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More "Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... praises of the sex. I rejoice that their hearts are more susceptible than ours, and that they do not war so strongly against that religion which their nature demands. I have met with but one female, whom I knew to be an avowed atheist. ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... "subscribed under their handes, to depose the President; sayeing they thought him very unworthy to be eyther President or of the Councell, and therefore discharged him of both".[19] They accused him of misappropriating funds, of improper division of the public stores, of being an atheist, of plotting to desert Virginia in the pinnace left at Jamestown by Captain Newport, of combining with the Spaniards for the destruction of the colony. Wingfield, when he returned to England, made a vigorous defense of his conduct, but it is now impossible to determine whether ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... our Savior's crown of thorns. Eleven had the lance that had pierced his side. If any person was adventurous enough to suggest that these could not all be authentic, he would have been denounced as an atheist. During the holy wars the Templar-Knights had driven a profitable commerce by bringing from Jerusalem to the Crusading armies bottles of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, which they sold for enormous sums; these bottles ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... great stir in the camp of the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Higher Critic and particularly the Evolutionist, because of this ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... species of self-seeking either on the part of an individual or an organisation that would seek to enchain the minds and thereby the lives of men and women, and even lay claim to their children. Yet Jefferson in his time was frequently called an atheist—and merely because men in those days did not distinguish as clearly as we do today between ecclesiasticism and religion, between formulated ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... out in state, in an apartment lighted by torches, or what Catholics call une chambre ardente. "I am neither," he said in the same phrase which we have formerly quoted, "a philosopher nor a physician. I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. It is not everybody who can be an atheist. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of the Catholic church, and receive the assistance which it administers." He then turned to Dr. Antommarchi, whom he seems to have suspected of heterodoxy, which the doctor, however, disowned. "How can you carry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... it if there were a rule and a truth of always lying. Besides, nobody records their flimflams and false prognostics, forasmuch as they are infinite and common; but if they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report, as being rare, incredible, and prodigious. So Diogenes, surnamed the Atheist, answered him in Samothrace, who, showing him in the temple the several offerings and stories in painting of those who had escaped shipwreck, said to him, "Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you say to so many persons preserved from ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... fountains never traced before: Truth they profess'd, yet often left the true And beaten prospect, for the wild and new. His chosen friend his fiftieth year had seen, His fortune easy, and his air serene; Deist and atheist call'd; for few agreed What were his notions, principles, or creed; His mind reposed not, for he hated rest, But all things made a query or a jest; Perplex'd himself, he ever sought to prove That man is doom'd in endless doubt to rove; Himself in darkness ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... him consider that a love of ruling from delight in ruling, and not from a delight in uses, is wholly devilish; and such a man may be called an atheist; for so far as he is in that love he does not in his heart believe in the existence of God, and to the same extent he derides in his heart all things of the church, and he even hates and pursues with hatred all who acknowledge God, and especially those who acknowledge the Lord. ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... over, and let you know as soon as I have arrived at a decision," I repeated. "But don't you make any mistake about the annihilation that comes after death. That is the atheist's notion; but, if you are reckoning upon anything of that kind, to save you from punishment for your misdeeds in this present life, you are going to be badly undeceived; ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... may ask what we mean by a deist here. A deist or theist in Franklin's time was one who believed in a God, but questioned the Christian faith and system. He was not an atheist. He held that a personal governing power directed all things after his own will and purpose. Under the providence of this Being things came and went, and man could not know how or why, but could simply believe that all that was was for the good ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Drumont's "Libre Parole" was long the chief. You have the Single-tax papers. You have the Teetotal papers—and, really, it is a wonder that you have not yet also had the Iconoclasts and the Diabolists producing papers. The Rationalist and the Atheist propaganda I reckon ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... the Abolitionist will not reflect. He lives in a whirlpool, whither he has been drawn by his own rashness. What to him is the love of country, or the memory of Washington? John Randolph said, "I should have been a French Atheist had not my mother made me kneel beside her as she folded my little hands, and taught me to say, 'Our Father.'" Remember this, mothers in America; and imprint upon the fair tablet of your young child's heart, a reverence for the early institutions of their country, and for the patriots ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right. 'What sort of a thing,' he asked, 'is a natural right, and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... when I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must have the will of a personal God as a source of obligation to conform to the law of truth and virtue, and that without such a source no assumed law can be binding on him, Jacobi adds: "Yes I am the atheist, and the godless man who, in opposition to the Will that wills nothing, will lie as the lying Desdemona lied; will lie and deceive as did Pylades in passing himself off as Orestes; will commit murder as did Timoleon; break law and oath as did Epaminondas, as did John ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when "Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he afterward became," and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the originality of Young's arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his own way ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... creed. You must say: "Once one is three, and three times one is one." The man who practiced every virtue, but failed to believe, was execrated. Nothing so outrages the feelings of the church as a moral unbeliever, nothing so horrible as a charitable atheist. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... science deals only with secondary or natural causes, the scientific terms of a theory of derivation of species—no less than of a theory of dynamics—must needs be the same to the theist as to the atheist. The difference appears only when the inquiry is carried up to the question of primary cause—a question which belongs to philosophy. Wherefore, Darwin s reticence about efficient cause does not disturb us. He considers only the scientific questions. As already stated, we think that a theistic ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... was not liked. In fact, the schoolmaster had declared that she was an atheist, and that a sort of reproach attached to her. The cure, who had been consulted by Madame ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... religious terms: the word of God, holy writ, scriptures, the gospel, heaven, sacred writings, heathen, christendom, christianize, papacy, papal see, atheist, high church, church and ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... is of opinion that if the exiled family had continued to reign, there would neither have been worms in our ships nor caterpillars in our trees. He firmly believes that King William burned Whitehall that he might steal the furniture, and that Tillotson died an atheist. Of Queen Anne he speaks with more tenderness; owns that she meant well, and can tell by whom she was poisoned. Tom has always some new promise that we shall see in another month the rightful monarch on the throne. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Baptiste," he answered, in a low, even, passionate voice, that he flung at her almost like a blow. "The atheist, the gaol bird, the pariah, the blasphemer, the anti-Christ. I've hoofs instead of feet. Shall I take off my boots and show them to you? I tuck my tail inside my coat. You can't see my horns. I've cut them off close to my head. That's ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... its destructive consequences; of how Edmund Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,—all this has been told so well and so often that I spare ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Catholics proclaimed him a Huguenot, Huguenots declared him a Catholic; yet, no one had ever seen him attend mass, the custom of good Catholics, nor had any heard him pray in French, the custom of good Huguenots. What then, being neither one nor the other? An atheist, whispered the wise, a word which was then accepted in its narrowest cense: that is to say, Monsieur le Marquis had sold his ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... one night softly stole to his room and opened the New Testament, and read its heavenly moralities with purged eyes; and when he had done, he fell upon his knees, and prayed the Almighty to pardon the ungrateful heart that, worse than the Atheist's, had confessed His existence, but denied His goodness. His sleep was sweet and his dreams were cheerful. Did he rise to find that the penitence which had shaken his reason would henceforth suffice to save his life from all error? Alas! remorse overstrained has too often reactions as ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cups as he often was, regarded the honor neither of God nor man in his conversation. Indeed if it were not speaking ill of the dead, one might say that he was a dirty, drunken, blasphemous blackguard. Worse again, he was, I fear, an atheist; for he never attended Mass, and gave His Holiness worse language even than he gave the Queen. I should have mentioned that he was a bitter rebel, and boasted that his grandfather had been out in '98, and his father with Smith O'Brien. At last he went by the name ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out; will not the expanding ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... an infinity of infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... change, and in spite of themselves conceive an aversion to those pleasures, even in sharing which they blush. The idol becomes a mere woman, and the hero of these adventures fancies himself right in estimating all women by a few exceptions, and becomes an atheist in love because he has sacrificed to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... doctrine. Locke, in this and many other things, followed Hobbes, whose doctrine, in the Leviathan, is fidem, quanta ad salutem necessaria est, contineri in hoc articulo, Jesus est Christus.[303] For this Hobbes was called an atheist, which {144} many still believe him to have been: some of his contemporaries called him, rightly, a Socinian. Locke was known for a Socinian as soon as his work appeared: Dr. John Edwards,[304] his ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... decree for closing the baths for three days, by which cruel ordinance, I was again cast adrift upon the sea of necessity. However, Providence stood my friend, and threw a few dirhems in my way, and I have made my customary provision in spite of the wretch of a caliph, who I fully believe is an atheist, and no ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... He was just out of college, a reviewer, a poet, and once, momentarily, an atheist. It was Newland who was present and said such a remarkable thing when Julia had the accident to her thumb-nail in closing the double doors between the living-room and the library, where her peculiar old father sat reading. "To ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... its most superstitious corner. Protestantism was a sin, but atheism was a crime against humanity. The Protestant might be the victim of a mistake, but the atheist was the deliberate son of darkness, the source of fearful dangers. An atheist in their midst was like a scorpion in a flower-bed—no one could tell when and where he would sting. Rough misdemeanours among them had been many, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... laud up our system out of hatred to the Established Church, though our system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I make him frequently scourge himself before me. ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... private reasonings whereby a man convinceth himself? and how shall he call his conviction the truth, since all truth is one, but the testimony of no man's private conscience is the same as another's? Nay, how does thee know that the atheist, whom thee excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself is? Truly, I hear the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will accept the Inner Light, then indeed shall ye know what ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... lies in the charge that the schools discussed futile questions by faulty methods, one cannot decently deny that in this case the question was practical and the method vital. Theist or atheist, monist or anarchist must all admit that society and science are equally interested with theology in deciding whether the universe is one or many, a harmony or a discord. The Church and State asserted that it ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... best of her: Whilst her little Zeal for any Sect or Party would make the Clergy of all sorts give her out for a Socinian or a Deist: And should but a very little Philosophy be added to her other Knowledge, even for an Atheist. The Parson of the Parish, for fear of being ask'd hard Questions, would be shy of coming near her, were his Reception ever so inviting; and this could not but carry some ill intimation with it to such as Reverenc'd the Doctor, and who, it ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... thunderings of zeal! I've seen the Atheist in terror start, Awed to contrition by the strong appeal That waked ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... the Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a Christian ass and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they are insincere, are on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. "Self," exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. "All ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... They've done away with all that since we had Jew members. An atheist can go into Parliament now; and I'm told that most of them are that, or nearly as bad. I can remember when no Papist could sit in Parliament. But they seem to me to be doing away with everything. It's a great comfort to me that Frederic is ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... for, first of all, how do you know the opinions of all nations? I really believe there are many people so savage that they have no thoughts of a Deity. What think you of Diagoras, who was called the atheist; and of Theodorus after him? Did not they plainly deny the very essence of a Deity? Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just now mentioned, the greatest sophist of his age, was banished by order of the Athenians from their city ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... becomes a personage who is never educated at all. He is in like case with a child who in the family itself receives lessons, and what is more important, example, from a mother who is religious and from a father who is an atheist. He is not educated, he has had no sort of education. The only real education, that is to say, the only transmission to the children of the ideas of their parents consists of an education at home which is reinforced by the instruction of masters chosen by the parents in accordance with their own ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... in this state, it being part of his religious creed? Why? Can an atheist give evidence ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... "Dull atheist, could a giddy dance Of atoms lawless hurl'd Construct so wonderful, so wise, So harmonised ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... euphuist and dramatist—an identification which requires confirmation. A still more wanton attempt to supplement ignorance with knowledge has been made in the further identification with Lyly of a certain "witty and bold atheist," who annoyed Bishop Hall in his first cure at Hawstead, in Suffolk, and who is called "Mr. Lilly." All supposed facts about him (or some other John Lyly), his membership of Parliament and so forth, have been diligently ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of Christianity. The modern anatomist and physiologist may declare that his science precludes the necessity of faith in God and of prayer; that through his research he has become a materialist, an atheist. But even in the Middle Ages, when practically all of anatomy and physiology was yet unexplored, the physicians of that day were as materialistic as those of our own. The medieval saying was: "Tres physici, duo athei," "of every three physicians, ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... inscription was to this effect: "I bless the hour of my imprisonment; it has taught me to know the ingratitude of man, my own frailty, and the goodness of God." Close to these words again appeared the proud and desperate imprecations of one who signed himself an Atheist, and who launched his impieties against the Deity, as if he had forgotten that he had just before said there was no God. Then followed another column, reviling the cowardly fools, as they were termed, whom captivity had converted into fanatics. I one day pointed out these ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... Pierre de Crousaz, maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... not jumble them; they are coordinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I say; for, set aside materialism, and what is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? Don't you see? In either case the vice consists in a ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... all Cornelius had turned away: like the "atheist" of whom Apuleius tells he had never once raised hand to lip in passing image or sanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally when the latter determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their return into the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... in general pay much attention to the opinions of others when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or coincide with his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public career professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the worshipper of Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those who, after deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their youth, continued constant and firm in their apostasy. Of those who deliberated concerning ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... at his theories, and proved that no man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. Suddenly she stopped, not through any skill of his, but because she had remembered some words of Bacon: "The true atheist is he whose hands are cauterized by holy things." She thought of her distant youth. The world was not so humorous then, but it had been more important. For a moment she respected her companion, and determined to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... The atheist is not so much the man who denies the existence of any god as the man to whom God is not God, who looks upon the Deity as subordinate to powers void of holiness and nobility, the man who will not see in God the highest force in the world ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,—both canticle and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you are,—or let me say as you WERE,—inasmuch as no atheist was ever a poet at the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... we should worship Him, so long the Sabbath will continue as its sign and memorial. Had the Sabbath been universally kept, man's thoughts and affections would have been led to the Creator as the object of reverence and worship, and there would never have been an idolater, an atheist, or an infidel. The keeping of the Sabbath is a sign of loyalty to the true God, "Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." It follows that the message which commands men to worship God and keep His commandments, will especially ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... whether I was to include the Conciones ad Populum in my remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime, and I think you could not do better than to turn 'em into verse,—if you have nothing else to do. Allen I am sorry to say is a confirmed Atheist. Stodart, or Stothard, a cold hearted well bred conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several daughters (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something unnatural ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... 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
... "Atheist," "infidel," "ungodly" are epithets which have been used as mental clubs, with temporary effect, to beat back the wave of religious and scientific Rationalism, which punctuated the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Jesus, and one of the powers transmitted to the apostles.' He assumes his gravest airs in adducing the cases of Cardan, Swedenborg, and a certain Duke of Montmorency, as though he were a genuine historical inquirer. He almost adopts the tone of a pious missionary in describing how his atheist doctor was led by the revelations of a clairvoyante to study Pascal's 'Pensees' and Bossuet's sublime 'Histoire des Variations,' though what those works have to do with mesmerism is rather difficult to see. He relates the mysterious visions caused by the converted doctor ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... we have freedom of the Press; he may be seen there; impartial, even neutral. Tyrant Grimm rolls large eyes, over a questionable coming Time. Atheist Naigeon, beloved disciple of Diderot, crows, in his small difficult way, heralding glad dawn. (Naigeon: Addresse a l'Assemblee Nationale (Paris, 1790) sur la liberte des opinions.) But, on the other hand, how many Morellets, Marmontels, who had ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... good Catholic, and prided himself upon having demonstrated the existence of God and of the soul of man. As a reward for his exertions, his old friends the Jesuits put his works upon the "Index," and called him an Atheist; while the Protestant divines of Holland declared him to be both a Jesuit and an Atheist. His books narrowly escaped being burned by the hangman; the fate of Vanini was dangled before his eyes; and the misfortunes ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials for heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same spiritual worlds? The atheist should ask himself how he received the giant idea of God, that he has neither opposed nor embodied. An idea that has not grown up by comparing different degrees of greatness, as it is the opposite of every measure and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... church on the afternoon preceding the day of the nuptials. The ushers, of course, are an hour late, which gives the bridegroom (Bap.) an opportunity to meet the minister (Epis.) and have a nice, long chat about religion, while the best man (Atheist) talks to the eighty-three year old sexton who buried the bride's grandpa and grandma and has knowed little Miss Dorothy come twenty years next Michaelmas. The best man's offer of twenty-five dollars, if the sexton will at once bury the maid of honor, is generally ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hot-house atmosphere of their self-conscious ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... relationships and obligations, and especially since Christ had promulgated the golden rule, the idea that man could own a fellow-creature was so preposterous that he would be an infidel, nay, he would go farther, he would be an atheist, rather than believe it. Our moral instincts are our guide. They are the highest source of evidence that there is a God, and they are a perfect indication as to what God and his requirements should be. He was for passing a vote of disapprobation at the act of Paul the Apostle in sending back ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... myself; yet, whatever I was or was not, the Nechludoffs were unfailingly kind to me, and (happily for myself) took no notice (as it now appears) of my play-acting. Only Lubov Sergievna, who, I believe, really believed me to be a great egoist, atheist, and cynic, had no love for me, but frequently disputed what I said, flew into tempers, and left me petrified with her disjointed, irrelevant utterances. Yet Dimitri held always to the same strange, something more than friendly, relations with her, and used to say not only ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... door, but a shilling a week of outdoor relief ye are sure of—for she sets up for being full of the milk of human kindness. She set her cap at John Home when he came home from London. She would never even allow that Davie Hume was an atheist, whilk was as clear as that I hae a nose to my face!—— Off with you to Fanny's at the Sciennes. And a long guid day to the pair of ye—ye are a disobedient regardless lassock, and ye are heapin' up wrath ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... would proceed to greater length than speech. But Macer stood firm, nothing daunted by the uproar. One, who signalized himself by the loudness and fierceness of his cries, exclaimed, 'that he was nothing else than an atheist like all the rest of the Christians; they have no gods; they deny the gods of Rome, and they give us nothing ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... religious question; while a great many of the much-read works of belle lettres never tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than those taken by them in reference to the religious question. And ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Wisdom's eye pervades the sable veil. Artists may paint the sun's effulgent rays, But Amory's pen the brighter God displays: While his great works in Amory's pages shine, And while he proves his essence all divine, The Atheist sure no more can boast aloud Of chance, or nature, and exclude the God; As if the clay without the potter's aid Should rise in various forms, and shapes self-made, Or worlds above with orb o'er orb profound Self-mov'd ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... the immeasurable consequence of every thought and deed, the ultimate disparition of evil, and the power of attainment to conditions of infinite memory and infinite vision,—cannot be termed either an atheist or a materialist, except by bigotry and ignorance. Profound as may be the difference between his religion and our own, in respect of symbols and modes of thought, the moral conclusions reached in either case are very ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... vanquished man. Bringing his life into the "light of the glory of God which shines from the face of Jesus Christ," we are compelled to pronounce it a miserable failure. We do not find either Christian faith or Christian morality in it. As to faith, he had none; for he was an atheist, and gloried in his disbelief of all revealed truth. As to morality, his biographer informs us that he was an unchaste, profane, passionate, arbitrary, ungenerous, unloving man. His apparent philanthropy ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... years preceding the Revolution in France no one was ever persecuted for being an atheist, deist, infidel or Roman catholic, but all of these united in suppressing the general use of the Bible and the presence of Bible readers, to the great injury of the public welfare. If that country had not foolishly and wickedly exterminated the people, that were fast becoming ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... of paganism in the world around him—not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... he had been 'had in derision' by 'two gentlemen poets' because I could not make my verses get on the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist tamburlane, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun. Farther on he laughs at the 'prophetical spirits' of those 'who set the end of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... original indictment, which is consistent enough—'Socrates does not receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new divinities'—but of the interpretation put upon the words by Meletus, who has affirmed that he is a downright atheist. To this Socrates fairly answers, in accordance with the ideas of the time, that a downright atheist cannot believe in the sons of gods or in divine things. The notion that demons or lesser divinities are the sons of gods is not to be regarded as ironical or sceptical. ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... themselves injured by the creation of an unsectarian institution on so large a scale. Typical was the attack made by an eminent divine who, having been installed as president over one of the smaller colleges of the State, thought it his duty to denounce me as an "atheist,'' and to do this especially in the city where I had formerly resided, and in the church which some of my family attended. I took no notice of the charge, and pursued the even tenor of my way; but the press took it up, and it recoiled upon the man ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... gallery and is conducted downwards. The scene changes to Ludgate Circus, but Michael is no longer in the centre of it. A Scot named Turnbull keeps a shop here, apparently in the endeavour to counterbalance the influence of St. Paul's across the way. He is an atheist, selling atheist literature, editing an atheist paper. Another Scot arrives, young Evan MacIan, straight from the Highlands. Unlike the habitual Londoner, MacIan takes the little shop seriously. In its window he sees a copy of The Atheist, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... She liked the cosmopolitan Tyson and his reckless speech, and she had her own reasons for wishing him to make a good impression. But her hints had roused in him the instinct of antagonism, and he went on more recklessly than before. "No; you are perfectly wrong. I'm not an interesting atheist. I have the most ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... tenets of our church, including the Seventh Day Sabbath, than I had of the laws of nature; but the truly spiritual character of my mother's religion saved me from becoming a bigot. If I had been trained in the dogmas of Christianity, I have no doubt I should have then become an atheist. Nor was I a prig. I must confess that I enjoyed the occasional larks in which my classmates sometimes led and sometimes followed me, as well as any of them. Our Greek professor, Doctor R., was a bit of a snob, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Rousseau. He was not a mocker, or a leveller, or a satirist, or an atheist. He resembled Voltaire only in one respect—in egotism. He was not so learned as Voltaire, did not write so much, was not so highly honored or esteemed. But he had more genius, and exercised a greater influence on posterity. His influence was more subtle and more dangerous, for he ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... from theirs as to the possibility of a republic, and as to the propriety of tolerating other forms of worship than his own. But it was for such pernicious doctrines, on religious matters in particular, that he was called Beelzebub, Pope John, a papist in disguise, and an atheist; and denounced, as leading young Maurice and the whole country ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... poor people she would like to have. She selected one bedridden old woman (Church of England preferred); one paralytic old man; one blind girl who would want to be read aloud to; one poor atheist, willing to be converted; two cripples; one drunken father who would consent to be talked to seriously; one disagreeable old fellow, needing much patience; two large families, and ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... are the principles I want to maintain—that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and of no creeds—Jew and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Mormon, believer and atheist." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... work "Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten", gives the literary man the place of priest in the world, continually unfolding the Godlike to man. This was also Beethoven's aim. Haydn charged him with being an atheist, but his works as well as his life refute this charge. The Kyrie and the Agnus Dei of the Mass in D, could never have been produced had he been other than a devout, religious man. In his journals he continually addresses the Godhead. Outwardly, however, he gave no sign. "Religion and ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... thou ever stood to see The Holly-tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceives Its glossy leaves Ordered by an Intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist's sophistries. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... misery of remote country life is that your neighbors have no toleration for difference of opinion and habit. My neighbors think I am an atheist, except those who think I am a Roman Catholic; and when I speak disrespectfully of the weather or the crops they think ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... recover his position. Machiavelli, a loyal Republican, wrote a primer of such fiendish principles as might lure the Medici to their ruin. Machiavelli's one idea was to ruin the rich: Machiavelli's one idea was to oppress the poor: he was a Protestant, a Jesuit, an Atheist: a Royalist and a Republican. And the book published by one Pope's express authority was utterly condemned and forbidden, with all its author's works, by the express command of another (1559). But before facing the whirlwind of savage controversy which raged and rages still about The Prince, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... by fainting-fits; and when the one desire of his heart was denied, when a love mighty as every other passion of his soul failed him, his grief, ungovernable and frenzied as his rage, overwhelmed him, and the "taint of madness which ran in his line," flooded his brain. But when the atheist became a Christian; when, in his own words, he felt "the Spirit of God was not the chimera of heated brains, nor a device of artful men to frighten and cajole the credulous, but an existence to be felt and understood as the whisperings of one's own heart;" his prayer of, "Lord! I believe, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... makes his past life seem still more unreal. It has been truly said that the solitary contemplation of the desert stars either for ever convinces a doubter of the certainty of a God, or confirms his opinions as an Atheist. When Michael was alone with the stars, the Sweet Singer of Israel's words ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... mature life, and are engrossed with quite different matters, we are indisposed to sit down and examine all our received tenets, to find ourselves in the wrong, to run counter to the opinions of our country or party, and to be branded with such epithets as whimsical, sceptical, Atheist. It is inevitable that we should take up at first borrowed principles; and unless we have all the faculties and the means of searching into their foundations, we naturally go on to the end ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... we to believe? Did Sprot go wherever he went with a blasphemous lie in his mouth? A motive for such vehemence of religious hypocrisy is difficult to find. Conceivably he had promise of benefits to his family. Conceivably he was an atheist, and 'took God in his own hand.' Conceivably his artistic temperament induced him to act his lie well, as he had a lie ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the altar and take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... more sensible for those who deny the fitness and necessity of prayer to take the ground of the atheist and say plainly "We do not pray, for there is no God to pray to," for to deny ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... creatures unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the rush ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Until the evidence became too strong to be resisted, the doctrine that our earth was once a baby world, with many millions of years to pass through before it could be the abode of life, was one which only the professed atheist (so said too many divines) could for a moment entertain; while the doctrine that not the earth alone, but the whole of the solar system, had developed from a condition utterly unlike that through which it is now passing, could have had its origin only in the suggestions of the Evil ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the noblest poem extant in any language, I mean his Essay on Man, must at once be convinced, from ocular demonstration, of the infamous falshood of this assertion. That his lordship was a theist, and a disbeliever in miracles and revelations, cannot and need not be denied. But that he was no atheist, no materialist, his acknowledged good sense is, alone, a sufficient proof. I do think scepticism the best and truest philosophy; and I scruple not to own, I have called in question, one time or other, the truth of most things which cannot be demonstrated. But the existence ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... and Atheist have therefore no pretence to cheerfulness, and would act very unreasonably should they endeavour after it. It is impossible for any one to live in good-humour and enjoy his present existence, who is apprehensive ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... purpose, he caused them stop in worship, till he beat him severely: after which, when they began, he would run behind the door, and with the napkin his mouth, sit howling like a dog. About 1684, he and one D. Jamie were banished to America, where it was said, Jamie became an atheist, and Gibb came to be much admired by the poor blind Indians for his familiar converse with the devil and sacrificing to him (a thing then more common than now in these parts). In consequence of such a wretched life, he died a dismal death as far ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... from prescribed creeds, and became a liberal in her religious ideas. She has been called an Atheist, but every line she writes, and her life of self-sacrifice, disprove this assertion. Her "one prayer," to which she says she confined herself, is, to my mind, sublime ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few. For in the minor artist the passionate—the elemental quality—is not often found: he being of his essence the ape or zany of his betters. Tourneur is not a great tragic. The Atheist's Tragedy is but grotesquely and extravagantly horrible; its personages are caricatures of passion; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid; its incidents are absurd when they are not simply abominable. But it is written in excellent dramatic verse and in a rich and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... charge, in his second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of my studies. You say you find me largelie in their Apologia; to my knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read manie bookes; but I have studied a fewe: meditation and invention ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... pantheism and atheism; loving everybody is loving nobody, and God everywhere is, practically, God nowhere. I once asked a man if he was a free-thinker; he replied that he did not think he was. And so, I have heard of a man exclaiming "I am an atheist, thank God!" Those who say there is a God are wrong unless they mean at the same time that there is no God, and vice versa. The difference is the same as that between plus nothing and minus nothing, and it is hard to say which we ought to admire and thank most—the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... equal'd with one stroke Both her first born and all her bleating Gods. Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd 490 Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And when Night 500 Darkens the Streets, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... moon derived its light from the sun. Some of them knew the difference between the planets and the fixed stars. Anaxagoras scouted the notion that the sun was a god, and supposed it to be a mass of ignited stone, for which he was called an atheist. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... atalaya watchtower. atar to tie. ataud m. coffin. atencion f. attention. atender to be attentive, heed. atentado attempt, offense. atento attentive. atenuar to diminish. ateo atheist. aterir vr. to grow numb. aterrador-a terrible. aterrar to prostrate, terrify. atomo atom. atonia weakness. atraer to attract. atrapar to catch, overtake, atras back, backwards. atravesar ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... errors of the vulgar, they diligently practiced the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods, and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robe. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume, and they approached with the same inward contempt and the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... been a little shocked if one had called her an atheist. She went to church most Sundays—when in the country; for, in the opinion of Lady Margaret, it was not decorous there to omit the ceremony: where you have influence you ought to set a good example—of hypocrisy, namely! But, if any one had suggested to ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... thence, they may have already made the next world richer by their coming. I do not know that; but I do know that they have made my soul infinitely richer by their sojourn here; I do not know whether they were Catholic or Atheist, but I do know how truly the Master of all souls could say to these two brave little Belgians: "When I was an hungered, ye gave me food; when I was thirsty, ye gave me drink; when I was a stranger, ye took me in; when I was sick and in prison, ye ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... individuality and distinction,—what has been rightly described as a "splendid work" on Burns;[52] while M. Emile Legouis, in a minute examination of "The Prelude," has contrasted and compared the orthodox Wordsworth of maturity with the juvenile semi-atheist of Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas has devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of the Night Thoughts; M. Leon Morel, another to Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh light has been thrown upon the birth and growth of the English Novel by the admirable ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Contradiction to good Manners, good Sense, and common Honesty; and as there is nothing in it but what is built upon the Ruin of Virtue and Innocence, according to the Notion of Merit in this Comedy, I take the Shoemaker to be, in reality, the Fine Gentleman of the Play: For it seems he is an Atheist, if we may depend upon his Character as given by the Orange-Woman, who is her self far from being the lowest in the Play. She says of a Fine Man who is Dorimant's Companion, There is not such another Heathen in the Town, except the Shoemaker. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... you to rally round the oriflamme of France, and summon the ban arriereban of my kingdoms. To my faithful Bretons I need not appeal. The country of Duguesclin has loyalty for an heirloom! To the rest of my subjects, my atheist misguided subjects, their father makes one last appeal. Come to me, my children! your errors shall be forgiven. Our Holy Father, the Pope, shall intercede for you. He promised it when, before my departure on this expedition, I kissed ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... supernatural religion. In the first article of the /Old Charges/ (1723) it is laid down that, "A mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law, and if he really understands the art he will never be a stupid atheist or an irreligious libertine." The precise meaning of this injunction has been the subject of many controversies, but it is clear from the continuation of the same article that the universal religion on which all ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... displayed; yet he was not one of that brotherhood. The spiritualists claim him as their most illustrious adept, but he was not a spiritualist; and there is hardly a sect in the Western world, from the Calvinist to the atheist, but affects to believe he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... "You talk like an atheist because you do not believe in our gods. To us it has been made quite visible that the Goddess has come with her boon, yet you distrust the obvious ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... torture the Continent, all the dark conspiracies of the secret societies, there, I admit, the Church is in antagonism with such aspirations after liberty; those aspirations, in fact, are blasphemy and plunder; and, if the Church were to be destroyed, Europe would be divided between the atheist and the communist." ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Ortigosa succeeded in finding out that Padilla had been tried for embezzlement, and he published that fact. The Castro News, on its side, insulted Caesar and called him a crooked speculator on the exchange, an upstart, and an atheist. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... is one thing I should be more at ease if I told your lordship: Mr. Carmichael, the minister of this parish, would tell you I was an atheist, or something very like it—therefore an altogether unsafe person. But he ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... wholly attributed to ignorance or thoughtlessness, as some might hold; for, indeed, we have produced some men of as rare ability as move among the human throng; yet it is almost as difficult to find an atheist, an agnostic, or an infidel of any sort among us as it is to find a "needle in a haystack." The Negro believes in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... suffered most. I recall the shrewd comments of a certain sailor who had known the disinherited in every country; of a Russian who had served his term in Siberia; of an old Irishman who called himself an atheist but who in moments of excitement always blamed the good Lord for "setting supinely" when the world was ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... your grave will be warm'd by a process of steam, Which will boil all the worms and the grubs in their holes, And preserve from decay ev'ry part but your souls. Our cemetery, centred in fancy's domain, Shall by a state edict eternal remain To all parties open, the living or dead; Or christian, or atheist, here rest their head, In a picturesque garden, and deep shady grove, Where young love smiles, and fashion delighteth to rove. To render the visitors' comforts complete, And afford the grieved mourners a proper retreat, The directors intend to erect an hotel, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... knowledge, in so far as it brings with it not an objective, but a subjective, although universally valid, necessity. Hence it is better to speak of belief in God as a need of the reason than as a duty; while a logical error, not a moral one, should be charged against the atheist. The atheist is blind to the intimate connection which exists between the highest good and the Ideas of the reason; he does not see that God, freedom, and immortality are the indispensable conditions of the realization ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... "If only that meant to me what it does to you, I might risk it. I'm no blatant atheist or anti- religionist. I'm simply agnostic; I don't believe. That's all. You have faith. I haven't. I didn't wish to get rid of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... his aunt, smiling with very little spontaneity. "You have insulted us, you great atheist! but we forgive you. I am well aware that my daughter and myself are two rustics who are incapable of soaring to the regions of mathematics where you dwell, but for all that it is possible that you may one day get down on your knees to us and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... confusion and diversity of opinion prevail as to the real views of the man whose writings have agitated the whole world, scientific and religious. If a man says he is a Darwinian, many understand him to avow himself virtually an atheist; while another understands him as saying that he adopts some harmless form of the doctrine of evolution. This is ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... have looked on the grief which takes no fortitude from reason, no consolation from conscience,—the grief which tells us what would be the earth were man abandoned to his passions, and the Chance of the atheist reigned alone in the merciless heavens. Pride humbled to the dust; ambition shivered into fragments; love (or the passion mistaken for it) blasted into ashes; life, at the first onset, bereaved of its holiest ties, forsaken by its truest guide; shame that writhed for ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... movement. As a matter of fact, he does nothing of the kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... bay for a while; but when the full cry is against you, you shan't have fair play for your life. If you can't be fairly run down by the hounds, you will be treacherously shot by the huntsmen. No, turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but poet. A modern poet is worse, more servile, timorous, and fawning, than any I have named: without you could retrieve the ancient honours of the name, recall the stage of Athens, and be allowed the force of ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... has the same task. The channel remains to-day just as it ever did, with Scylla and Charybdis presiding over their rocks as of old. Hobbes's Leviathan appeared in 1651, and in 1670 both his philosophy and his statecraft were fashionable doctrine. All really pious people called Hobbes an Atheist. Technically he was nothing of the sort, but it matters little what he was technically, since no plain man who can read can doubt that Hobbes's enthronement of the State was the dethronement ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... said, if he had known of the massacre in France, or the powder treason of England? He would have been seven times more Epicure, and atheist, than he was. For as the temporal sword is to be drawn with great circumspection in cases of religion; so it is a thing monstrous to put it into the hands of the common people. Let that be left unto the Anabaptists, and other furies. ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... fallen in the room it could not have had a more startling effect than this outburst of Honor's. The nurse recoiled in horror thinking she was in the presence of a free-thinker who is first cousin to an atheist, and Mrs. Meek choked back her sobs to stare wide-eyed at her visitor who had dared to voice such heresy under ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... of the most remarkable characters I ever met with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr. Uttley said with the utmost simplicity that he was an atheist, and the religious world called him "Uttley the Atheist," a title which he accepted as naturally as if it implied no contempt or antagonism whatever. He was by no means devoid of physical courage also, for I remember that at one time he ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Candidate arrived drunk at one of his meetings? He had to be lifted out of the carriage, and kept in the Committee Room till he was sober. Shocking, isn't it? and then such shameful hypocrisy to talk about Local Option! But can you wonder? You know he's an atheist? Oh yes, I know he goes to Church, but that's all a blind. His one object is to do away with Religion. Yes, they do say he has been in the Divorce Court, but I should not like to say I know it, though I quite believe ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... desire of his heart was denied, when a love mighty as every other passion of his soul failed him, his grief, ungovernable and frenzied as his rage, overwhelmed him, and the "taint of madness which ran in his line," flooded his brain. But when the atheist became a Christian; when, in his own words, he felt "the Spirit of God was not the chimera of heated brains, nor a device of artful men to frighten and cajole the credulous, but an existence to be felt and understood as the whisperings of one's own heart;" his prayer of, "Lord! ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the facts, which," the writer remarks, "is like to avail very little when they come upon their trials." "The parson," he continued, "will believe nothing of all this; so that the whole town cries out: 'Shame! that one of his cast should be such an atheist.'"[26] ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... nations. She was in a frequent state of intoxication, and kept gin, brandy, and beer in her berth. Whether sober or not, she was equally voluble; and as her language was not only inelegant, but replete with coarseness and profanity, the annoyance was almost insupportable. She was a professed atheist, and as such justly an object of commiseration, the weakness of her unbelief being clearly manifested by the frequency with which she denied the existence ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... hands of the uncircumcised heathen. Eternal nothingness! The fool hath said in his heart There is no God—and he is being dashed headlong upon the judgment bar of the God who saith, I will repay. Cursed be the Atheist! May he find the passage, fiery though it be, as nothing to the flames of the avenging God; may he go to his appointed place where the worm dieth not and the fire is not ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... in for a good share of satire, but darker things were said of the Italianate Englishman. He was an atheist—a creature hitherto unknown in England—who boldly laughed to scorn both Protestant and Papist. He mocked the Pope, railed on Luther, and liked none, but only himself.[104] "I care not," he said, "what you talk to me of ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... stand to it; so all his days they turned not back from the Lord God of their Fathers." This is the covenant, and this is a general view of the general matter; this is according to the aim of those that made it, take it, swear to it. Who but an atheist can refuse the first? who but a papist the second? who but an oppressor, or a rebel, the third? who but the guilty, the fourth? who but men of fortune, desperate cavaliers, the fifth? who but light and empty men, unstable as water, the sixth? In a word, the duty is such, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... world, but themselves, know them to be. Guy thought he "wasn't such a bad sort of fellow at all," and yet in every movement of his, one could detect him—the victim of the age. He had never professed any direct code of belief. He would have been very much offended if any one called him an "atheist." He knew there was some reason why a fellow should go to church now and then, and not be everlastingly doing mischief. He confided to himself in strict secret that "to die" was about the very last thing he'd like to do; but, somehow, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Reconciled With The Holiness Of God. Section I. The hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Section II. The hypothesis of the Manicheans. Section III. The hypothesis of optimism. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Section V. The sophism of the atheist exploded, and a perfect agreement shown to subsist between the existence of sin and the holiness of God. Section VI. The true and only foundation of optimism. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... between Church and State through patient study of the phenomena exhibited in other countries, were the leading motives of the man. Yet he was perpetually denounced in private as an unbeliever, an atheist, a tyrant, because he resisted dictation from the clergy within the Provinces and from kings ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Some three months before Sir Richard's death," writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, "I was seated at Sir Richard's tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, 'I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.' [529] Perhaps, however, this should be considered to prove, not that he was an atheist, but that he could not resist the pleasure ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... would obtain eternal life." All the book is amplification of this doctrine. Locke, in this and many other things, followed Hobbes, whose doctrine, in the Leviathan, is fidem, quanta ad salutem necessaria est, contineri in hoc articulo, Jesus est Christus.[303] For this Hobbes was called an atheist, which {144} many still believe him to have been: some of his contemporaries called him, rightly, a Socinian. Locke was known for a Socinian as soon as his work appeared: Dr. John Edwards,[304] his ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of its leafless elm-trees has a meaning for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had before. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes me so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and her ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... morality or of his paternal authority, merely because I do not share his blind reverence for the Catholic Church and her Ministers. On that account he looks upon me, not merely as Latitudinarian, but as a perfect Atheist, and a faithful old manservant of ours, who is much attached to me, and who accidentally saw my father's will, told me in confidence that he had left all his property to the Jesuits. I think this is highly suspicious, and I fear that the priests have been maligning me to my father. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... soliloquy, and bent his head to let the storm raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over. His bad instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason, louder than reality. His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where a porcelain figure, the grotesque chef d'oeuvre of some great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin. The young man ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... world believes it stabler if the soft Are whipped to show the face repentance wears. Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom, Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites; Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom The chasm between our passions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the speakers, a sickening sense of dismay at his heart. His ideal was the daughter of Luke Raeburn! And Luke Raeburn was an atheist leader! ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... and she's an atheist, too. You know what an atheist is, don't you? You know, Prue, Mount Mark is a very religious town, on account of the Presbyterian College, and all, and it seems the Simpsons are the only atheists here. ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... parish, a strange refractory man, will believe nothing of all this; so that the whole town cries out, 'Shame! that one of his coat should be such an atheist;' and design to complain of him to the bishop. He goes about very oddly to solve the matter. He supposes, that the first of these ladies keeping a brandy and tobacco shop, the fellows went out smoking, and got drunk towards ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... its own name, has never had many to embrace it. Its only hope is to be tolerated and believed under some other name. In Russia, no man is allowed to belong to the ruling (Communist) party unless he is an atheist. It will be a sorry world when "scientific" atheism wins, ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... believe in some incomprehensible creed. You must say: "Once one is three, and three times one is one." The man who practiced every virtue, but failed to believe, was execrated. Nothing so outrages the feelings of the church as a moral unbeliever, nothing so horrible as a charitable atheist. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... its heart." He once said that his highest desire was that there should be a monument to himself somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its face smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist." ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl—he told me—had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free Stater ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... family who was ordered to the front with a higher rank. He refused promotion in order to stay behind, and in a month's time he died of the plague in his own village. If he had gone to the front his family would have received the war pension. An atheist never achieves honour, Mother. He is always unsettled and has no consolations. Do we Mussulmans think that the Prophet will spend all his time in asking God to forgive our transgressions? Tell the Pir ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... should Jove himself descend, And tell me,—Hector, thou deservest not life, But take it as a boon,—I would not live. But that a mortal man, and he, of all men, Should think my life were in his power to give, I will not rest, till, prostrate on the ground, I make him, atheist-like, implore his breath Of me, and not ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... pyrrhonism; bout &c 485; agnosticism. atheism; deism; hylotheism^; materialism; positivism; nihilism. infidelity, freethinking, antichristianity^, rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour^, heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort [Fr.], freethinker, latitudinarian, rationalist; materialist, positivist, nihilist, agnostic, somatist^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... true bath consists in washing the mind clean of all impurities, and charity consists in protecting all creatures.' The Yaksha asked,—'What man should be regarded as learned, and who should be called an atheist? Who also is to be called ignorant? What is called desire and what are the sources of desire? And what is envy?' Yudhishthira answered,—'He is to be called learned who knoweth his duties. An atheist is he who is ignorant and so also ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... America it would be difficult to return an atheist—you are more likely to come back in a religious frame of mind.... Idleness and luxury are not among the distinguishing characteristics of the descendants of the Puritans.... In the light, transparent atmosphere of the States, simplicity, the cheerful, alert spirit infects the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila—the opposite of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church—a person very closely related to me,—the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... nation every year from the Revolution, and is of opinion that if the exiled family had continued to reign, there would neither have been worms in our ships nor caterpillars in our trees. He firmly believes that King William burned Whitehall that he might steal the furniture, and that Tillotson died an atheist. Of Queen Anne he speaks with more tenderness; owns that she meant well, and can tell by whom she was poisoned. Tom has always some new promise that we shall see in another month the rightful monarch on the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but she wished to bind him to make no request to that effect after marriage.[828] In vain did Catharine protest that this was to require him to become an atheist, and her own advisers solemnly warn her that this could but lead to an entire rupture of the negotiations. Under the pretence of excluding all exercise of Popery from England, the queen disappointed the ardent hopes of thousands of sincere and thorough Protestants in France and of ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... his death leads us on to faith and obedience for ourselves. The name atheism, which, it is true, orthodoxy held ready for every belief incorrect according to its standard, was on the contrary undeserved. The deists did not attack Christian revelation, still less belief in God. They considered the atheist bereft of reason, and they by no means esteemed historical revelation superfluous. The end of the latter was to stir the mind to move men to reflection and conversion, to transform morals, and if anyone declared ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... he would find Churches within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers was, in virtue of his Establishment views, little better than a Papist, or that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, must have been an unconscious atheist at bottom. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... this, Which builds on heavenly cant its earthly sway And in a convert mourns to lose a prey; Which, grasping human hearts with double hold,— Like Danaee's lover mixing god and gold,[6]— Corrupts both state and church and makes an oath The knave and atheist's passport into both; Which, while it dooms dissenting souls to know Nor bliss above nor liberty below, Adds the slave's suffering to the sinner's fear, And lest he 'scape hereafter racks him here! But ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... hundred hens to the acre. They die by dozens mysteriously.... I am more than doubtful concerning my Maker. Why has the Lord afflicted me? What a return for all my endeavour— Not to mention the L. S. D.! I am an atheist now and for ever, Because this God ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... jagervest next to the skin. But with a diary it is different; with a diary one may be sincere. . . . To begin with, I note down that my religious belief I carried still intact with me from Metz did not withstand the study of natural philosophy. It does not follow that I am an atheist. Oh, no! this was good enough in former times, when he who did not believe in spirit, said to himself, 'Matter,' and that settled for him the question. Nowadays only provincial philosophers cling to that worn-out creed. Philosophy of our times does not pronounce ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Murrough. His last exploit was the murder of a neighbouring chief, despite the most solemn pledges. In an old translation of the Annals of Ulster, he is termed, with more force than elegance, "a cursed atheist." After his excommunication, his brother Dermod was made King of Meath, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... writer, "in his sublime discussions of the most sacred truths, as no style can be too lofty nor conceptions too grand for such a subject, so has the great master never exerted the powers of his great genius with more signal success. Impiety shrinks beneath his rebuke; the atheist trembles and repents; the dying sinner catches a gleam of revealed hope; and all acknowledge the just ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Beethoven, praised the Septett of the latter; upon which the young man exclaimed, deprecatingly, "Ah, it is far from being a 'Creation'!" To which Haydn replied, "That you could not have written, for you are an atheist!