"Irreligious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should accept and follow the ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help. Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who are to be leaders in the great movements upon ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... palliated his conduct and remained faithful to his standard; but they felt he had committed a great blunder, if it were not a great crime. They knew that their cause was lost,—lost by him who had been their leader. Truly could they say, "Put not your trust in princes." To the irreligious, but worldly-wise, Henry had made a grand stroke of policy; had gained a kingdom well worth a Mass, had settled the disorders of forty years, had united both Catholics and Protestants in fealty to his crown, and was left at ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... lies in politics and lies in religion, lies in the pulpit, 'nail't wi' Scripture,' lies in the counting room railed with false entries, religious lies, told by Deacon Longface, for the advancement of what the Deacon calls 'the gospel,' and irreligious lies told by Bill Snooks, and clenched with an oath, lies in good books, and lies in bad ones, lies written, and printed in the newspapers, and lies whispered in the ear, and any number of lies sent by telegraph! And then, there's the walking lies, going about on two legs, saying what they do ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Bishop Butler threw out in a sermon before the House of Lords, in 1741, does honour to his political sagacity, as well as to his knowledge of human nature; he calculated that the irreligious spirit would produce, some time or other, political disorders similar to those which, in the seventeenth century, had arisen from religious fanaticism. "Is there no danger," he observed, "that all this may raise somewhat like that levelling spirit, upon atheistical principles, which ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... character displayed itself. He never avoided the most trying and irksome duties. If he had selfishness, those who knew him long and well as schoolmates and comrades never discerned it. More than once I have heard his beautiful Christian example spoken of by irreligious comrades. Bitter and inexplicable as may be the Providence which has removed one so full of promise of good to his fellows, I feel that we may thank God that we have been permitted to witness a life so Christ-like terminated ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... three days after this began, the subjects of intense heart-searchings, and of piercing compunctions for their backslidings. This was not less true of the more devoted Christians, than of others. The irreligious members of the seminary were also deeply moved; and there was a similar experience in the girls' seminary. Geog Tapa again shared largely in the spiritual blessings of a revived religious feeling. In the village of ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many passages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply grave to me. How far my mind has been paralysed by the faults and sorrow of life,—how far short its knowledge may be of what I might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... paid on account of his employer. In this respect I was far in advance of him, of which my master was aware, and which was one of the causes of Hines' excessive hatred of me, and of his great desire to "put me down and make me know my place," as he termed it. He was very irreligious, and entirely wanting in every attribute of a Christian. He was also what in the South is termed a "bully"—that is, he was free to use his pistols on the slightest occasion, when among his equals, but when in ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... own opinions!" This latter passage is characteristic, and many who do not like Jefferson will read between the lines the exultation of a man who was not always careful to draw the line between religious liberty and irreligious license.] ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... which St. Paul personifies is the curbing power of a strong government as then seen in the administrative system of the Roman empire. The power of Rome protected him against Jewish fanaticism at this period (Acts xix. 35-41; xxii. 22-29), but in this truly irreligious fanaticism he discerned a latent mysterious evil (ii. 7) which would afterwards reveal itself in hideous excesses. While "the man of sin," or {132} "wicked one," thus wreaks his will, Christ will come and consume him with the ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... the glass away with contempt for its virtue of comfort; and I laughed, I think, in a disagreeable way, so that the old man, unused to manifestations as harsh and irreligious ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... baby! You wicked, horrible, sacrilegious girl!" Brinnaria stormed. "You irreligious, atheistical, blasphemous wretch! To save your hide you'd desecrate the temple, pollute the Altar, anger Vesta, make all our prayers in vain, bring down curses without count on Rome and all of us. Be silent! Don't you dare to speak another word! Off to ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, "And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... me wrathy to think of Winifred Anstice marrying that Mr. Flint, who is so dangerously irreligious, and Philip Brady marrying Nora Costello, who is so injudiciously religious, and then poor Leonard Davitt throwing away his life for that pert, forward, foolish Tilly Marsden, who has gone back to her shop-counter, pleased, ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... silent and motionless for half a minute, then he said: "Superstition is irreligious, but there is something in the air of this place. I think it's ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... best to marry persons of your own faith and religious convictions, unless one is willing to adopt those of the other. Difference of faith is apt to divide families, and to produce great trouble in after life. A pious woman should beware of marrying an irreligious man. {171} ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... which Infinite Mercy has concealed. There is but little probability that the curiosity of mankind in this respect will ever be wholly eradicated. Death and ill-fortune are continual bugbears to the weak-minded, the irreligious, and the ignorant; and while such exist in the world, divines will preach upon its impiety and philosophers discourse upon its absurdity in vain. Still, it is evident that these follies have greatly diminished. Soothsayers and prophets have lost the credit they formerly enjoyed, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... inquire. It is certain, at least, that the whole is not covered. And nothing more lends confidence to the method than this. For one thing, room is still left for mystery. Had no place remained for mystery it had proved itself both unscientific and irreligious. A Science without