"Unbelief" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of—" he began blankly; then words failed him, which was just as well. He gulped twice, joy or unbelief choking him. The smile that crept into her face dazzled him; he stared at her in speechless amazement. "Then—then, you are not a duchess or a—" he ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Co. Limerick, gives us two stories as he heard them related by Mr. Michael O'Dwyer of the same place. The former is evidently a very strong believer in supernatural phenomena, but he realises how strong is the unbelief of many, and in support of his stories he gives names of several persons who will vouch for the truth of them. With a few alterations, we give the story in his own words: "Mr. O'Dwyer has related how one night, after he had carried ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... controlled since the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can be done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losing its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... present deponent would be loth to decide dogmatically; but, if we were implicitly to swallow everything that the old Anglo-Indian in his simplicity assures us he has seen—well, the clergy would have no further cause any longer to deplore the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... in their glory," continued my friend, "you should go into the small towns in the provinces, uncontaminated with railroads or unbelief. There they last several days The stage is the town, the Temple scene takes place in the church, the Judgment at the city hall, and the procession of the Via Crucis moves through all the principal streets. The leading roles are no joke,—carrying fifty kilos of wood over the mud and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the Christ of Nazareth was put to death and rose again. I do not say you err in that belief; but if you refuse to believe that the gentle spirit of Love is crucified daily upon the dark cross of your selfish desires, then, I say, you err in this unbelief, and have not yet perceived, even afar off, ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... Puritans and Socialists." Yet, inconsistently enough, he declared that Bay writers could not have grown to the stature of authors at all, unless they had first shaken off the Puritan religion, and adopted "a religion of indifference and unbelief." Thus, though attacking them as Puritans and Socialists (this phrase was aimed at Brook Farm), he denied that they were Puritans at all. Clear understanding of anything from a writer with so much of the boomerang in his mind was not to be expected. But neither ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... (la vostra credenza raffermeremo); but the meaning is, "whereby we may amend your unbelief and give you cause to credit our assertion that ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... no one to sin; but we pray in this petition that God would so guard and preserve us, that the devil, the world, and our own flesh, may not deceive us, nor lead us into error and unbelief, despair, and other great and shameful sins; and that, though we may be thus tempted, we may, nevertheless, finally prevail and gain ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... in a strange union strong religious faith with philosophic unbelief, turned aside, as we have seen, from the questions which had occupied his predecessors; knew little and cared less about substance and accident, matter and spirit; but set himself to investigate the nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... his soul there is a knowledge that influences his lightest action. The man of science, the "advanced thinker," or whatever he likes to call himself, proves to us by his ceaseless protestations of doubt and unbelief that he is incessantly pondering the one subject which he would fain have us fancy he ignores. At heart he is in full sympathy with the Brahman, with the rude Indian, with the impassioned English Methodist, with all who cannot shake off the mystic belief in a life that shall go on behind ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... am, then; and I know you've done me nothing but good with your unbelief. It was just because I was of the same sort precisely that I was able to understand and help you. My circumstances ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... into the house and lighted a fire in the room under the haunted one, and took off his boots and set them On the hearth, and stretched out his feet and warmed him self. For a time he prospered in his unbelief; but a little while after the night had fallen, and everything had got very dark, one of his boots began to move. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards the door, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the first boot ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... nature that he was too positive and practical. In the spirit it is all yea and amen; there is no negative; in the New Jerusalem there is no night. We can describe this feature of his ministry by words from, one of his own sermons: 'It has always been through men of belief, not unbelief, that power from God has poured into man. It is not the discriminating critic, but he whose beating, throbbing life offers itself a channel for the divine force,—he is the man through, whom the world grows rich, and whom it ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian Theism, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... good do so side by side; and well is it for poor humanity that the bane and the antidote grow together. The misanthrope sends his poisonous streams throughout the land, but the philanthropist erects his dams everywhere to stem the foul torrents and turn them aside. The Infidel plants unbelief with reckless hand far and wide, but the Christian scatters the "Word" broadcast over the land. The sordid shipowner strews the coast with wreck and murdered fellow-creatures; but, thank God, the righteous shipowner—along with other like-minded men—sends forth ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... STEADFASTLY on HIM, SAW HIS FACE AS IT HAD BEEN THE FACE OF AN ANGEL. Even so has it ever been, and so it ever will be with all who with humble hearts and a rightly disposed spirit scan the sacred volume. And they who read it with AN EVIL HEART OF UNBELIEF and an alien spirit, what boots for them the assertion that every sentence was miraculously communicated to the nominal author by God himself? Will it not rather present additional temptations to the unhappy scoffers, and furnish them with ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was consummated the last great act of logical unbelief. ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... had had been listening attentively to all Mr Skinner had said. He never attempted to argue with him. He had long lost all confidence in the correctness of the notions he had held. Tears filled his eyes. "I believe, help Thou my unbelief," he ejaculated, in a ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... He never suffered for uttering his honest convictions: on the contrary, as far as we know, he was honored by the people among whom he lived and taught. Nor was Plato ever punished on account of his unbelief, and though he, as well as his master, Sokrates, became obnoxious to the dominant party at Athens, this was due to political far more than to theological motives. At all events, Plato, the pupil, the friend, the apologist of Sokrates, was allowed ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of "unbelief." ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... still kneeling on the door-stone, but the burden of her prayer was not now for Caleb Gordon. "O Lord, have mercy on my boy! Thou knowest how, because of my disobedience, he has the fierce fighting blood and the stubborn unbelief of all the Gordons to contend with: save him alive and make him a man of peace and a man of faith, I beseech Thee, and let not the unbelief of the father or the unfaithfulness of the mother be visited ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... one, save that the Fatherhood looks down lovingly, and the Sonship looks up lovingly. Love is all. And God is all in all. He is ever seeking to get down to us—to be the divine man to us. And we are ever saying, "That be far from thee, Lord!" We are careful, in our unbelief, over the divine dignity, of which he is too grand to think. Better pleasing to God, it needs little daring to say, is the audacity of Job, who, rushing into his presence, and flinging the door of his presence-chamber to the wall, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... and love the more to impart them to you. Nevertheless, scholar, if I should begin but to name the several sorts of strange fish that are usually taken in many of those rivers that run into the sea, I might beget wonder in you, or unbelief, or both: and yet I will venture to tell you a real truth concerning one lately dissected by Dr. Wharton, a man of great learning and experience, and of equal freedom to communicate it; one that loves me and my art; one to whom I have been beholden ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... better word than fright in describing the emotion of the man who glared at this uncanny object. Unbelief was supreme in his mind for a short time only. After the first tremendous shock, his rigid figure relaxed and he trembled like a leaf. Horror seemed to be turning his blood to ice, his hair to the whiteness of snow. Slowly the natural curiosity of the human mind ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... and I was falling into the danger which is so apt to beset the new beginner—that of self-sufficiency, and the substituting of human wisdom for faith. The steward was not slow in discovering this; and he produced some of Tom Paine's works, by way of strengthening me in the unbelief. I now read Tom Paine, instead of the bible, and soon had practical evidence of the bad effects of his miserable system. I soon got stern-way on me in morals; began to drink, as before, though seldom intoxicated, ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... to my weak and unassisted sense," said the priest, in great agony of spirit, arising from his doubt and unbelief, "that it were the very utmost of madness and folly to give up this strong and almost impregnable position for one where our little army may be outflanked, and even surrounded ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Michael, is the type of the spiritual life,—the life of heroic and active charity. All the stories about knights and dragons have one common esoteric meaning. The dragon is always Materialism in some form; the fearsome, irrepressible spirit of Unbelief, which wages war on human peace and blights the hopes of all mankind. In most of these tales, as in the typical legend of St. George, there is a princess to be delivered,—a lady, sweet and lovely, whose sacrifice is imminent at the moment of her champion's ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... an antidote and we have found it. Your helmet is perfect and you simply must believe in it, you must trust to it. We have made full provision for your safety. If you go under it will be your own fault from one of four causes—unbelief, disobedience, carelessness, or fear. If you carelessly go without your helmet it means death. During an attack, after putting on the respirator, just stand and wait. There is nothing you can do for yourself except to keep your helmet on. Your skill, your strength ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... Thou hast the words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God?" I dare not ask that question of myself. How then dare I ask it of you? I know not. I can only say, "Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief." I know not. But this I know—that in this or any other world, if you or I did recognise Him, it would be with utter shame and terror, unless we had studied and had striven to copy either Himself, or ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... latter heads there is of course much debased exaggeration. The soteriology we might be perhaps tempted to connect rather on the one hand with the Epistle to the Hebrews, and on the other with those of St. Paul. There may be something of an echo of the fourth Gospel in the allusion—to the unbelief and carnalised religion of the Jews. But the whole question of the speculative affinities of a writing like this requires subtle and delicate handling, and should be rather a subject for special treatment than an episode in an enquiry like the present. The opinion ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life. Thus the spirit of the time is seen to waver between perversions and savagism, between what is unnatural and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief, and it is often nothing but the equilibrium of evils that ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... birth in a wretched order of creatures. If thou thinkest, O king, that this world is nothing and that the next world is the shadow of a shadow, the myrmidons of Yama in the infernal regions will convince thee, dispelling thy unbelief.'"'" ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the door slowly, belief and unbelief competing in her mind, and when it was closed again Prescott insisted upon knowing at once if Miss Catherwood were still ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... it away, to modify its miseries, to extract its sting—whether they have come from the party of unbelief, or the party of education, or the party of amusement, have failed—and failed utterly. No matter what men say or do to get rid of it, there it is—staring them in the face! Whether they look amongst the most highly civilized peoples or amongst the lowest ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... "greatest work written on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over unbelief," in the strain of Newman's Grammar of Assent. On the surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, "the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its rights; the danger is always ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... of the New, which, after the commandment of GOD, any man ought to believe, I believe verily in my soul, as a sinful deadly wretch of my cunning and power ought to believe; praying the LORD GOD, for His holy name, for to increase my belief, and help my unbelief. ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... List and hear The Godless cannons, booming far and near. Flaunting the flag of Unbelief, with Greed For pilot, lo! the pirate age in speed Bears on to ruin. War's most hideous crimes Besmirch the record of these modern times. Degenerate is the world I leave to you, - My happiest ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... supported, against the temptations of the devil: moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular; and told to each other, by which they had been afflicted and how they were borne up under his assaults. They also discoursed of their own wretchedness of heart, and of their unbelief; and did contemn, slight and abhor their own righteousness, as filthy, and insufficient to do them ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... subject discussed with greater interest and excitement than in the Fairthorn household. Sally, when she first heard the news, loudly protested her unbelief; why, the two would scarcely speak to each other, she said; she had seen Gilbert turn his back on Martha, as if he couldn't bear the sight of her; it ought to be, and she would be glad if it ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... while man is further directed to God as his end. Wherefore a sin which is about the very substance of man, e.g. murder, is graver than a sin which is about external things, e.g. theft; and graver still is a sin committed directly against God, e.g. unbelief, blasphemy, and the like: and in each of these grades of sin, one sin will be graver than another according as it is about a higher or lower principle. And forasmuch as sins take their species from their objects, the difference of gravity which is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... perish; so that predestination is only conditional. (2.) That Christ died for all men, but that none except believers are really saved by His death. The intention, in other words, is universal, but the efficacy may be restricted by unbelief. (3.) That no man is of himself able to exercise a saving faith, but must be born again of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. (4.) That without the grace of God man can neither think, will, nor do anything ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... image, are ignorant | of thy love, and, according to the propitiation of thy Son Jesus | Christ, grant that by the prayers and labours of thy holy Church | they may be delivered from all superstition and unbelief, and | brought to worship thee; through him whom thou hast sent to be | our Salvation, the Resurrection and the Life of all the faithful, | the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. | | For Missionaries in Distant Lands. | | O God our Saviour, ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... stimulated by the remembrance of the mystic divination of a soothsayer in the years agone. My mother was a woman of too much intelligence and force of character to nourish an average superstition; but prophecies fulfilled will temper, though they may not shake, the smiling unbelief of the most hard-headed skeptic. Mother's moderate skepticism was not proof against the strange fulfillment of one prophecy, which fell out ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... that grew of all beliefs One moment back was blown And belief that stood on unbelief ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... I mean. And that moment something went, the jacket was off, and there was I feelin' as if every stroke I took was as wide as the mainyard. I had no time to repent, only to thank God. And wasn't it more than I deserved, sir? Ah! He can rebuke a man for unbelief by giving him the desire of his heart. And that's a better rebuke than tying him up ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... she wearing away the slow months in passionate unbelief of me? I could not tell. But before I slept that night I had taken my resolve. I would sail for home by the next steamer. The case would suffer, perhaps, by the delay and the change of hands: D—— must come out to attend to it himself, then, but I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... take, and we are content to occupy but a corner of the broad land which He has given us. In like manner Joshua did not realise to the full the following promise of uniform victory, but was defeated at Ai and elsewhere. The reason was the same,—the faithlessness of the people. Unbelief and sin turn a Samson into a weakling, and make Israel flee before ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... eyes never left his face. There was an expression in them as of the dawning of a great joy struggling against amazed unbelief, so that Sandy felt as though he had seen into some secret holy place. Turning, he stumbled out of the room, leaving those two who loved ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... in his unbelief, according to 2 Kings xvi. 7, 8. He sent messengers with large presents to Tiglath-pileser, King of Assyria, saying: "I am thy servant and thy son (a word as ominous as that: 'We have no king but Caesar,'in John xix. 35); come up and save me out of the hand ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... were minutely known to all the world, and were never denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the people'—not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have overwhelmed—but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... accomplish this end, and to give spiritual direction to the Italian-Americans who are turning from the superstition and inadequacy of the religion which is fast losing its hold upon them in Italy, as well as America, and from which they are rapidly drifting into indifference and unbelief. ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... single and beautiful likeness of frank young manhood; his love of country and loathing of the Church that would bring it into subjection are two sides of the same national quality that has made and will always make every Englishman of his type such another as he was in belief and in unbelief, patriot and priest-hater; and no part of the design bears such witness to the full-grown perfection of his creator's power and skill as the touch that combines and fuses into absolute unity of concord the high and various elements of faith in England, loyalty to the wretched lord ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... follow delights of the mind. In the great gloomy shed wafts and twists of thick steam are jetting upward, heavily coiled in the cold air. In the train you smoke two pipes and read the morning paper. Then you are set down at Haverford. It is like a fairyland of unbelief. Trees and shrubbery are crusted and sheathed in crystal, lucid like chandeliers in the flat, thin light. Along the fence, as you go up the hill, you marvel at the scarlet berries in the hedge, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... curious that she should assert her unbelief. He was too nonplussed to go on immediately. Then he supposed it was part of the joke, and proceeded to give the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... God), and, on the other hand, he prepares the way for the following argument, wherein he proposes to exhibit the good works according to the Ten Commandments. For the First Commandment does not forbid this and that, nor does it require this and that; it forbids but one thing, unbelief; it requires but one thing, faith, "that confidence in God's good will at all times." Without this faith the best works are as nothing, and if man should think that by them he could be well-pleasing to God, he would be lowering God ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... time, and, by grace, it is my stay now. I know that the Lord is glorified in my brother, whatever his end has been: whether in his last hours, like the thief, on the cross, he was saved, or whether he died in sin and unbelief; yet I do, as to myself, desire from my heart to adore that grace which plucked me as a brand out of the burning, many years ago.—May the Lord make this event a lasting blessing to me, especially in leading me to earnestness in prayer ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... to be a republican. A person whose imagination is quick and warm, whose feelings are acute, and whose intellect is wholly untrained, can find no comfort except in belief. His scepticism is a mere freak of vanity or self-will. Coming upon the stage of life when unbelief was fashionable in high drawing-rooms, he became a sceptic. But Nature will have her way with us all, and so this atheist at fifteen was ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... petticoats, timid of the night streets and requiring escort home. If you had suggested to him that some of his sisters' popularity was due to his own presence, or if you had hinted that the more kittenish of these visitors were palpably making eyes at him, he would have stared in amazement and unbelief. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had lived. He shook himself, and went on reading. Having read the precepts he took up the Gospels, opened the book, and happened on a passage he often repeated and knew by heart: 'Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief!'—and he put away all the doubts that had arisen. As one replaces an object of insecure equilibrium, so he carefully replaced his belief on its shaky pedestal and carefully stepped back from it so as not to shake or upset it. The blinkers were adjusted again and ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... time, many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him." Was it the part of a writer who dealt in suppression and disguise to put down this anecdote? Or this, which Matthew has preserved (xii. 58)? "He did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief." ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... these pages a "Life of Christ" which shall be, to quote Mr. Hall Caine's words in the December MCCLURE'S, "as vivid and as personal from the standpoint of belief as Renan's was from the standpoint of unbelief." ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... innocence is proved by his drinking without harm, a liquid which, were he guilty, would cause spots on his face. Mary also drinking of the same, unhurt, one of the accusers affirms that the bishop has changed the draught, but is cured of his unbelief by being forced to drink what is left. The fifteenth play relates to the nativity. Joseph, it seems, is not yet satisfied of Mary's innocence, and his doubts are all removed in this manner: Mary, seeing a tall tree full ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... power of believing has a tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend, 'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... chance belief of some ancient chief or patriarch, transmitted across continents and seas and even across the great gulf that has always divided the Aryan from the Semitic civilization and preserved through ages of darkness and unbelief, saw in it the common yearning of the human soul to find rest on a loving Father's almighty arm; yet when our oriental missionaries and scholars found such fundamental truths of their own religion as the common brotherhood ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... I had treated the moollah's account as an idle tale; my unbelief, however, was quickly removed, for just as we entered the narrow passage the light of the torches was for an instant thrown upon a group of human skeletons. I saw them but for an instant, and ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... false interpretations of the Old Testament to be dogmatically proposed in the New. I see the moral teaching concerning Patriotism, Property, Slavery, Marriage, Science, and indirectly Fine Art, to be essentially defective, and the threats against unbelief to be a pernicious immorality. See also p. 80. Why will critics use my frankly-stated juvenile opinions as a stone to ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... which existed in New York City, although upon ordinary subjects they had the greatest respect for my truthfulness and conservativeness, having known me in business for a good many years, they would look at me with pity for my misguided opinions. While they would mildly express unbelief at my statement to my face, when they got behind my back they would shake their heads and say, "Crittenton has gone crazy, do you know he even believes now that girls are held in slavery in New York City, against their ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... that there is such a spiritual life to be lived by men on earth. Nothing cuts the roots of the Christian life so much as unbelief. People do not believe what God has said about what He is willing to do for His children. Men do not believe that when God says, "Be filled with the Spirit," He means it for every Christian. And yet Paul wrote to the Ephesians each one: ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... repair the harm we do to one who loses faith in our goodness,—he inevitably loses some part of his faith in goodness itself. "Much of our lives is spent in marring our own influence," says George Eliot, "and turning others' belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief, which they call knowledge of the world, but which is really ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... not see in this, my son," said the Papal Legate, "the blight of unbelief? Do you not mark the withering effects of the modern so-called scientific thought? What think you of a religion wherein the chief interest centers in trials for heresy; whose ultimate effect upon human character is a return to the raw, primitive, immature sense of life that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediæval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Abraham de Portaleone, an excellent archaeologist, who established that Jews had been the first to observe the medicinal uses of gold; David de Pomis, the author of a famous defense of Jewish physicians; and Leo de Modena, the rabbi of Venice, "unstable as water," wavering between faith and unbelief, and, Kabbalist and rabbi though he was, writing works against the Kabbala on the one hand, and against rabbinical tradition on the other. Similar to him in character is Joseph del Medigo, an itinerant author, who sometimes ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... that 'profound criticism' and that 'careful scholarship' which have been laboring for years, in Europe, to destroy the supernatural bases of faith. We are justified, from M. Renan's position and character, in taking it for granted, that his book is the best that modern unbelief has to offer, his theory the most satisfactory that the deniers of the divine origin of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... philosophical criticism had lent its aid to Greek philosophical discovery in this destruction of the national faith. It sustained by many arguments the wide-spreading unbelief. It compared the doctrines of the different schools with each other, and showed from their contradictions that man has no criterion of truth; that, since his ideas of what is good and what is evil differ according to the country in which he lives, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom divided against itself? They who maintain ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... periods of the work to look to Him to care for twenty homeless orphans at a cost of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. Only by using faith are we kept from practically losing it, and, on the contrary, to use faith is to lose the unbelief that hinders God's ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... regard such things as either injurious or important. A sceptic at the present day is generally less profane than a religious man was in the last century. Such is the result of civilization, although unbelief in itself inclines to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... not gain much by discussion. Let objectors or inquirers only get one personal interview with the Son of God; that will scatter all their darkness, all their prejudice, and all their unbelief. The moment that Philip succeeded in getting Nathanael to ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... insinuation yonder; a difficulty with this statement, an objection to that, a discrepancy here—this is their favorite way of assailing the gospel. If one chooses to treat the Bible in this narrow and uncandid way, he will soon plunge himself into the mire of unbelief. Difficulties and objections should be candidly considered, and allowed their due weight; but they must not be suffered to override irrefragable proof, else we shall soon land in universal skepticism: ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... away his daughter by force from the Duke and Dr. Joel; also is strengthened in his unbelief by Dr. Cramer—Item, how my gracious Prince arrives at Marienfliess, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... by reason of their cruelty, will cause aversion in us; or (by reason of their impossibility) unbelief [pp. 496, 545], ought either wholly to be avoided by a Poet, or only delivered by Narration.' To which, we may have leave to add, such as 'to avoid tumult,' as was before hinted [pp. 535, 544]; or 'to reduce the Plot into a more reasonable compass of time,' or 'for defect of beauty in them,' ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion, as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely; and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity. Plutarch saith well to that purpose: Surely (saith he) I had rather a great deal, men should say, there was no such man ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and "blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper, and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... questioning whether He will help me or not. And, indeed, it would be sinful ingratitude, after all the Lord has been doing for me in this work, not to rely upon Him. May He in mercy uphold me to the end in this service, and keep me from dishonouring His holy name, either by unbelief, or in any ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... of a mighty church, and demand of us an unconditional submission, which they call faith. Doubts arise sooner or later in the breast of every one who has the power of thinking and reverence for the truth; and then even when we are on the right road, to overcome our faith, the terrors of doubt and unbelief arise and disturb the tranquil ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda. In the early eighteenth century, in the age ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... sadly, as one who was deeply pained by the appalling amount of unbelief to be met ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... free-thinkers, holding their meetings at an ale-house, sought out Franklin and drew him into their convivial gatherings. These men had no common principle of belief; they were united only in the negative principle of unbelief in the Christian religion. Ralph had formed a connection with a young milliner, by whom, through his many fascinations, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... penetrated below it. The mines were rich beyond his dreams. Yet he sat there at his noon meal as cheerful, as unexcited, as content as ever. When one has waited so long, impatience sleeps soundly, arouses with the sluggishness of unbelief itself. Outside he saw the sun, for the first time in weeks, and heard the pines singing their endless song. Inside, his fire sparkled and crackled; his kettle purred like a fireside cat. Peter was tired; tired, but content. The dream was very ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... who evince a spirit in every respect the direct contrary of that of our Blessed Redeemer should fancy that they are Christians of singular attainments; and it is more woful still, that many young people should be scared away into irreligion or unbelief by the wretched delusion, that these creatures, wickedly caricaturing Christianity, are fairly representing it. I have beheld more deliberate malice, more lying and cheating, more backbiting and slandering, denser stupidity, and greater self-sufficiency, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... partly derived from agnostos (the "unknown'' God), and partly from an antithesis to "gnostic''; but the meaning remains the same in either case. The name, as Huxley said, "took''; it was constantly used by Hutton in the Spectator and became a fashionable label for contemporary unbelief in Christian dogma. Hutton himself frequently misrepresented the doctrine by describing it as "belief in an unknown and unknowable God''; but agnosticism as defined by Huxley meant not belief, but absence of belief, as much distinct from belief on the one hand as from disbelief on the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hear with our ears his denial, and if he repent at the last, it is well, let him live. But if he harden his heart against our entreaties, let him die. Levi hath brought certain pieces of wood hither to my house, and is even now at work. If the youth is still stubborn in his unbelief, let him die even as the Unbeliever died—by the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... your heart; at least aim at this; I say, aim at it, for this too must be given you. Roll yourself, your doubts, your fears, your sins, your duties, all on him: say, 'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.' He is an almighty Saviour to deliver sinners from sin as well as from punishment. I leave you on the Father of mercies, and will, when the Lord ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... the ordinary course of events he might never have thought about them in relation to himself until he came to die—perhaps not then. In college he had been too much engrossed with other things to listen to the arguments, or to be influenced by the general atmosphere of unbelief. He had been a boy whose inner thoughts were kept under lock and key, and who had lived his heart life absolutely alone, although his rich wit and bubbling merriment had made him a general favorite where pure fun among the fellows was going. He loved to "rough house" as he called it, and his ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... stubby beard, the tiny icicles that still clustered on his eyebrows; while these traces of hardship tugged at her heart they were forgotten when she saw the expression that overshadowed his face. Wonder and unbelief and longing were all mirrored there. She took a shy step forward to see what riveted his gaze. And despite the choking sensation in her throat she smiled—for she had taken off her little, beaded house moccasins and left them lying on the bearskin before the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sins, then there is a Fountain for sin, and we may experience cleansing and deliverance from them, if we put them immediately under His precious Blood, the moment we are conscious of them. And they are sins. Their source is unbelief and an inverted form of pride, and they have hindered and hidden Him times ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... quatrefoil above is St. Paul with his sword, and over to the right St. Thomas; still further to the right St. James the Less. Just above is our Saviour, clad in a golden tunic, and carrying a staff, overcoming the unbelief of St. Thomas. Upon his knees that Apostle feels, with his right hand held by the Redeemer, the spear wound in ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... not separate from his Divine Source and never has been. He is, in reality, one with the Infinite. The separation which he feels and experiences is mental, and is due to his blindness and unbelief. Man can never be separated from Spirit, for he himself is Spirit. He is an integral part of one complete whole. He lives and moves and has his being in God (Universal, Omnipresent Spirit), and God (Spirit) dwells in him. The majority of people are unaware of ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... predomineth (and that will be until glory take the empire) all will run in the channel of grace; and though now sense (which is oft faith's unfaithful friend) will be always suggesting false tales of God, and of his grace unto unbelief, and raising thereby discontents, doubts, fears, jealousies, and many distempers in the soul, to its prejudice and hurt, yet in end, grace shall be seen to be grace; and the faithful shall get such a full sight of this manifold grace, as ordering, tempering, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... faith. Then came the thought, How did they begin to have faith? and it seemed to me that this step in the dark, which I hesitated to take, was probably the very step by which these great men had passed from a life of unbelief to ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one can look at all closely into its history, at least in Italy, without seeing that the idea of infidelity—not heresy, but infidelity—was quite a familiar ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to save, and they narrowly escaped murder. But why extend the gruesome list? In view of their mad fury, so fatal to their benefactors, one is tempted to exclaim: Unglaube du bist nicht so viel ein ungeheuer als aberglaube du! "Of the twin monsters, unbelief and superstition, the more to be dreaded ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... summons him to go not to the battle, but to the holy hill of Tabor, where Jehovah will bring about what is further to happen; he, however, objects to this, and insists that the prophetess herself shall go with him. This is regarded as a caprice of unbelief, because the prophetess is thought to have exhausted her mission when she transmitted the command of the Deity to His instrument: she has appeared for no end but to make it known through her prophecy that Jehovah alone brings everything to ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of falling back on the Old Testament, which is the mother of the New, they plunge into unbelief and heathenism. That is the case with Archbishop Oppas himself in Toledo, who calls himself a hater of Christ, and would rather ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Godfrey dress himself for agitation; brain and heart seemed to mingle in chaotic confusion. Anger strove with unbelief, and indignation at his mother with the sense of bitter wrong from Letty. It was all incredible and shameful, yet not the less utterly miserable. The girl whose Idea lay in the innermost chamber of his heart ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... obeys the gracious call And runs to this relief; I would believe thy promise, Lord! Oh! help my unbelief. ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... quickly laughed a bright unbelief to the youth's face, a face which might as well have been a wood-carving. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... unbelief, wherewith Satan again tempted me, I had become so weak that I was forced to lean my back against the constable his knees, and expected not to live even till we should come to the mountain; for the last hope I had cherished was ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... me, O auspicious King, that when the jeweller quitted his wife, he repented having bespoken her thus and, returning to his shop, he sat there in disquiet sore and anxiety galore, between belief and unbelief. About eventide he went home alone, not bringing Kamar al-Zaman with him: whereupon quoth his wife, "Where is the merchant?"; and quoth he, "In his lodgings." She asked, "Is the friendship between thee and him grown cold?" and he answered, "By Allah, I have taken a dislike to him, because of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... forth out of the womb I sanctified thee and made thee a prophet unto the nations). Thus it is that Declan was sanctified in his mother's womb and was given by God as a prophet to the pagans for the conversion of multitudes of them from heathenism and the misery of unbelief to the worship of Christ and to the Catholic faith, as we shall see later on. The very soft apex of his head struck against a hard stone, as we have said, and where the head came in contact with the stone it made therein a hollow and cavity of its own form ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... the South Seas, where he would be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to lay down her life for an illusion. So it seems, when one looks about the world, that faith and doubt ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... spiritual tyrants. Faith is a matter concerning which each one is responsible for himself; for as little as one man can go to heaven or hell for me, so little can he believe or not believe for me; and as little as he can open or close heaven or hell for me, so little can he drive me to belief or unbelief. We have the saying from St. Augustine: 'No one can or should be compelled to believe.' The blind and miserable people do not see what a vain and impossible thing they undertake; for, however imperiously they command, and however ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their authenticity had been chided as having "an evil heart of unbelief." But scientific scepticism had questioned the evidence, and late in the eighteenth century a consensus of opinion in the French Academy had declined to admit that such stones had been "conveyed to the earth by lightning," let alone any ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... all our hope is in Christ alone. Christ's relation is always to men as they are sinners and not as they are righteous. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. 'Tis with sinners, then, Christ has to do. Nothing damns but unbelief; and unbelief is just holding back from pressing God with this promise, that Christ came to save sinners. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, and it is still to be found standing in the most clipped-up ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... avowed in the daring language in which it has been above stated; if may frequently be observed to exist in an inferior degree: and often, when not distinctly formed into shape, it lurks in secret, diffusing a general cloud of doubt or unbelief, or lowering our standard of right, or whispering fallacious comfort, and producing a ruinous tranquillity. Not to anticipate what will more properly come under discussion, when we consider the nature and strictness of practical Christianity; ...
— 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
... the kingdom of God within us, of the Spirit of God, who is teaching men, though they too often will not believe it; though they disclaim God's Spirit and take all the glory to themselves. Truly Christ is among us; and our eyes are held, and we see Him not. That is our English sin—the sin of unbelief, the root of every other sin. Christ works among us, and we will not own Him. Truly, Jesus Christ may well say of us English at this day, There were ten cleansed, but where are the nine? How few are there, who return to give glory to God! Oh, consider what ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... but I have never been quite sure, from the tone of that laugh, whether it was a laugh of conviction or of unbelief. It is not improbable that my fair friend's mental constitution may have been somewhat similar to that of the old woman who declined to believe her sailor-grandson when he told her he had seen flying-fish, but at once recognised his veracity when he said he had seen the remains of Pharaoh's chariot-wheels ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne |