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it. Neglecting the command not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, she had married Sir Thomas Seymour very shortly after King Henry's death. It can be no lack of charity to call a man an unbeliever, a practical Atheist at least, whose daily habit it was to swear and walk out of the house when the summons was issued for family prayers. Poor Katherine had all the piety on her own side, but she had not to bear the penalty she had brought ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... 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 ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... pageant, but a riot—and a suppressed riot. There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist— and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... intellect was always with Locke and Milton. Indeed, his jests upon hereditary monarchy were sometimes such as would have better become a member of the Calf's Head Club than a Privy Councillor of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far from being a zealot that he was called by the uncharitable an atheist: but this imputation he vehemently repelled; and in truth, though he sometimes gave scandal by the way in which he exerted his rare powers both of reasoning and of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have been by no means unsusceptible ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... humanity—the protectress of the purity of a thousand homes[A]—I am prepared to say that to have "no morals at all" is better than to accept such infamy and call it "morals"; as it is better to be an agnostic or an atheist than to worship a devil—to have no standard than to say: "Evil ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... And, in doing this, is he improving the Word of God? Just such difference as there is between the sense in which a minister may be said to improve a text, to the people's comfort, and the sense in which an atheist might declare that he could improve the Book, which, if any man shall add unto, there shall be added unto him the plagues that are written therein; just such difference is there between that which, with respect to Nature, man is, in his humbleness, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... misery;—it must be so; it cannot by law be anything else. For what is God? Who is God? God is a name merely,—but we give it to that Unseen, but ever working Force which rules the Universe! The coldest atheist that ever breathed must own that somehow,—by some means or other,— the Universe is ruled,—for if it were not, we should know nothing of it. Therefore, when we set aside, or leave out the consciousness and acknowledgment of the Ruler, the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Honesty; and as there is nothing in it but what is built upon the Ruin of Virtue and Innocence, according to the Notion of Merit in this Comedy, I take the Shoemaker to be, in reality, the Fine Gentleman of the Play: For it seems he is an Atheist, if we may depend upon his Character as given by the Orange-Woman, who is her self far from being the lowest in the Play. She says of a Fine Man who is Dorimant's Companion, There is not such another Heathen in the Town, except the Shoemaker. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... handwriting of Mr. Gladstone. Persons not otherwise noted for their religious exercise have been known to procure and preserve portions of the hair of Paderewski. Nay, by this time blasphemy itself is a sacred tradition, and almost as much respect would be paid to the alleged relics of an atheist as to the alleged relics of a god. If any one has a fork that belonged to Voltaire, he could probably exchange it in the open market for a knife that ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... mature age of twelve was formally entered at the University of Kasi, where, without loss of time, the first became a gambler, the second a confirmed libertine, the third a thief, and the fourth a high Buddhist, or in other words an utter atheist. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... spiritual realm whereinto we have no instruments to gaze. Every existent thing has its metes and limits. In fact, the only final weapon and fort of a thing is its environing limitation. It goes into nothing if that be taken down, the atheist says; into infinity, the mystic says. The mistake and difficulty lie in discerning what the last wall around the essence is. "The universe is the body of our body." The boundary of our life is boundless ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... that he should be forgiven, because he really didn't hold the views which he had preached," laughed Phyllis. "She also said that he should not be regarded as an atheist, because he believed not only in one ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... mistaken for a u, or the change or omission of a punctuation mark, which may involve claims to thousands of dollars. Even the separation of one word into two may reverse the meaning of the sentence, yet not betray itself by any oddity of phrase, as when the atheist who had asserted that "God is nowhere" found himself in print standing sponsor for the statement that "God is now here." The same trick of the types was played on an American political writer in his ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... cygnet's plume? She next sought such relief as study could afford; and her natural bent of thought, and her desire to vindicate her deeds to herself, plunged her into the fathomless abyss of metaphysical inquiry with the hope to confirm into positive assurance her earlier scepticism,—with the atheist's hope to annihilate the soul, and banish the presiding God. But no voice that could satisfy her reason came from those dreary deeps; contradiction on contradiction met her in the maze. Only when, wearied with ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Protestantism or Jansenism. It is authentically related that Louis XIV. on one occasion objected to the appointment of a representative on a foreign mission on account of the person being supposed to be a Jansenist; but on its being discovered that the nominee was only an Atheist, the objection was ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... with lavish bounty scatters? But yet, ye great triumvirate—I fear To call you back to earth, for ye debas'd With vile impurities the comic muse, And made her delicate mouth pronounce such things As would disgust a Wilmot in full blood, Or shock an Atheist roaring o'er his cups[13] O shameful profligate abuse of powers, Indulg'd to you for higher, nobler purposes, Than to pollute the sacred fount of virtue, Which, plac'd by heaven, springs ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... to religion and to the whole religious question; while a great many of the much-read works of belle lettres never tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than those taken by them ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... difficulty, indeed, arose from their intense interest in religious truth. They could not conceive a State which should not control men's theology in some real way. Even Locke did not advocate toleration for the atheist, for such a man (in his opinion) could not make the solemn asseverations on which alone civil life could go forward. Nor would he tolerate the Roman Catholic, but in this case political considerations swayed the balance; the Catholic introduced the fatal principle of allegiance to a 'foreign prince.' ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and convictions are entirely with this that he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... Horace The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... infidel or atheist, Or him who doubts if ever God can be, And questions the existence of a Christ, Mark well the fruits of Christianity, And say what other power has ever wrought The good that Christianity ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... absolute isolation; it is the sign of a thoroughgoing egotism. If we wish to do good to men we must pity and not despise them. We must learn to say of them, not "What fools!" but "What unfortunates!" The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He reminds me of the somber words ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time when I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and reason. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... at this story, and Jones burst into a loud fit of laughter; upon which Partridge cried, "Ay, you may laugh, sir; and so did some others, particularly a squire, who is thought to be no better than an atheist; who, forsooth, because there was a calf with a white face found dead in the same lane the next morning, would fain have it that the battle was between Frank and that, as if a calf would set upon a man. Besides, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... matter-of-fact Romans, no divinity is absent, if Prudentia be present, so it still seems that everything is wanting to a man, if he wants that. Shelley denied the commonly received Divinity, as all the world knows,—an Atheist of the most unpardonable stamp,—and has suffered in consequence; his life being considered a life of folly and vagary, and his punishment still enduring, as we may perceive from the tone and philosophy of his biographers, or rather ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... scruples of delicacy and propriety, as relative to a common course of things, ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... sail. It seems that salt water did him some good last year. They're both of them rather the worse for a row at one of their meetings in the North in support of that public nuisance, the democrat and atheist Roughleigh. The Radical doctor lost a hat, and Beauchamp almost lost an eye. He would have been a Nelson of politics, if he had been a monops, with an excuse for not seeing. It's a trifle to them; part of their education. They call themselves students. Rome will be capital, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... common knowledge, so inherently probable—Malipizzo gave way. He was too good a lawyer to spoil his case. Sooner or later, he foresaw, that bird would be caged with the rest of them. Regarding the Messiah, an unexpected and breathless appeal for mercy was lodged by the Communal doctor, atheist and freemason like the judge, who implored, with tears in his eyes, that the warrant for his arrest should be rescinded. By means of a sequence of rapid and intricate Masonic signs, he explained that Bazhakuloff was a patient of his; that he was undergoing a daily treatment with the stomach-pump; ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... again, with creatures unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which had not been achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... prescribed creeds, and became a liberal in her religious ideas. She has been called an Atheist, but every line she writes, and her life of self-sacrifice, disprove this assertion. Her "one prayer," to which she says she confined herself, is, to my mind, sublime with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... which seem to establish an infinite difference between the Creator and the most excellent of his creatures. This obvious consequence was maintained by AEtius, on whom the zeal of his adversaries bestowed the surname of the Atheist. His restless and aspiring spirit urged him to try almost every profession of human life. He was successively a slave, or at least a husbandman, a travelling tinker, a goldsmith, a physician, a schoolmaster, a theologian, and at last the apostle of a new church, which was propagated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... thing that stands out prominently in the emotions produced by the disaster is that in moments of urgent need men and women turn for help to something entirely outside themselves. I remember reading some years ago a story of an atheist who was the guest at dinner of a regimental mess in India. The colonel listened to his remarks on atheism in silence, and invited him for a drive the following morning. He took his guest up a rough mountain ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... stood to see The Holly-tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceives Its glossy leaves Ordered by an Intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist's sophistries. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... rapine, accident, conspire, And now a rabble rages, now a fire; Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; Here falling houses thunder on your head, And here a female atheist talks you dead. [c]While Thales waits the wherry, that contains Of dissipated wealth the small remains, On Thames's banks, in silent thought, we stood Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood; Struck with the seat that gave Eliza[A] ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. "Self," exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. "All for love, or ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... these lines I wonder where their spirits are now. Speeded thence, they may have already made the next world richer by their coming. I do not know that; but I do know that they have made my soul infinitely richer by their sojourn here; I do not know whether they were Catholic or Atheist, but I do know how truly the Master of all souls could say to these two brave little Belgians: "When I was an hungered, ye gave me food; when I was thirsty, ye gave me drink; when I was a stranger, ye took me in; when I was sick and ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... let us take heed to ourselves now lest he should prove a flatterer also. So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them. His name was Atheist, and he asked them whither they ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... knelt down beside her bed, her bare white feet peeping out from beneath the drapery of her white night-dress, in a posture that would have made the most human atheist believe in the beauty of devotion, those words were still in her ears: "The price of ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... component parts of a sentence? 3. Can all sentences be divided into clauses? 4. Are there different methods of analysis, which may be useful? 5. What is the first method of analysis, according to this code of syntax? 6. How is the following example analyzed by this method? "Even the Atheist, who tells us that the universe is self-existent and indestructible—even he, who, instead of seeing the traces of a manifold wisdom in its manifold varieties, sees nothing in them all but the exquisite structures ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and by that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the seat of the scorner. It was observed presently—no eyes so keen for such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way—that Bill Bull was coming under conviction of his conscience; and when this great news got abroad, Terry Lute, too, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... possible for the Devil in the Shape of an innocent Person to do other mischiefs. As for those who acknowledge that Satan may personate a pious Person, but not to do mischief, their Opinion has been confuted by more than a few unhappy Instances. Mr. Clark[17] speaks of a Man that had been an Atheist, or a Sadduce, not believing that there are any Devils or any (to us) invisible World; this Man was converted, but as a Punishment of his Infidelity, evil Angels did often appear to him in the Shape of his most intimate Friends, and would sometimes seduce him into great Inconveniences. ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... first to receive the severest attacks. The small group of skeptics, which is hardly perceptible under Louis XIV, has obtained its recruits in the dark; in 1698 the Palatine, the mother of the Regent, writes that "we scarcely meet a young man now who is not ambitious of being an atheist."[4215] Under the Regency, unbelief comes out into open daylight. "I doubt," says this lady again, in 1722, "if; in all Paris, a hundred individuals can be found, either ecclesiastics or laymen, who have any true ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... This appears in chap. xviii. of the "Plus Ultra." With great simplicity Glanvill relates:—"At this period of the conference, the disputer lost all patience, and with sufficient spite and rage told me 'that I was an atheist!—that he had indeed desired my acquaintance, but would have no more on't,' and so turned his back and went away, giving me time only to answer that 'I had no great reason to lament the loss of an acquaintance that could be so easily forfeited.'" The following ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... conjured me, however, to be patient and peaceable, in which case he said he would endeavour to devise some plan to satisfy me. Amongst other things, he observed that the bishops hated a sectarian more than an Atheist. Whereupon I replied, that, like the Pharisees of old, they cared more for the gold of the temple than the temple itself. Throughout the whole of our interview he evidently laboured under great fear, and was continually looking behind and around him, seemingly in dread of being overheard, which ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... boy, young as he was, was an atheist; and he even reasoned in a logical manner for a ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... conception also. It will be difficult to distinguish the follower of this religion from the follower of none, and the man who declines either to assert or to deny the existence of God, is practically in the position of an atheist. For theism enjoins the cultivation of sentiments of love and devotion to God, and the practice of their external expression. Atheism forbids both, while the simply non-theist abstains in conformity with the prohibition of the atheist and thus practically sides with him. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Owen himself was an Atheist formerly, and a very zealous and able advocate of Atheistical views. He gives his articles in the Atlantic Monthly as an autobiography, and seeks to make the impression that he has revealed to his readers all the important facts of his history without reserve. And he has certainly revealed ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... years of ago, who applied for exemption, said his father was an Atheist, his mother was 'all the other way about,' and his brother was a Socialist, and if he went away there would be war at home. He considered that he should stay at home to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... so long the Sabbath will continue as its sign and memorial. Had the Sabbath been universally kept, man's thoughts and affections would have been led to the Creator as the object of reverence and worship, and there would never have been an idolater, an atheist, or an infidel. The keeping of the Sabbath is a sign of loyalty to the true God, "Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." It follows that the message which commands men to worship God and keep His commandments, will especially ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... the best of her: Whilst her little Zeal for any Sect or Party would make the Clergy of all sorts give her out for a Socinian or a Deist: And should but a very little Philosophy be added to her other Knowledge, even for an Atheist. The Parson of the Parish, for fear of being ask'd hard Questions, would be shy of coming near her, were his Reception ever so inviting; and this could not but carry some ill intimation with it to such as Reverenc'd the Doctor, and who, it is likely, might be already satisfy'd from the Reports ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... is merely founded upon human policy must be always subject to human chance; but that which is founded on the divine wisdom can no more miscarry than the government of heaven. To govern by parties and factions is the advice of an atheist, and sets up a government by the spirit of Satan. In such a government the prince can never be secure under the greatest promises, since, as men's interest changes, so will ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... Christian at that price, and so, instead of remaining a Christian humbug, I will be an honest atheist." ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... I got the religion wrong. I simply couldn't think what you were, so I said an atheist, and he said as the Congregational clergyman hadn't a full house to-night we'd better go to him. Lord, what would the Mater say? She wouldn't think it legal unless you were married in church with the 'Voice that breathed ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... entertain what appears to him independent evidence in favour of Theism, and thus he may become a theist. Or he may entertain what appears to him independent evidence in favour of Atheism, and thus he may become an atheist. But, in any case, so far as his Monism can carry him, he is left perfectly free either to regard the world as an object alone, or to regard the ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... with quite different matters, we are indisposed to sit down and examine all our received tenets, to find ourselves in the wrong, to run counter to the opinions of our country or party, and to be branded with such epithets as whimsical, sceptical, Atheist. It is inevitable that we should take up at first borrowed principles; and unless we have all the faculties and the means of searching into their foundations, we naturally go on to the end as ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... he did not believe in anything. At the point of death he would not hear talk of God. He said, speaking of himself, "Let this carcass alone, it is now good for nothing." He would steal, lie and swear; he was an atheist and..... ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... Thus the permission of evil is for the sake of the end, namely, salvation. It is well known that man has full liberty to think and will but not to say and do whatever he thinks and wills. He may think as an atheist, deny God and blaspheme the sanctities of Word and church. He may even want to destroy them utterly by word and deed, but this is prevented by civil, moral and ecclesiastical laws. He therefore cherishes this impiety and wickedness inwardly by thinking, willing and even ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... unable to suppress the language of its misery; a dread of making proselytes,—even as men refrain from exposing their sores or plague-infected garments in the eyes of the world. The least we can expect from him is that mood of mind which Pascal so sublimely says becomes the Atheist ... "Is this, then, a thing to be said with gayety? Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears as the saddest thing ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and saint, The Baptist and the Atheist, Swear by the Covenant, Old Jemmy is a Papist: Whilst all the holy crew did plot To pull his Highness down, Great Albany, a noble Scot Did ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... though our system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I make him frequently scourge himself before me. Well, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... which any rational religion, any that appeals to the intellect as well as to the feelings, can rest securely. Whoever accepts them, by whatever other name he prefer to call himself, is essentially a theist. He only who denies or ignores them can justly be stigmatised as an atheist. Yet, although an inquiry into their soundness is thus plainly second in interest to none, it is not that in which I propose to engage at present, unless indirectly. My immediate concern is not ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... staggering peer, to midnight revel prone; The slow-tongued bishop, and the deacon sly, The humble pensioner, and gownsman dry; The proud, the mean, the selfish, and the great, Swell the dull throng, and stagger into state. Lo! proud Flaminius at the splendid board, The easy chaplain of an atheist lord, Quaffs the bright juice, with all the gust of sense, And clouds his brain in torpid elegance; In china vases, see! the sparkling ill, From gay decanters view the rosy rill; The neat-carved pipes in silver settle laid, The screw by mathematic ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... unless his assisting at those performances was a sort of hypocrisy, (as no doubt it was:) But he was sure not to encrease that by any the least appearance of religion. He said once to my self, he was no atheist, but he could not think God would make a man miserable only for taking a little pleasure out of the way. He disguised his Popery to the last. But when he talked freely, he could not help letting himself out against the liberty ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... foresaid corrupt fountain, that the office, authority, and constitution of lawful magistrates, does not solely belong to professing Christians, in a Christian reformed land, but that the election and choice of any one whosoever, made by the civil body (whether Pagan, Papist, Atheist, Deist, or other enemy to God, to man, and to true religion), makes up the whole of what is essential to the constitution of a lawful magistrate according to God's ordinance. A tenet contrary to the light and dictates both of reason ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... foundling asylum and educated by charity. When I knew him he was on his way to a leper island in 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, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... are there of the tens of thousands of Gipsies, who have died in Britain, that, whether living or dying, have been visited by the minister or his people! The father of three orphan children lately taken under the Care of the Southampton Committee for the improvement of the Gipsies, had lived an atheist, but such he could not die. He had often declared there was no God; but before his death, he called one of his sons to him and said—I have always said there was no God, but now I know there is; I see him now. He attempted to pray, but knew ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... philosophers of Holland, who understood him no better; and who, having a nearer view of his glory, hated his person the more, so that he was obliged to leave Utrecht. Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God, was suspected to believe ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Christian—a position which no little disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist—which is still more extravagant; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a Gott trunkner Mann—a ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... mother, he knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with amusement her growing solicitude ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... interest's on the dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demireps That love and save their souls in new French books— We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway: one step aside, They're ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... his learning, got into a discussion with an atheist; but, failing to convince him, he threw down his shield and fled. A person asked him, "With all your wisdom and address, learning and science, how came you not to controvert an infidel?" He replied: "My learning is the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... condition be wholly attributed to ignorance or thoughtlessness, as some might hold; for, indeed, we have produced some men of as rare ability as move among the human throng; yet it is almost as difficult to find an atheist, an agnostic, or an infidel of any sort among us as it is to find a "needle in a haystack." The Negro believes in the God ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... tell her that she and I had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered so much in ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... emotion.] Sir, this poor land Needs all her honest children—noble sorrow, And yet a cheerful spirit to assert The truth of right, yea! God's eternal truth, Lest the world die a foolish sacrifice And perish flaming in the night of space, An atheist torch to warn the universe— Smile not, I pray thee. We ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... Cherokee," he explained. "There never was a kid in Yellowhammer. We tried to rustle a bunch of 'em for your swaree, but this sardine was all we could catch. He's a atheist, and he don't believe in Santa Claus. It's a shame for you to be out all this truck. But me and the Judge was sure we could round up a wagonful of candidates for ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... longer to continue in his brother's employment, and went to several other printers in Boston, hoping to enter into a new engagement. But his brother had preceded him, giving his own version of the story, and even declaring his brilliant brother to be an infidel and an atheist. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... himself looks scarcely less appalling, at first sight, than the Discoverie. This gave some colour to the declamation of the author's opponents, who held him up as Wierus had been represented before him, as if he were as deeply dipped in diabolical practises as any of those whom he defended. Atheist and Sadducee, if not very wizard himself, were the terms in which his name was generally mentioned, and as such, the royal author of the Demonology anathematizes him with great unction and very edifying horror. Against the papists, the satire of Scot had ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... months' constant travel and hard work, and on the 17th went to the National Woman's Rights Convention at Philadelphia and gave the report for New York. It was through her determined efforts, overcoming the objection that she was an atheist and declaring that every religion or none should have an equal right on their platform, that Mrs. Rose was made president. She met here for the first time Anna and Adeline Thomson, Sarah Pugh and Mary Grew, and was the guest of James and Lucretia ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... worship, till he beat him severely: after which, when they began, he would run behind the door, and with the napkin his mouth, sit howling like a dog. About 1684, he and one D. Jamie were banished to America, where it was said, Jamie became an atheist, and Gibb came to be much admired by the poor blind Indians for his familiar converse with the devil and sacrificing to him (a thing then more common than now in these parts). In consequence of such a wretched life, he died a dismal death as far down ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... terrific account of the ghostly crisis, mixed with denunciations of the Sadducee or Atheist who disbelieved; and to the book was added a preface, written by the four other clergymen who had assisted with their prayers, the character of which may be judged by a single extract. "The following account will afford to him that shall read with ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... jumble them; they are coordinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I say; for, set aside materialism, and what is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? Don't you see? In either case the vice consists in a want ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Existence Of Moral Evil, Or Sin, Reconciled With The Holiness Of God. Section I. The hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Section II. The hypothesis of the Manicheans. Section III. The hypothesis of optimism. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Section V. The sophism of the atheist exploded, and a perfect agreement shown to subsist between the existence of sin and the holiness of God. Section VI. The true and only foundation ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... no doubt your father objects to me specially because I am a Jew. If I were an atheist he might, perhaps, say nothing on the subject of religion. On this matter as well as on others it seems to me that your father has hardly kept pace with the movements of the age. Fifty years ago, whatever claim a Jew might have to be as well ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... feet, the young philosopher, however acute and ingenious we may suppose him to be, certainly could not offer one valid argument against the alleged fact. He could only stare, and wonder, and say that it might be so for all that he knew to the contrary. Just so, when the atheist tells us, that far off in infinite space is a region, of which we can see nothing, even with our best telescopes, except a faint glimmer of light, floating like a cloudlet in the heavens, where the primitive atoms of matter, directed ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... fist, Nor enter the debate an atheist; But when they say there is a God I ask Why Bartlett, then, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... one thing I should be more at ease if I told your lordship: Mr. Carmichael, the minister of this parish, would tell you I was an atheist, or something very like it—therefore an altogether unsafe person. But he knows nothing ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... seditious and most turbulent principles. Black, minister of St. Andrew's, went so far,[**] in a sermon, as to pronounce all kings the devil's children; he gave the queen of England the appellation of atheist; he said, that the treachery of the king's heart was now fully discovered; and in his prayers for the queen he used these words: "We must pray for her for the fashion's sake, but we have no cause: she will never do us ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... bed," he said, folding his overcoat for a pillow, and yawning. "Till lately, you know, I had no knowledge of God at all. I was an atheist. When I was lying in the hospital I thought of religion, and began reflecting on that subject. In my opinion, there is only one religion possible for a thinking man, and that is the Christian religion. If you don't believe in Christ, then there is nothing else to believe in, . . . is there? Judaism ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... know that the Radical Candidate arrived drunk at one of his meetings? He had to be lifted out of the carriage, and kept in the Committee Room till he was sober. Shocking, isn't it? and then such shameful hypocrisy to talk about Local Option! But can you wonder? You know he's an atheist? Oh yes, I know he goes to Church, but that's all a blind. His one object is to do away with Religion. Yes, they do say he has been in the Divorce Court, but I should not like to say I know it, though I quite believe it. His great friend, Mr. Comus, certainly was, and Mr. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... work him surer death? Grown old in villany, and dead to grace, Hell in his heart, and Tyburn in his face, Behold, a parson at thy elbow stands, Lowering damnation, and with open hands, Ripe to betray his Saviour for reward, The Atheist chaplain of an Atheist lord![176] 340 Bred to the church, and for the gown decreed, Ere it was known that I should learn to read; Though that was nothing, for my friends, who knew What mighty Dulness of itself could do, Never design'd me for a working priest, But hoped I should have ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... first sight, than the Discoverie. This gave some colour to the declamation of the author's opponents, who held him up as Wierus had been represented before him, as if he were as deeply dipped in diabolical practises as any of those whom he defended. Atheist and Sadducee, if not very wizard himself, were the terms in which his name was generally mentioned, and as such, the royal author of the Demonology anathematizes him with great unction and very ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... you, I desire to die when I have nobody left to laugh with me. I have never yet seen or heard any thing serious, that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object; and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... that roll the world back to light and justice, will He who built it hurl it to the earth again in crashing ruin, to build another order in its place. The man who has let that great truth, written out in flame across the dusky forehead of the Past, slip from his foolish atheist's heart and his shallow atheist's brain, is blind, not only to our own land's short history, but to the lessons of the long ages ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... constant dread of what Grandy would or would not be pleased to have her do. And though she was unaware of it, her everyday behavior was exactly what that silent man had so ordered. She did not know there was a God because the Major was an atheist—who out-Ingersolled Robert G. in the violence of his denial of deity. She did not know there was a world of reality outside the garden because he did not choose to have her mingle with that world. She was not taught French because he vowed he hated France and the French and all their ways. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... practicality which made him, after Drake's day, perhaps the ablest of Elizabeth's captains; the versatility and culture, which place him securely in the second flight of the writers of the time; the breadth of intellectual outlook which caused his enemies to call him an atheist, coupled with an actual sincerity of belief; boundless energy, daring, ambition. His too were the fiery temper and the contemptuous arrogance which made him at one time the best-hated man in England outside a narrow circle of devoted admirers; while for all his pride he could match Hatton ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... I here describe simply a new variety of moralist, differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps especially including, those to which, in moments of aesthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal and resigned ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... have bearing on Holbach's early manhood. They reveal a certain sympathy and feeling—rather gushing to be sure—quite unlike anything in his later writings, and quite out of line with the supposedly cold temper of a materialist and an atheist. ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... ill of Young's morality in the early part of his life may perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Atheist have therefore no pretence to cheerfulness, and would act very unreasonably should they endeavour after it. It is impossible for any one to live in good-humour and enjoy his present existence, who is apprehensive either of torment or of annihilation—of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkies of the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that he is an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster-Hall, downwards through poor seven-feet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... man. Bringing his life into the "light of the glory of God which shines from the face of Jesus Christ," we are compelled to pronounce it a miserable failure. We do not find either Christian faith or Christian morality in it. As to faith, he had none; for he was an atheist, and gloried in his disbelief of all revealed truth. As to morality, his biographer informs us that he was an unchaste, profane, passionate, arbitrary, ungenerous, unloving man. His apparent philanthropy was so veined with selfishness that it was rarely ever exhibited except ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... native land and without any prospects for the future, he was brought to a profound religious crisis. With almost incredible fortitude he succeeded in fighting his way through this difficult period, with the remarkable result that the former Bohemian, atheist, and scoffer was gradually able to emerge with the firm assurance of a prophet, and even enter a new creative period, perhaps mightier than before. One cannot help reflecting that a man capable of overcoming a crisis of such a formidable character and of several years' duration, as ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... With odious atheist names[123] you load your foes; Your liberal clergy why did I expose? It never fails in charities like those. In climes where true religion is profess'd, That imputation were no laughing jest. But imprimatur,[124] with a chaplain's name, Is here sufficient licence to defame. What wonder ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... you mean? Could you for a moment suppose me to be an atheist? Surely you have not become a student of German Neology?" And Mr. Arnold smiled ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... struggle," she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, "between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an atheist people." ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... in reference to religion and to the whole religious question; while a great many of the much-read works of belle lettres never tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than those taken by them in reference to the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar, they diligently practiced the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods, and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robe. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume, ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... Let the most obstinate unbeliever attend but a few times by the bedside of a dying Catholic, and observe the piety and faith of the priest and people around the bed of the "soul departing;" and if he be not an atheist or a blasphemer of God's providence, it is impossible for him not to perceive the superiority of the Catholic religion to all other forms of worship that ever existed. But to be present at the death hour of a Christian is a privilege which Protestants and ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... crudits, but I abstained from quoting him. Mohl went on to tell me a story of a newspaper that had been about to be established, called Le Democrat. The shareholders met, when it appeared that one party wished to make it a Roman Catholic, and the other an atheist organ. Whereupon the existence of God was put to the vote and carried by a majority of one, at which the atheist party were so disgusted that they seceded in ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... a love mighty as every other passion of his soul failed him, his grief, ungovernable and frenzied as his rage, overwhelmed him, and the "taint of madness which ran in his line," flooded his brain. But when the atheist became a Christian; when, in his own words, he felt "the Spirit of God was not the chimera of heated brains, nor a device of artful men to frighten and cajole the credulous, but an existence to be felt and understood as the whisperings of one's own heart;" his prayer ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... that there is in blasphemy a certain outlet which solaces the burdened heart. When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a source of much dispute. Jefferson states "that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets, and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did," and Morris, it is scarcely necessary to state, was an atheist. The same authority quotes Rush, to the effect that "when the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation, that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... gay, boisterous; lovers of women and of wine, of no outward sanctity or gravity. Charles was a ruler after the Italian fashion; grave, demure, of a solemn carriage, and a sober diet; as constant at prayers as a priest, as heedless of oaths as an atheist." ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Religion: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Muslim ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... brethren, this hypocrisy is the curse and danger of our age. The Atheist, no longer an execration, an astonishment, a curse, and a reproach, poses now as the friend of man and the champion of right. Those who incur the last and most terrible curse in this book, do so in the name of that truth for which they profess to be seeking. Art, profanely veiling its ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... can do nothing for me. You are a Spaniard, I am a Frenchman; you believe in the commandments of the Church, I am an atheist." ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... greater number of philosophical reasonings displayed upon any subject than those which prove the existence of Deity, and refute the fallacies of Atheists, and yet the most religious philosophers still dispute whether any man can be so blinded as to be a speculative Atheist;' 'how (continues he) shall we reconcile these contradictions? The Knight-errants who wandered about to clear the world of dragons and of giants, never entertained the least doubt with regard to the existence of ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations except the last. The ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... fervent prayer, but from her rosy youth, So full of life, to gray old age's time, Prays on with faith half ignorant, half sublime. Yes, commonplace! But if I spoil this common faith, when all is done Can deist, pantheist or atheist invent a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... moral than Jeremiah, Ruskin is superior to Isaiah; Ingersoll, the Atheist, is a nobler moralist and a better man than Moses; Plato and Marcus Aurelius are wiser than Solomon; Sir Thomas More, Herbert Spencer, Thoreau, Matthew Arnold, and Emerson are worth more to us ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... had the impression that poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don't always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can't allow ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... life by the very constitution of the realm must not be sacrificed to mere probabilities or presumptions; then he showed the untrustworthiness of his accusers, how one had confessed himself a murderer, and how another was an atheist. Then he ended with a word or two ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... and, directly, with that Power's only active representative on earth, with death. It was well said of him that he had no beliefs, for he knew of no intermediate position between total suspension of judgment, and the certainty of direct knowledge. And it was equally true that he was no atheist, as he had sanctimoniously declared of himself. He admitted the existence of the Power; he claimed the right to assail it, and he grappled with the greatest, the most terrible, the most universal and the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... so good, he would not let Mrs. Jewkes speak ill of me, and scorned to take her odious unwomanly advice. O, what a black heart has this poor wretch! So I need not rail against men so much; for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.—To be sure she must be an atheist!—Do you think ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... Catholicism. The Moslem veto upon intoxicants cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist (who presides at a Licensing Committee, and also at a large dinner), it is absolutely necessary for him, to make a distinction between gin and champagne. The Atheist veto upon all miracles cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist to make a distinction between his wife (who is an aristocrat and consults crystal gazers and star gazers in the West End), and vulgar miracles claimed by gipsies ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... paying all expenses. The Presidente, like most other Brazilians of a certain age, was blase beyond words. Nothing interested him except his family, and life was not worth living. He believed in nothing. He was an atheist because he had not been as successful as he wished in the world, and attributed the fault to God. He cared little about the future of his country. If his country and all his countrymen went to a warmer place than Heaven, he would be glad to see them go that way! As ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of herbs and dry bread, while to me was given ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... but it were much to be wished, that they who value themselves upon that conceited Title were a little better instructed in what it ought to stand for; and that they would not perswade themselves a Man is really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable Sense, meerly by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other Distinction. It may be doubted, with good Reason, whether there ever was in Nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted Generation than the Tribe of Beaux Esprits, at present ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... but what is private conscience but the private reasonings whereby a man convinceth himself? and how shall he call his conviction the truth, since all truth is one, but the testimony of no man's private conscience is the same as another's? Nay, how does thee know that the atheist, whom thee excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself is? Truly, I hear the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will accept the Inner Light, then indeed shall ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... foreign power. She had grown up in the historical castle of Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently furnished by her father. Montessuy made life give all it could yield. An instinctive and powerful atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world and all the desirable things that earth produces. He accumulated pictures by old masters, and precious sculptures. At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... instruments; he warns her that 'deliverance and enlargement shall arise.' He is no fatalist; he believes in man's work, therefore he urges her to let herself be the instrument by which God's work shall be done. He is no atheist; he believes in God's sovereign power and unchangeable faithfulness, therefore he looks without dismay to the possibility of her failure. He knows that if she is idle, all the evil will come on her head, who has been unfaithful, and that in spite of that God's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is necessary to the atheist he invents one, and in a single instant this hopeless skeptic had become a firm believer in the Deity. It seemed for a few moments as if his passions would destroy him by their internal violence; ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly. He called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist. I should have burst out at that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood which he was retailing. Whenever I feebly ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... atoms? You might as well say that Homer's Iliad, or Voltaire's Henriade, is a result of the fortuitous concourse of written characters.' Now for my part, I should be very sorry to use that reasoning to an atheist; the comparison would give him a very easy game to play. According to the laws of the analysis of chances, he would say to me, I ought not to be surprised that a thing comes to pass when it is possible, and the difficulty of the event is compensated by the number of throws. There is ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... I was to include the Conciones ad Populum in my remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime, and I think you could not do better than to turn 'em into verse,—if you have nothing else to do. Allen I am sorry to say is a confirmed Atheist. Stodart, or Stothard, a cold hearted well bred conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several daughters (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something unnatural in such a marriage. How I sympathise with you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Elizabeth), while d'Aubigny got their lands and the key of Scotland, Dumbarton Castle, on the estuary of Clyde. The Kirk, regarding d'Aubigny, now Earl of Lennox, despite his Protestant professions, as a Papist or an atheist, had little joy in Morton, who was denounced in a printed placard as guilty in Darnley's murder: Sir James Balfour could show his signature to the band to slay Darnley, signed by Huntly, Bothwell, Argyll, and Lethington. This was not true. Balfour knew much, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Bonaparte; that he was preaching sedition and rebellion in Christ's name, and was showing to the ignorant laborers a letter, which he had received from Christ, in which it was declared that General Bonaparte was an atheist and a heretic, whom one ought to destroy and drive away ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... "An atheist," said the dogmatic voice of the individual who had given that common-sense view of spiritualism the previous evening, "must be a fool of the most complete type. Because he doubts what men teach of God, is no ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... intellectual and moral nature. From a wise father we learn more than from all our teachers. When a celebrated artist, Benjamin West, was asked "What made him a painter?" his reply was, "It was my mother's kiss." "I should have been an atheist," said a great American statesman, "if it had not been for one recollection, and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers, and caused me on my knees to say, 'Our Father, who art in heaven.'" On the other hand, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... that Cosmo Rugieri, a Florentine, a great atheist and pretended magician, had a secret chamber, where he shut himself up alone, and pricked with a needle a wax image representing the king, after having loaded it with maledictions and devoted it to destruction by horrible enchantments, hoping thus to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... certain amount of movement. As a matter of fact, he does nothing of the kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Britton acquired, that he was called "Sir;" and many persons, unable to believe that a man of that class and of such a business could arrive by natural means to be called "Sir," took him for a magician, an atheist, and a Jesuit. ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... rate: 2.3 children born/woman (1992) Nationality: noun - Chinese (singular and plural); adjective - Chinese Ethnic divisions: Han Chinese 93.3%; Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean, and other nationalities 6.7% Religions: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Muslim 2-3%, Christian 1% (est.) Languages: Standard Chinese (Putonghua) or Mandarin (based on the Beijing dialect); also Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Louis XIV. on one occasion objected to the appointment of a representative on a foreign mission on account of the person being supposed to be a Jansenist; but on its being discovered that the nominee was only an Atheist, the objection was at ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... that he was that rara avis an atheist, and that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... was you asked in whom you put your trust? A. Agreeably to the laws of our ancient institution, no Atheist could be made a Mason; it was, therefore, necessary that I should believe in Deity; otherwise, no oath or ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... exasperates dissension, was present. French Democrats had set up the Goddess of Reason (in private life Mme. Momoro) as an object of worship; American Democrats were accused of making Tom Paine's "Age of Reason" their Bible; "Atheist" and "Infidel" were added to the epithets which the Federalists discharged at their foes. So fierce and so general was the quarrel on this European ground, that a distinguished foreigner, then travelling in this country, said that he saw many French and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... than that the spirit of true religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. "Self," exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... prepared for those who dare venture to dissent from the received opinions of their country or party? And where is the man to be found that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of whimsical, sceptical, or atheist; which he is sure to meet with, who does in the least scruple any of the common opinions? And he will be much more afraid to question those principles, when he shall think them, as most men do, the standards set ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... defender of the Nolan philosopher, went a step further, and declared pantheism itself to be "veiled atheism." Moreover, she says, "So thoroughly does pantheism strike at the root of all idea of God, as taught by theists, that we can scarce think that Bruno was unfairly judged when called atheist by his contemporaries; the conception of the pantheist cannot be called a God in the commonly accepted sense of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... have done it because I doubted if anyone had ever crossed himself for her sake before. It may be that in the other world she will rejoice to think that a sinner like herself has cried to heaven for the salvation of her soul. Why are you laughing? You believe nothing, atheist! And your story was not even correct! If you had listened to what I was saying, you would have heard that I did not only pray for the Comtesse du Barry. I said, 'Oh Lord! give rest to the soul of that ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... various: his parts were quick; and his eloquence was singularly ready and graceful. To sanctity he made no pretensions. Indeed Episcopalians and Presbyterians agreed in regarding him as little better than an atheist. During some months Sir John at Edinburgh affected to condemn the disloyalty of his unhappy parent Sir James; and Sir James at Leyden told his Puritan friends how deeply he lamented the wicked compliances of his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... debaters. To the former he suddenly flashed out: "I know men well, and I tell you that Jesus Christ was not a man"; then he curtly attacks the pretentious doctor by informing him that "aspiring to be an atheist does not make ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... separable and independent, yet auxiliary each to the other. Virtue is conduct in accordance with the right, and we have seen that right and wrong, as moral distinctions, depend not on the Divine nature, will or law,(8) but on the inherent, necessary conditions of being. The atheist cannot escape or disown them. Whatever exists—no matter how it came into being—must needs have its due place, affinities, adaptations, and uses. An intelligent dweller among the things that are, cannot but know something of their fitnesses and ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... puppies are the only bribes you take? You're an atheist, you never go to church, while I at least am a firm believer and go to church every Sunday. You—oh, I know you. When you begin to talk about the Creation it makes my ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... Every one who complained of social inequalities, every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper, who would extol Law, and spread the net of government over the whole of life, and the iconoclastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... for it: Take heed: for you may so long exercise Your scurrilous wit against authority, The Kingdoms Counsels; and make profane Jests, (Which to you (being an atheist) is nothing) Against Religion, that your great maintainers (Unless they would be thought Co-partners with you) Will leave you to the Law: and then, Septimius, Remember ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... having come to the knowledge of the Government that a set of misguided men, the enemies of the throne and of society, known to be in league with the republican, atheist, and anarchist associations of foreign countries, are inciting the people to resist the just laws made by their duly elected Parliament, and sanctioned by their King, thus trying to lead them into outbreaks that would be ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... sects, a belief in a life beyond this world is the only thing that pierces through the walls of our prison-house, and lets hope shine in upon a scene, that would be otherwise bewildered and desolate. The proselytism of the Atheist is, indeed, a dismal mission. That believers, who have each the same heaven in prospect, should invite us to join them on their respective ways to it, is at least a benevolent officiousness,—but that he, who has no prospect or hope himself, should seek for companionship in his road to annihilation, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... if we were to say that a man who bravely and nobly pursued his way in life, doing his duty because it was his duty, and giving no thought as to future reward or punishment, must needs want soul or be an Atheist. ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... deal of the spirit of what went on. Indeed it would be difficult not to understand the Miserere, which I take to be the composition of an atheist. If it ever be a good thing to take such despondency to heart, the Miserere is the right music, and a cathedral a fit scene. So far I am at one with the Catholics:- an odd name for them, after all? But ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that I am an atheist, and that is very true. Now I will make you a proposal and you shall see how serious I mean. I will change myself and believe in God, if you will change yourself and ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... proceed to greater length than speech. But Macer stood firm, nothing daunted by the uproar. One, who signalized himself by the loudness and fierceness of his cries, exclaimed, 'that he was nothing else than an atheist like all the rest of the Christians; they have no gods; they deny the gods of Rome, and they give us ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... 1, after seven months' constant travel and hard work, and on the 17th went to the National Woman's Rights Convention at Philadelphia and gave the report for New York. It was through her determined efforts, overcoming the objection that she was an atheist and declaring that every religion or none should have an equal right on their platform, that Mrs. Rose was made president. She met here for the first time Anna and Adeline Thomson, Sarah Pugh and Mary ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... so great an injury. It must suppose one to be a devil in human shape. Oh, me! now I am speaking of religion, let me ask you is not his name Bagshawe that you say rails on love and women? Because I heard one t'other day speaking of him, and commending his wit, but withal, said he was a perfect atheist. If so, I can allow him to hate us, and love, which, sure, has something of divine in it, since God requires it of us. I am coming into my preaching vein again. What think you, were it not a good way of preferment as the times are? If you'll advise me to it I'll venture. The ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... king.[402] For this reason, the king should always establish rules and restraints for gladdening the hearts of his people. Rules in respect of even very trivial matters are hailed with delight by the people. There are men who think that this world is nothing and the future also is a myth. He that is an atheist of this type, though his heart is agitated by secret fears, should never be trusted. If the robbers of the forest, while observing other virtues, commit depredations in respect only of property, those ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own Church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I make him frequently scourge himself before me. Well, Radicalism does us good service, especially amongst ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... mechanically, whether he would or no. Indeed, they respected him the more that he was their Rector, and could not be removed, and were glad that theirs was no common Vicar like that of Coldingham, dependent on the caprices of others. For, with the exception of two bad characters and one atheist, the whole village, Conservatives or Liberals (there were Liberals now that they were beginning to believe that the ballot was really secret), were believers in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that which no other hand durst do." While at his headquarters in the house of Major Thomas Pate, in Gloucester, a few miles east of West Point, he became ill of dysentery. Bacon's enemies accused him of being an atheist, but in his last hours he called in Mr. Wadding to prepare his mind for death. "He died much dissatisfied in mind," we are told, "inquiring ever and anon after the arrival of the frigates and soldiers from England, and asking if the guards were strong about the house." He died ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... which, it is true, orthodoxy held ready for every belief incorrect according to its standard, was on the contrary undeserved. The deists did not attack Christian revelation, still less belief in God. They considered the atheist bereft of reason, and they by no means esteemed historical revelation superfluous. The end of the latter was to stir the mind to move men to reflection and conversion, to transform morals, and if anyone ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... many kinds of unbelievers: atheists, deists, infidels, heretics, apostates, and schismatics. An atheist is one who denies the existence of God, saying there is no God. A deist is one who says he believes God exists, but denies that God ever revealed any religion. These are also called freethinkers. An infidel properly means one who has never been baptized—one who is not of the ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... terms: the word of God, holy writ, scriptures, the gospel, heaven, sacred writings, heathen, christendom, christianize, papacy, papal see, atheist, high church, church and ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... her bleating Gods. Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd 490 Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... himself; was very careless of his person; and when in his cups as he often was, regarded the honor neither of God nor man in his conversation. Indeed if it were not speaking ill of the dead, one might say that he was a dirty, drunken, blasphemous blackguard. Worse again, he was, I fear, an atheist; for he never attended Mass, and gave His Holiness worse language even than he gave the Queen. I should have mentioned that he was a bitter rebel, and boasted that his grandfather had been out in '98, and his father with ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
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