mystery is unknown; a Religion without mystery is absurd. This is no attempt to reduce Religion to a question of mathematics, or demonstrate God in biological formulae. The elimination of mystery from the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... have had a beginning; that there must be one great first cause, God. Surely there is no better way to bring His goodness into question, to throw doubt on His revelation, and to make it the laughing stock of the irreligious, than thus to clip the wings of faith, to throw her into a dungeon, to keep her from the light of day, to make her read through. Hebrew spectacles, and to force her to be a laggard and dullard, instead of a bright and volatile ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the best divines such as could not write. In all their preachments they so highly pretended to the Spirit, that some of them could hardly spell a letter. To be blind with them was a proper qualification of a spiritual guide, and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost convertible terms. None save tradesmen and mechanics were allowed to have the Spirit, and those only were accounted like St. Paul who could work with their hands, and were able to make a pulpit before ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at all," replied my old friend sourly, "leastwise nothin' poignant. It's that yoothful party in the black surtoot who comes pesterin' me a moment ago about the West bein', as he says, a roode an' irreligious outfit." ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Israel, was a good deal to blame for this. A historical event was translated into metaphysic. The only truly religious man was made the centre of a new mythology and naively worshipped. It may sound like a paradox, but it is a fact that the whole of the first millenary was inwardly irreligious; it concealed its want of metaphysical intuition behind the falsification of historical events. The entire mediaeval (and a large proportion of the Protestant) theology laboured to obtain an intellectual grasp ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... he looked towards me. "Do you know, Nikhil," he said, "I believe Sandip is not irreligious—his religion is of the obverse side of truth, like the dark moon, which is still a moon, for all that its light has gone over to ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... go to church sometimes: I am sorry to see the young men of the present day so irreligious. Perhaps you could get my old friend, Madame De—, to choose the Cachemire—take care ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... typical Oriental colouring, the whole arrangement was traditional, and it was irreligious to depart from what had been fixed by statute many centuries before, and only perfected by the experience of many generations of men; and this veneration for traditional custom has hitherto been prevalent in European ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... remember, things were very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that, roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a few exceptional men—Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... priest for ever; who, being raised from the dead, died no more; and who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God." Paul's Epist. to the Hebrews, ch. ix. 10. It was on account of this gross absurdity, and the irreligious application of it, that our first reformers suffered, and so many were put to death in the reign of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... descended the stairs with the rocking chair, she thought, "Nothing could be more suiterble. We are both about the same age; I am most respecterbly connected—in fact, I regard myself as somewhat his superior in this respect; he is painfully undeveloped and irreligious and thus is in sore need of female influence; he is lonely and down-hearted, and in woman's voice there is a spell to banish care; worst of all, things are going to waste. I must delib'rately face the great duty with which Providence ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... go further," continued Theodora, "there is the whole of the East; that certainly is not orthodox, according to your views. You may not agree with all or any of their opinions, but you could scarcely maintain that, as communities, they are irreligious." ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Philip of Macedon bought what responses he wished at Delphi. Anybody with plenty of money, who would quietly "see" the priests, could have such a response as he chose. Or, if he was a bull-headed, hard-fisted, fighting-man, of irreligious but energetic mind, the priests gave him what he wished, out of fear. When Themistocles wanted to encourage the Greeks against the Persians, he "fixed" Delphi by bribes. When Alexander the Great came to consult the same oracle, the Pythia was disinclined to perform. But Alexander rather roughly ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... own way," cried Fichta, "I would shut up these irreligious American schools. Religion is the base of the social ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 the other. A man may be irreligious, and yet a great stickler for property, because a great owner of it,—or because he is by nature stanchly conservative, and his infidelity merely a matter of logic. But if there be any reason for charging a man with Agrarianism, though it be never so unreasonable a reason, his infidelity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... right of private judgment on all points of his belief, was a deeply religious man, as indicated throughout his career, at every stage, in every event of his life. It is hardly possible even for an irreligious man to conceive that Prince Albert could have been what he was without faith and discipline. His biographer has with reason quoted the "God be my stay!" in the light of the sincerity of the man, in a letter written in the flush of his joy and the very fruition of his desires, as one ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... himself the trouble to go down into damp, unwholesome graves, for the purpose of fetching up a few trumpery sheets of manuscript; and if the public has been rather tired with their contents, and is disposed to ask why Mrs. Sand's religious or irreligious notions are to be brought forward to people who are quite satisfied with their own, we can only say that this lady is the representative of a vast class of her countrymen, whom the wits and philosophers of the eighteenth ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we take the experience of an individual or the history of a tribe, whether we have recourse to the opinions of religious teachers or irreligious philosophers, we find them nigh unanimous that the emotion which is the prime motor of religious thought is fear. I need not depend upon the well-known line of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the faults of public worship in the west. The practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes the whole performance ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... from all sources of three-quarters of a million per annum. Now consider from whence all this has sprung. It is only twenty-five years since the author of this volume stood absolutely alone in the East of London, to endeavour to Christianise its irreligious multitudes, without the remotest conception in his own mind of the possibility of any such Organisation ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... curates. In my time we girls saw them, of course, running about the place like rabbits. But we never took any notice of them, I need hardly say. But I am told that nowadays country society is quite honeycombed with them. I think it most irreligious. And then the eldest son has quarrelled with his father, and it is said that when they meet at the club Lord Brancaster always hides himself behind the money article in The Times. However, I believe that is quite a common occurrence nowadays and that they have to take ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... many on similar grounds; and that he had himself been repeatedly attacked for his anti-Christian teachings. He seems not to have perceived that, just as his antagonists were wrong in condemning as irreligious, theories which he saw were not irreligious; so might he be wrong in condemning, on like grounds, the Theory of Evolution. In brief, he fell short of that highest faith which knows that all truths must harmonize; and which is, therefore, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... means. It is a far more important matter that is at stake. The Court considers the atheistical irreligious 'attentats' have gone too far and therefore has ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This "leading in triumph," a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and deep-thinking Christian, melancholy by temperament, and grieved by what seemed to him the hopelessly irreligious condition of his age. In his view not only the religious life of the nation, but (what he regarded as synonymous) the church itself, was in an almost hopeless state of decay, as we see from his first and only charge to the diocese of Durham and [v.04 p.0883] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... help to him. Nanny had been a great church-goer when she was a maiden, but after her marriage she only went in the afternoons, and a time came when she ceased altogether to attend. The minister admonished her many times, telling her, among other things, that her irreligious ways were a distress to her husband. She never replied that she could not go to church in the forenoon because Sanders insisted on a hot meal being waiting him when the service ended. But it was true that Sanders, for appearance's sake, would have had her go ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... small parish—a dull village on the edge of a marsh—the Holy Communion was only celebrated once a month. It was not because he was irreligious that old Mr. Rampant was one of the too numerous non-communicants. "It's his temper, poor gentleman," said Nurse. "He can't answer for himself, and he has that religious feeling he wouldn't like to come unless he was fit. ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... hell, had filthie pleasure no other pillowe to leane vpon but his spreaded limmes? On thy flesh my fault shall bee imprinted at the day of resurrection. O beauty, the bait ordained to insnare the irreligious: rich men are robd for theyr welth, women are dishonested for being too faire. No blessing is beautie but a curse: curst bee the time that euer I was begotten: curst be the time that my mother brought me ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... be no more doubt that Omar did order the destruction of this library, under an impression of its uselessness or its irreligious tendency, than that the Crusaders burnt the library of Tripoli, fancifully said to have consisted of three million volumes. The first apartment entered being found to contain nothing but the Koran, all the other books were supposed to be the works of the Arabian impostor, and were consequently ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and hypocrites in general are roundly scored, especially in chapter 27, where the sage, angered by the reproaches which the mustahid has made to him for his bad conduct and irreligious poetry, gives vent to his sentiments of disgust in a number of poems (vol. ii. p. 137 seq.). Bodenstedt undoubtedly had in mind the persecutions to which Hafid was subject, culminating in the refusal of the priests to give him regular burial and ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... 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 man has the heart to criticise the hasty speculations and abject fear of those who stand without in the presence of the surrounding darkness. In other words, religion is perpetually on the exposed side of civilization, sensitive to the blasts that blow from ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... hunger took away all natural and relative affections, "so that husbands had not sympathy for their wives, nor wives for their husbands; parents for their children, nor children for their parents." The saddest proof of the extent of the suffering is shown in the irreligious despair which seized upon the sufferers. Scotland then, as now, was strongly marked for its piety, but want made men defiant of heaven, prepared, like her who counselled the man of Uz, to curse God and die by the roadside. Warned by ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient times Masons were charged in every country to be of the religion of that country or nation, whatever it was, yet it is now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves: ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... has become famous both in England and abroad, had its origin at Oxford, about A. D. 1838. Some distinguished members of the university thought that the church of England was in an alarming position, and that irreligious principles and false doctrines had been admitted into the measures of the government of the country on a large scale. To check the progress of these supposed errors and mischievous practices, they published a series of "Tracts for the ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... 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 my name's not le Harnois: damn!"—With which emphatic monosyllable, ascending in a growl ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... a proud woman. And because she would lose the friendship of all proud women and clean thinking men if she condoned what you intend to do. It's horrible to see you turned from a simple, stupid, but honourable boy, into a hard, selfish, irreligious man—and all the result of being rich. I should never have thought it could have made such a dreadful difference so quickly. But I have not changed, Raymond. And I tell you this: if you don't marry ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... throughout France. They, no doubt, indicate clearly enough the state of general opinion at this time. But what then? Their great compeers, the giants of thought, foreshadow what it will be. The profligate novels, licentious drama, and irreligious opinions of the middle class now in France, are the result of the infidelity and wickedness which produced the Revolution. The opinions of the great men who have succeeded the school of the Encyclopedie, who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... own actions are governed by reasonable or moral motives? Can the gluttonous father expect a self-denying son? With how ill a grace must a man who will often be disguised in liquor, preach sobriety? a passionate man, patience? an irreligious man, piety? How will a parent, whose hands are seldom without cards, or dice in them, be observed in lessons against the pernicious vice of gaming? Can the profuse father, who is squandering away the fortunes of his children, expect to be regarded ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... worse elements of society. The people shunned the clergy, and held them up to ridicule. They formed a class apart, not in sympathy with the parishioners. They committed serious transgressions, were irreligious and transformed the service of ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... if I'd taken a hammer and smashed the wretched old casts!" sobbed Diana. "I really didn't do them any damage; even the seccotine was easily sponged off Venus. But Miss Todd talked and talked as if I'd done something irreligious in church. I'd never do that, you know! Would I, now? She said I had 'an irreverent mind'. I don't believe she'll ever quite forgive me. And oh, Hilary has been so nasty! Thank goodness, dancing evening's ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to die?" resumed the Bishop. He a mortal like to US? Death was not for him intended, though communis omnibus: Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... might be written on the subject of "London out of Church," dealing with the manners and customs of those people who patronize no sort of religious establishment on the Sunday. I have seen pretty well all the typical phases of religious London and London irreligious; but these would rather be characterized as non-religious than as irreligious folks. They do not belong to any of the varied forms of faith; in fact faith is from their life a thing apart. It is in this ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to induce her to authorise him to contradict her own letter. He appealed first to her affection, and then to her duty; and after that, having failed in these appeals, he poured forth the full vials of his wrath upon her head. She was ungrateful, obstinate, false, unwomanly, disobedient, irreligious, sacrilegious, and an idiot. In the fury of his anger, there was hardly any epithet of severe rebuke which he spared, and yet, as every cruel word left his mouth, he assured her that it should all be taken to mean nothing, if ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... evolution; second, that he had discovered the method by which evolution is accomplished. Before his time there was no general agreement as to the fact of evolution. People generally thought the idea absurd, as well as irreligious. All previous efforts on the part of advanced thinkers to persuade mankind of the truth of evolution had been nearly without effect. Among the early philosophers the whole idea was purely speculative. They made no ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... no rabid Churchmen, of any school of thought, ever again take exception to the irreligious character of playhouse entertainments. Let them read the advertisement of the Lyceum Theatre in The Times for March 13:—"During Holy Week this theatre will be closed, re-opening on Saturday, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... Harnack's celebrated History of Dogma, and around these he framed his reply. "To act as if faith in eternal life and in the living Christ was the simplest thing in the world, or a dogma to which one has to submit, is irreligious. . . It is Christian to pray that God would give the Spirit to make us strong to overcome the feelings and the doubts of nature. . . Where this faith, obtained in this way, exists, it has always been supported by the conviction that the Man lives who brought life ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... life," went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, and for ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Meanwhile the French, too, will develop farther. English Socialism affords the most pronounced expression of the prevailing absence of religion among the working-men, an expression so pronounced indeed that the mass of the working-men, being unconsciously and merely practically irreligious, often draw back before it. But here, too, necessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... dreaming," replied the philosopher, laughing. "But I have a question to propose. Have you ever observed the strange nature of our people? Pacific, they love warlike spectacles; democratic, they adore emperors, kings, and princes; irreligious, they ruin themselves in the pomps of the ritual; the nature of our women is gentle, but they have deliriums of delight when a princess brandishes a lance. Do you know the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... comfortably rich. 2. The decently comfortable. 3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious. 4. The very poor, who are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... there come domestic and social hindrances which still more completely draw the line between the male and female duties.... Every attempt to break through them, therefore, must be pronounced as unnatural as it is irreligious and profane.... The most serious importance of this modern 'woman's rights' doctrine is derived from its direct bearing upon the marriage institution. The blindest must see that such a change as is proposed in the relations and life of the sexes cannot leave either marriage or the ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... except the boss of the Macdonald gang, Macdonald Bhain, who was a regular attendant and stanch supporter of the church, and indeed had been spoken of for an elder. But from the church Macdonald Dubh held aloof. He belonged distinctly to the "careless," though he could not be called irreligious. He had all the reverence for "the Word of God, and the Sabbath day, and the church" that characterized his people. All these held a high place in his esteem; and though he would not presume to "take ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... accomplished by prayer, must pray. In that way only, and not by communication of knowledge from another, could he understand it as a practical effect. And to understand it not practically, but only in a speculative way, could not meet any religious wish, but merely an irreligious curiosity. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... long before his death, spoke with disapprobation of Abolitionists in the United States, "for undertaking," as he said, "to decide, without sufficient evidence, upon the irreligious character of ministers and church-members. They, forsooth, undertake to exclude men from the Lord's table, who are in good and regular standing in the church of Christ, because they happen to hold slaves! ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... their peculiar tenets. "I have always respected religion," said he; "the morality of the Gospel is the noblest gift ever bestowed by God on man." The Jesuits strenuously urged him to put into their hands a corrected copy of the Lettres Persanes, in which he had expunged the passages having an irreligious tendency, but he refused to give it to them; but he gave the copy to the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, and Madame Dupre de St Maur, who were in the apartment, with instructions for its publication, saying, "I will sacrifice every thing to religion, but nothing to the Jesuits." Shortly after he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... by side, exchanging their opinions in regard to Gervaise, whom they stigmatized as an irreligious ne'er-do-well whose child would never have gone to the Holy Communion if it had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... religiously and strictly brought up by his father, a Scotch Puritan, but he had broken loose from the restraints which his parents sought to throw around him, and had led, if not a vicious, at least an irreligious life, without thought of God, or of the lessons of truth and goodness which he had been taught. Yet his conscience was not so hardened that he could be happy in this neglect of God, and he felt ill at ease, dissatisfied with himself, ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... better ones in London. For the population and magistrates of London were prevailingly Puritan, and the great body of the Puritans, then as always, were strongly opposed to the theater as a frivolous and irreligious thing—an attitude for which the lives of the players and the character of many plays afforded, then as almost always, only too much reason. The city was very jealous of its prerogatives; so that in spite of Queen Elizabeth's strong patronage of the drama, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly. "My friend I spoke of took that out of me. He was the most irreligious man I ever knew, and the most moral. And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The mediaevalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go. To be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for the traditions ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... of every man, whatever his belief, or however humble his degree, to aspire, and to have some means of aspiring, to be a better and a wiser man? I find that, in 1825, certain misguided and turbulent persons proposed to erect in Liverpool an unpopular, dangerous, irreligious, and revolutionary establishment, called a Mechanics' Institution; that, in 1835, Liverpool having, somehow or other, got on pretty comfortably in the meantime, in spite of it, the first stone of a new and spacious edifice was laid; ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... want it back? and who is the author? There is a great deal of clever writing in it,—great observation of nature, and also of character among a certain class of persons. But it is almost too minute, and for me decidedly too theological. You see what irreligious people we are here. I shall come over to one of your camp-meetings and try to be converted. What will they administer in such a case? brimstone or brandy? I shall try ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Obviously if the mind turns away from one part of the environment it will only do so under some temptation to correspond with another. This temptation, at bottom, can only come from one source—the love of self. The irreligious man's correspondences are concentrated upon himself. He worships himself. Self-gratification rather than self-denial; independence rather than submission—these are the rules of life. And this is at once the poorest and the commonest form ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its essence. It is the entanglement of religion in dogma that still keeps the world superficially irreligious. Now, though no religion can escape the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more easily and light-heartedly than any other. That religion is art; for art is a religion. It is an expression of and a means to states of mind ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... expressions it should never be forgotten) that the theory has been both at its first promulgation and since vehemently attacked and denounced as unchristian, nay, as necessarily atheistic; but it is not less true that it has been made use of as a weapon of offence by irreligious writers, and has been again and again, especially in continental Europe, thrown, as it were, in the face of believers, with sneers and contumely. When we recollect the warmth with which what he thought was Darwinism was advocated by such a writer as Professor Vogt, one cause of his zeal ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... [John Allen was himself so fierce an unbeliever, and so bitter an enemy to the Christian religion, that he was very fond of asserting that other men believed as little as himself. It was almost always Allen who gave an irreligious turn to the conversation at Holland House when these subjects were ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... which she in her wisdom had laid down for the government of the church,—on failure of which they scrupled not to recall to her memory the strong denunciations of the Jewish prophets against wicked and irreligious princes,—at once exasperated and alarmed her, and led her to assume continually more and more of the incongruous and odious character of a protestant persecutor of protestants. But the puritans themselves must have seemed guiltless in ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... right to the Supreme Pontiff. The people is the real sovereign; and kings are delegates from the people, with authority which they can only justly exercise so long as they remain in obedience to Rome. It follows from these positions that every nation must refuse fealty to an irreligious or contumacious ruler. In the last resort they may lawfully remove him by murder; and they are ipso facto in a state of mortal sin if they elect or recognize a heretic as sovereign. This theory sprang from the writings of the English Jesuits, Allen and Parsons. It was elaborated ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... men. He had his wish. His son Richard was a very fine gentleman, no doubt; but, unfortunately, the same circumstances that raised him to that much coveted position, also made him a gambler and a profligate. Oh! foolish papas, when will you learn that a Christian snob is worth ten thousand irreligious gentlemen? When will you be content to bring up your boys for heaven rather than for the brilliant world? Nash, senior, sent his son first to school and then to Oxford, to be made a gentleman of. Richard was entered at Jesus College, the haunt of the Welsh. In my day, this ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... and making for the demise of others even more preparation than for our own. Otherwise there is a selfishness about it by no means Christian-minded. You look at things always from such an intense and even irreligious point of view. But such things are out of my line altogether. Your Aunt Mary ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Lore, or cricket. Though Oxford men have their Cambridge moments, and beneath their haughty exterior there sometimes beats a Cambridge heart. Behind such reserve you would never suspect any passions at all save one of pride. Even frankly irreligious Oxford men acquire an ecclesiastical pre- Reformation aloofness which must have piqued Thackeray quite as much as the refusal of the city to send him to Westminster. He complains somewhere that the undergraduates wear kid gloves and drink less wine than their jolly brethren of the Cam. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... and the Brahmanas, never accept gifts from those that are fallen, or those that are begotten by Shudras on the girls of other castes, or the Vahikas who never perform sacrifices and are exceedingly irreligious.' That learned Brahmana had also said in the Kuru court, 'The Vahikas, without any feelings of revulsion, eat of wooden vessels having deep stomachs and earthen plates and vessels that have been licked by dogs and that are stained with pounded barley and other corn. The Vahikas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... answer;—if the vices of the adult generation were traceable in a great degree to the want of early Christian training—as who could doubt?—was it not manifest that the only check to the transmission of its irreligious spirit, was the careful education of the young? Yes; let the ignorant be taught, and little by little God's work would be done. Success might at first be small, but it would be certain. Each mind enlightened, would be a heart converted, and even one ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... hand on some child's head, to say some kind words to its mother, and to offer his ring to be kissed. One day, when he was surrounded by a crowd of prostrate and respectful people, he saw a man whose worn face bore traces of irreligious passion, who was moving away as if to escape the apostolic benediction. The Holy Father approached him, and said gently, "Do not run away; an old man's blessing has never done any one any harm." This remark ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... represent your people as no better and no wiser than they were before, and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without any fear of censure for inconsistency ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... "Giovanni, I will ask you not to air your irreligious remarks about that dog with an unseemly name, in connection with ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... him taking color from what was round him, nor shall we be astonished if that color is dazzling and brilliant. Five successive influences marked his earlier life. First, his education under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system; secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the fashionable abbes of the day, which showed him another side of the official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the Abbe de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... beams that shoot from the eyes of a new lover. Would to Heaven that I had not to go down to my boobies at Cleve! I should like nothing better than to amuse myself an autumn at Dallington with the little Dacre, and put an end to such an unnatural and irreligious connection. She is a splendid creature! Bring her to ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Duty And of Religion, press'd how just it was, How honourable, how glorious to entrap A common enemy, who had destroy'd Such numbers of our Nation: and the Priest Was not behind, but ever at my ear, Preaching how meritorious with the gods It would be to ensnare an irreligious 860 Dishonourer of Dagon: what had I To oppose against such powerful arguments? Only my love of thee held long debate; And combated in silence all these reasons With hard contest: at length that grounded maxim So rife and celebrated in the mouths ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the Count de Moustier but one hour ago. But I did not speak to him of the Almighty, because he is an atheist. Yet if we were prudent and merciful it was because we are religious. When men are irreligious, the Lord forsakes them; and if bloodshed and bankruptcy follow it is not to ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... much piety and much impiety; but, with very few exceptions, neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn of Protestantism. The religious Italians desired a reform of morals and discipline, but not a reform of doctrine, and least of all a schism. The irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity, without hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than in any other. It was to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and Pliny. Neither the spirit of Savonarola ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the efficiency of the Church at Amoy. Besides the objection furnished by the increase of denominations, which the heathen will thus, as readily as the irreligious in this country, be able to urge against Christianity, it will deprive the churches of the benefit of the united wisdom and strength of the whole of them for self-cultivation and for Christian enterprise, and will introduce a spirit of jealous ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... and once or twice he found himself speaking to her quietly, seriously, and rationally, not from the purpose of pleasing her, but because she had aroused such a strain of thought in his own mind. There was a certain class of brilliant sayings of his, of a cleverly irreligious and sceptical nature, at which Rose never laughed: when this sort of firework was let off in her presence, she opened her eyes upon him, wide and blue, with a calm surprise intermixed with pity, but said ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not "possess even a rudiment of humility or aspiration after goodness." "Surely," exclaims our new Guide to Hell, "surely if there is a sin which, on merely Theistic principles, merits the severest pains of hell, it is the authorship of an irreligious book." Which leads us in turn to exclaim, "Surely, yea thrice surely, will hell never be wholly abolished or deprived of its last torture-chamber, while Christians require a painful place for those who boldly differ from them." Mr. Mivart, it is true, confesses that "those ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... after it infinite mischiefs and disorders; for as the presence of religion implies every excellence, so the contrary is involved in its absence. To the Church, therefore, and to the priests, we Italians owe this first debt, that through them we have become wicked and irreligious. And a still greater debt we owe them for what is the immediate cause of our ruin, namely, that by the Church our country is kept divided. For no country was ever united or prosperous which did not yield obedience to ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... not be in her sister's company for a month without discovering that Lady Fareham's whole life was given up to the worship of the trivial. She was kind, she was amiable, generous, even to recklessness. She was not irreligious, heard Mass and went to confession as often as the hard conditions of an alien and jealously treated Church would allow, had never disputed the truth of any tenet that was taught her—but of serious views, of an earnest consideration of life and death, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... block of "stores," ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy's world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... o' fun may be, I can't rightly say, young feller. But if I was you, I wouldn't call the boat which, under Providence, was the means o' savin' ye, names. In the first place, it's blame irreligious. In the second, it's annoyin' to my feelin's—an' I'm Disko Troop o' the We're Here o' Gloucester, which you don't seem ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... subject into which we are not concerned to inquire. But where the evil in question is a moral evil, which a man can scrutinise, and where that moral evil has its origin within ourselves, let us not imagine that we can clear our consciences by this general, not to say irreligious, way of putting aside the question." Pitt concluded by urging on the house the influence which their decision would produce in other countries, and that the divine blessing was to be expected on their own, by exertions in such a righteous cause. His speech was rapturously applauded, but he failed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... peculiarly religious community. This may be said of the whole of the North of Ireland. About one-half of the people are Protestants and the other half Catholics. Each party does all it can to make its own doctrines popular and draw the affections of the irreligious toward them. One hears constantly of the most touching instances of this zeal. A week ago a vast concourse of Catholics assembled at Armagh to dedicate a new Cathedral; and when they started home again the roadways were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is irreligious and not a transgressor, it foretells that she will have that independent frankness and kind consideration for others, which wins for women profound respect, and love from the opposite sex as well as her own; ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... influence of superstition is less prevalent, although, amongst many of the lower orders of Irish, the traces of it are to be discovered; it leads, however, to no injurious consequences, and deserves encouragement, in preference to those totally irreligious principles which might naturally be expected to shew themselves amidst a body of men, of characters and dispositions so hostile to every thing which ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... particularly at this period of which I am now speaking, when men attempted to treat Religion as if it were one department of life, instead of being the whole foundation of every and all life. To treat it so is, of course, to proclaim oneself as fundamentally irreligious—and, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... is, "man (body, soul, and spirit) is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." (vol. ii. p. 372) Mr. Darwin adds: "He who denounces these views (as irreligious) is bound to explain why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... wicked one; children of darkness. V. be impious &c adj., profane, desecrate, blaspheme, revile, scoff; swear &c (malediction) 908; commit sacrilege. snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c 989; desecrating &c v.; profane, irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, un-regenerate; hardened, perverted, reprobate. hypocritical &c (false) 544; canting, pietistical^, sanctimonious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... must be done even to Parker before handing him over to the Tormentor. What were his positions? He was a coarse-fibred, essentially irreligious fellow, the accredited author of the reply to the question "What is the best body of Divinity?" "That which would help a man to keep a Coach and six horses," but he is a lucid and vigorous writer, knowing very well that he had to steer his ship through ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... often affected my mind in the same way is that which comes before us to-day—that the true prophets of the Old Testament had to face the opposition, not of heathens, and not of the openly irreligious among their own countrymen only, but of those who had the name of God in their mouths and were publicly recognised as His oracles. To us these are now false prophets, because time has found them out and the Word of God has branded ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... not excite yourself about it, for it only makes your asthma worse, and does no especial good to anybody. Things may be as you say. Certainly I intended nothing irreligious. Yet these extended naps, appropriate enough for saints and emperors, are out of place in one's own family. So, if it is not stuff and nonsense, it ought to be. And that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a mass of harm may have come of not believing in Apollo? Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as irreligious mania? Is there no such thing in ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... into so inveterate a habit of digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example. The Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an irreligious people. They say so themselves. Writes one of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion." A score of like pronouncements ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... at whose door we alighted for a moment to obtain a particular point of view, told us that at sunset the mountain assumed a peculiar transparency, with most mysterious hues of blue and purple; so that she had seen irreligious natures, frivolous and light, when suddenly called out to look, stand petrified, or rather exalted above themselves, and irresistibly turning their faces, their thoughts, their breathings of adoration ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... deny the inspiration of the Bible are, for the most part, but doubting Thomases who ask to see the nail- prints in the hands of their risen Lord; who are disposed to question him, not because they are irreligious, but because they want the Truth, and they know for a verity that it ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... on this donjon was, at the era engaging us, the disenchanter of the Greeks; insomuch that in passing the Sweet Waters of Asia they hugged the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, crossing themselves and muttering prayers often of irreligious compound. A stork has a nest on the donjon now. As an apparition it is not nearly so suggestive as the turbaned sentinel who used to occupy ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... mind of Europe: it is the belief or want of belief, the religious or irreligious views, the grasping ambition, the headlong desire of an impossible or unholy happiness, the reckless sway of unbridled passions, which try to spread themselves among all nations, and bring them all up, or rather down, to the level of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... upon the contents of Christianity, and finally to justify an attitude of doubt concerning the very foundations on which Christianity was based. Empiricism, Sensualism, Materialism, and Scepticism in philosophy, undermined dogmatic Christianity, and prepared the way for the irreligious and indifferentist opinions, that found such general favour among the educated and higher classes during ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... goin' to cuik till ye on the Sabba' Day? Ye'll no be findin' th' irreligious sort o' betches that'll do that for ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... pretend to assert, that, in this irreligious age, the natural terrors of superstition, dreams, omens, apparitions, &c., had lost ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... rapture. It must hurt;—but they seem to enjoy it! Just as some women become nuns, and flagellate themselves,—and then when they are writhing from their own self-inflicted stripes, they dream they are the 'brides of Christ,' entirely forgetting the extremely irreligious fact that to have so many 'brides' the good Christ Himself might possibly be troubled, and would surely occupy an inconvenient position, even in Heaven! Each man,—each woman,—makes for himself or herself a little groove or pet sorrow, in which to trot round and round and bemoan life; ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... common and general error of the uninitiated to bring the following accusations against philosophers. Some of them think that those who explore the origins and elements of material things are irreligious, and assert that they deny the existence of the gods. Take, for instance, the cases of Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and other natural philosophers. Others call those magicians who bestow unusual care on the investigation of the workings ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... but he had invested his funds in the new town. He was a prudent man, and when the proposal was made him by the two proprietors to join them in the enterprise, he was disinclined to do so. They were irreligious men, stirring, energetic workers, but devoid of interest in "things unseen," and therefore could not be expected to care for the present and future moral condition of the settlement. Yet we should do them the justice to say that they were not indifferent to the religious welfare ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... if anything is there set down which can be proved in set terms to contravene the order of Nature, or not to be deducible therefrom, we must believe it to have been foisted into the sacred writings by irreligious hands; for whatsoever is contrary to Nature is also contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd, and, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... we may see that the new conception of life will only come through the peeling off in the various nations of the old husks of the diplomatic, military, legal, and commercial classes, with their antiquated, narrow-minded and profoundly. irreligious and inhuman standards — those husks which have so long restricted and ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... defy the stoutest heart to snap them asunder. Colonel Thomas, an officer of the Guards, who was killed in a duel, added the following clause to his will the night before he died: — "In the first place, I commit my soul to Almighty God, in hope of his mercy and pardon for the irreligious step I now (in compliance with the unwarrantable customs of this wicked world) put myself under the necessity of taking." How many have been in the same state of mind as this wise, foolish man! He knew his error, and abhorred it, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of Voisenon, king of the country, felt deeply humiliated amid the crowd which surrounded him, and which had already begun to murmur at this refusal, as irreligious as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... men labored to bring about this most desirable end, others, such as Frederic of Prussia, and Joseph II. of Austria, by ill-advised measures, and the countenance which they gave to unsound and even irreligious doctrines, sowed the seeds of anarchy and unbelief, which failed not, in due time, to produce fruit according to their kind, and well-nigh accomplished the overthrow of society as well as that of the Christian Church. The Austrian ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Than the pursuit, the discipline of beauty? He who finds beauty helps to interpret God: For not an irreligious heart can dwell In him who sees and knows the beautiful. I'll not believe that one whom Art has chosen For a high priest can be irreverent, Sordid, unloving; his veil-piercing eye Sees not in life the beauty till it sees God and the life beyond; not in a dream Of Pantheistic revery where ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... think from the words of her husband and daughter that there was a good deal of the nouveau riche about her, and Mrs. Underwood did not know how to think of trusting a daughter in a worldly, perhaps irreligious household. But Mr. Underwood was a good deal touched by his cousin's warmth and regret; he believed that the family kept up religious habits; he thought that Providence had brought him friends in this last hour, and his affectionate sanguine spirit would not hesitate in accepting the kindness ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... concerning flight and death?" Brutus answered, "When I was young, Cassius, and unskillful in affairs, I was led, I know not how, into uttering a bold sentence in philosophy, and blamed Cato for killing himself, as thinking it an irreligious act, and not a valiant one among men, to try to evade the divine course of things, and not fearlessly to receive and undergo the evil that shall happen, but run away from it. But now in my own fortunes I am of another mind; for if ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough |
