleigh his house, had brought the Godhead in question, and the whole course of the Scriptures, but of whom he so heard it he did not remember. (Thomas Harriot was an acknowledged deist, and Raleigh had taken him into his house to study mathematics with him.] He heard his brother, Dr. Jesopp, say that Mr. Carew Rawleigh, reasoning with Mr. Parry and Mr. Archdeacon about the Godhead [as he conjectureth], his said brother, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... revelation I saw not that cold, distant, unfeeling fate, or that crushing regularity of power and wisdom, which was all the ancient Greek or modern Deist can behold in God; but I beheld, as it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves, and suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his garments on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to mortal kind. An autocrat of this sort had no scruples about changing Wood's copy whenever he differed from Wood in political or religious opinion. Now Antony, as we said, had eyes to discern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the Dean considered no better than a Deist or an Atheist. The Dean therefore calmly altered all that Wood had written of the Philosopher of Malmesbury, and so maligned Hobbes that the old man, meeting the King in Pall Mall, begged leave to reply in his own defence. Charles allowed the dispute ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... as advocating a universal religion in the place of Christianity. But this by no means follows. The idea is surely that Masons should be men adhering to that law of right and wrong common to all religious faiths. Craft Masonry may thus be described as Deist in character, but not in the accepted sense of the word which implies the rejection of Christian doctrines. If Freemasonry had been Deist in this sense might we not expect to find some connexion between the founders of Grand Lodge and ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... unlike Russell, was in theory not averse to Republicanism, but the accusations are false as to his being a sceptic or a deist, as his own dying apology attests. He says: "God will not suffer this land, where the Gospel has of late flourished more than in any part of the world, to become a slave of the world. He will not suffer it to be made a land of graven images; He will stir up witnesses ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... civilised and philosophical than many by which they were surrounded, had been alone preserved a pure and sublime theism, disdaining a likeness in the things of heaven or earth. Leila knew little of the more narrow and exclusive tenets of her brethren; a Jewess in name, she was rather a deist in belief; a deist of such a creed as Athenian schools might have taught to the imaginative pupils of Plato, save only that too dark a shadow had been cast over the hopes of another world. Without the absolute denial of the Sadducee, Almamen ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book III. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hard-heartedness. But the story was a physiologic fact; and, originally, it had been brought forward in a philosophic work, by Darwin, who had the reputation of an irreligious man, and even of an infidel. A bold freethinker he certainly was: a Deist, and, by public repute, something more.] But, secretly, I was struck with awe at the revelation of powers so unsearchably new, lurking within old affections so familiarly known as cold. Upon the analogy of this case, it might be thought that nothing whatever had yet been truly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... heart, like so many men of his class who are unbelievers, he was not sorry that his family should believe for him: for it is always good to have allies in the opposing camp, and one is never sure which way Fortune will turn. He was a Deist, and he reserved the right to summon a priest when the time came, as his father had done: even if it did no good, it could do no harm: one insures against fire, even if one has no reason to believe that the house will ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... quote correctly? I think I remember another line, which may amend my meaning: 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto me.' Deist? Bless you, man, I was raised on the milk of the Word. Now, Doctor, the pocket of the world having uttered its voice, what has the heart to say? You are a philanthropist, in a small way,—n'est ce pas? Here, boy, this gentleman can show you how to cut korl better,—or your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... let his demand be what it might, he would give it on condition I would yield to be his companion, keeping the same company, and I should always, in every respect, fare as he fared, wearing my clothes like his and of equal value: telling me then plainly, he was a Deist; adding, so were most of the noblemen in France and in England; deriding the account given by the four Evangelists concerning the birth of Christ, and his miracles, etc., so far that I desired him to desist: for I could not bear to hear my Saviour so reviled and spoken against. Whereupon he ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the empire of a Frenchwoman—she is coquette, then deist, then devote. The empire during these is never lost—she only changes her subjects. When thirty-five years and more have unpeopled her dominion of the slaves of love she repeoples it with slaves of infidelity, and, then with the slaves of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... become the majesty of the empire to acknowledge a Supreme God. Their Jupiter, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jehovah of the Phoenicians, was always considered as the master of the secondary gods. This great truth can not be too forcibly inculcated." Voltaire was a Deist. ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... are offended at certain things in revelation.... Well, I will show you that in your and my admitted system of nature there are just as many difficulties as in the system of revelation." And on this, says Arnold, he does show it, "and by adversaries such as his, who grant what the Deist or Socinian grants, he never has been answered, he never will be answered. The spear of Butler's reasoning will even follow and transfix the Duke of Somerset,[53] who finds so much to condemn in the Bible, but 'retires into one unassailable fortress—faith in God.'"[54] Butler's method, then, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... collectivism, otherwise our equality will be nothing but a phantom and an hypocrisy. Every one who is a convinced and sincere egalitarian, and who takes the trouble to think, is forced to be a collectivist. Bonald asked very wittily: "Do you know what is a deist? It is a man who has not lived long enough to be an atheist." We in our turn ask: "Do you know what is an anti-collectivist democrat? It is a man who has not lived long enough to be a collectivist, or who, having lived long enough, has never taken ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... He professes himself a deist; believing in a general Providence, but doubting of, though by no means rejecting (as is commonly supposed) the immortality of the soul ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... abuse for raising Milton's Bust, And impiously molest learn'd Johnston's Dust. Religious, he the Psalms in Latin sung, From hence the Malice of the Deist sprung. While with a just Derision we survey, Thy wretched ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted |
