"Deist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presumption there lies in this combination of aspects of 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, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... himself a superior person, above 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. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 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 ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Kings. He that believes in the divine right of Kings believes 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 ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the legislature, became judge of the court of common pleas, and a member of congress. He did not wholly give up his disputatious ways, if we can judge from the books written by and to him, one of the latter being, "A Droll, a Deist, and a John Bacon, ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... which separates the two cultes, whilst the contrast, so far as the eternal records of nature, impressed upon and read in the page of creation, are involved, would be all in favour of the Moslemite deist, and pity and folly would be mingled with his ideas ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... objection to "scientist"—that it is a Latin word with a Greek termination, and that it implies the existence of a non-existent verb—may be urged with equal force against such harmless necessary words as deist, aurist, dentist, florist, jurist, oculist, somnambulist, ventriloquist, and—purist. Much more valid objection might be made to the word "scientific," which is not hybrid indeed, but is, if strictly ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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, ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 the school of Deists—Toland, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... 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
... those other gods, Civa, and Brahm[a].' But the sectary is not content with making the All-god one with Vishnu. Vishnu was manifested in the flesh, some say as Krishna, some say as R[a]ma[68]. The relation of sectary to Vishnuite, and to the All-spirit deist, may be illustrated most clearly by comparison with Occidental religions. One may not acknowledge any personal god as the absolute Supreme Power; again, one may say that this Supreme Power is a personal ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... universe, and in his place is only the inexorable law, which grinds on forever. It punishes and 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: ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... with all the contempt it merits. Faber says, 'evident design must needs imply a designer,' and that 'evident design shines out in every part of the universe.' But he also tells us 'we reason exclusively, if with the Deist we thence infer the existence of one and only one Supreme Designer.' By Gillespie and M'Neil, the same truth is told in other words. By Chalmers and Watson we are assured that, natural proof of a God there is none, and our trust must be placed solely ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... dries and extinguishes this heavenly unction than a talkative reasoning temper that is always catching at every opportunity of hearing or telling some religious matters. Stop your ears and shut your eyes to all religious tales . . . I would no more bring a false charge against a deist than I would bear false witness against an apostle. And if I knew how to do the deists more justice in debate I would gladly do it . . . And as the gospel requires me to be as glad to see piety, equity, strict sobriety, and extensive charity in a Jew or a Gentile as in a Christian; as ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and last sort of Deist are such as believe the existence of a Supreme Being, together with his providence in the government of the world; also all the obligations of natural religion, but so far only as these things are discoverable by the light of nature alone, without ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Dialogue between Philalothes, a Christian Deist, and Theophanes, a Christian Jew, in which the Grounds of ...
— The Annual Catalogue: Numb. II. (1738) • Various
... extending over all creatures from the beginning to everlasting; the reality and nature of God's purposes, and their fulfilment in creation and providence; in opposition to the atheist, the fatalist, the deist, the sceptic, and every other who does not believe in the truth of Divine revelation; are made known, and claim to be contended ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... 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 most ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... 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 too late ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... happens in the ferment of popular movements, the one leader who spoke undiluted truth and sense 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 ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... by the principal literary opponents of religion and morality. His earliest excursions into literature marked him out immediately as a dangerous adversary of the Christian religion. He journeyed in England where he was in close touch with the Deist school of thought, in Germany where he was a welcome guest at the court of Frederick II. of Prussia, and settled finally at Ferney in Switzerland close to the French frontiers. Towards the end of his life (1778) he returned to Paris where he ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... 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; Episcopalian, Presbyterian; Lutheran, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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, and died in 1753. He says in one ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury |
