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More "Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... devotion to the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness—class distinctions ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... providence did 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 ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... controversy in proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was 'an atheist,'[45] freethinkers were 'the first-born sons of Satan,' the Established Church was 'fallen into mortal schism,'[46] Ken, for thinking of reunion, was 'a half-hearted wheedler,'[47] Roman Catholics were 'as gross idolaters as Egyptian worshippers ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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, under ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... as a young man of steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his position in Moonstone, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 nor with ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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 with this bias. He ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... know 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
... were near you, as I yearn to be, as I ought to be, there would be need for this letter. Oh, be sure that He means well by us by what we suffer, and it is when we suffer that He often makes the meaning clearer. You know how that brilliant, witty, true poet Heine, who was an atheist (as much as a man can pretend to be), has made a public profession of a change of opinion which was pathetic to my eyes and heart the other day as I read it. He has joined no church, but simply (to use his own words) has 'returned home to God like ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... 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 beautiful child-like ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself. I have to do business with these Merlinolators. It's all I can do to keep Flora from ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... been driven to seek shelter with 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, was himself involved, but had not ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... 495 Triumphal pomp for liberty confirmed, [W] I paced, a dear companion at my side, The town of Arras, [X] whence with promise high Issued, on delegation to sustain Humanity and right, that Robespierre, 500 He who thereafter, and in how short time! Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew. When the calamity spread far and wide— And this same city, that did then appear To outrun the rest in exultation, groaned 505 Under the vengeance of her cruel son, As Lear reproached the winds—I could almost Have quarrelled with that blameless spectacle For lingering yet ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... in the camp of the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Higher Critic and particularly the Evolutionist, because of this modern David—America's ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... doomed man, and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend to him, but when the case was transferred to me, I naturally became very anxious about his soul. The family with whom he lived were Christians, and from them I learned that he was an avowed atheist, and very antagonistic to anything religious. They had, without asking his consent, invited a Scripture reader to visit him, but in great passion he had ordered him from the room. The vicar of the district had also called, hoping to help him; but he had spit in his face, and refused ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... him with its opprobrium. Assuredly, he was not the man that world painted. It by no means follows that because Shelley did not repeat the ordinary creeds, and even mocked at them, that he believed nothing. Shelley was never in his soul an atheist: it was simply impossible with his nature that he should be; what he did deny and defy was a deity whose worship seemed, as he saw the world, consistent with the reign of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Maggie, bewildered. "Father never minded about dissenters. Our butcher in St. Dreot's was an atheist and—" ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... character Ibn Khallikan remarks (ii. 43), "There were four poets whose works clearly contraried their character. Abu al-Atahiyah wrote pious poems himself being an atheist; Abu Hukayma's verses proved his impotence, yet he was more salacious than a he-goat, Mohammed ibn Hazim praised contentment, yet he was greedier than a dog, and Abu Nowas hymned the joys of sodomy, yet he was more passionate for women ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and ally of Dermod Mac 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, in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages,—the latter of self-denying monasticism in its best ages. The Brahman is like Thomas Aquinas with his dogmas and metaphysics; the Buddhist is more like a mediaeval freethinker, stigmatized as an atheist. The Brahman was so absorbed with his theological speculation that he took no account of the sufferings of humanity; the Buddhist was so absorbed with the miseries of man that the greatest blessing seemed to be entire and endless rest, the cessation of existence itself,—since ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... "No sir. I asked him what was the rule in Shelley's Case, and he told me the rule in Shelley's Case was that when the father was an atheist the Lord Chancellor would appoint ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... at Landless's ear. "Well for those who find that at the 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 ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... 28, when the debates were becoming so bitter that it seemed unlikely that the convention could continue, Doctor Franklin, erroneously supposed by many to be an atheist, made the following solemn and beautiful appeal to their better ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... 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 Christian religion, and they ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder, an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a religion which ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... 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, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... standards acceptable to all? A good churchman, perhaps, whose first thought would be to bring everyone into the saving grace of his religion? Or an atheist, who would take care that no rascally churchman got the upper hand? Can you think of any man who does not have strong opinions on at least one subject? Who does not have one thing that he is a little ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... really did not know what his views were, beyond having a vague notion that he was an Atheist of a rather pronounced type, but that I would go and hear him when ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... 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 God, so as ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... they explained eclipses, and supposed that the 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
... only that," she said. "When he was—all right, he was an atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... naturally suppose that men holding such opinions must be materialists of the grossest type—and, indeed, many of them gloried in the name of materialist and atheist—but such an inference would be erroneous. While denouncing metaphysics, they were themselves metaphysicians in so far as they were constantly juggling with abstract conceptions, and letting themselves be guided in their walk and conversation by a priori deductions; while ridiculing romanticism, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... answer. Great 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
... 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 Life Honorine ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... 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 faith, or even believe in our Lord. It makes one tremble. . . ." The position ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by 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 ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God? If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble, ye idolatries and ye religions! Fall, feeble keystones ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... a witch and a devil the attributes peculiar to the Almighty; yet how few are willing to be found opposing such a torrent, as knowing that in so doing they shall be sure to meet with opposition to the utmost, from the many, both of Magistrates, Ministers, and people; and the name of Sadducee, atheist, and perhaps witch too, cast upon them, most liberally, by men of the highest profession in godliness; and, if not so learned as some of themselves, then accounted only fit to be trampled on, and their arguments (though both rational and ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... The only atheist is one Who hears no Voice in wind or sun, Believer in some primal curse, Deaf in God's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... 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
... poem I was cursed for writing! When it came out no word was bad enough for me! I was a blackguard, a ruffian and an atheist! You will live to have as great a contempt for literary critics and the public as ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... governed by the laws of nature, without rising up in our thoughts to the efficient cause and superior reason, or, that which is always implied in the term law, viz., a legislator and executive putting in force, is to play the Atheist and take things by halves; is to suppose the laws of nature are beings, and imagine fabulous divinities in ignoring or setting aside the Christian's God, who is the source of all the laws of nature, and who governs all things according to them. "The laws of nature are the art of God." ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... passages which can give us a clear comprehension of Leonardo's ideas of the world at large. It is scarcely necessary to observe that there is absolutely nothing in them to lead to the inference that he was an atheist. His views of nature and its laws are no doubt very unlike those of his contemporaries, and have a much closer affinity to those which find general acceptance at the present day. On the other hand, it is obvious ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... whey and buttermilk of literature must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire's death is merely what we might expect ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Queen Catharine was concerned (and the same is true of some of her advisers), it is admitted by all that no zeal for religion controlled her conduct. A dissolute and ambitious woman, and, moreover, almost an avowed atheist, she could not have acted from a sincere but mistaken belief that it was her duty to exterminate heresy. But among the inferior agents it can scarcely be doubted that there were some who believed themselves to be doing God service in ridding the world of the enemies ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... being divided into 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 hare, the fox, the red deer, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... enemies." What did the preacher know about it? He called to mind the look on his mother's face, the agony of her voice; he realised the bitter years she had spent in silence and misery, and remembered who was responsible for it all. Thus Paul became a kind of atheist. He was not yet old enough to think deeply about it, but incipient unbelief was in the boy's mind and heart. It darkened his thoughts and gave a sombre hue to life. In any case he was not going to trouble about religion. He remembered the vow he had made after he had left his mother, and ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... 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
... tortures of the 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 been ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... was general at that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, affirmed his belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what things ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... 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
... 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. Well, Radicalism does us good service, especially amongst the lower classes, for Radicalism ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... wont to 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 conversation that she did not get credit ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called "Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... conspiring to establish Popery, to dethrone the King, and to put the crown on the head of Arabella Stewart. Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, led the accusation, and disgraced himself by heaping on Raleigh's head every foul epithet, calling him 'viper,' 'damnable atheist,' 'monster,' 'traitor,' 'spider of hell,' &c., and by his violence, although to his own surprise, as he never expected to gain his cause in full, he browbeat the jury to bring in a verdict of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that anticipate and sum up ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... 'infidels' the last forty years. These 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
... Obdurest Atheist among men would seriously and in good earnest consider that relation, and ponder all the circumstances thereof, he would presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing a story less considerable, 'I believe ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Frenchman, a retired teacher of his native language, who had somehow heard of the insult offered to his great countryman, and a copy of the contradiction had been sent to Mr. Broad. He was content with observing that its author was a Frenchman, and therefore probably an atheist, "with no consciousness of moral obligation." Voltaire's diabolic disappearance continued, therefore, to be one of Mr. Broad's most striking effects.)—This was a subject of great delicacy. They knew how ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... October 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 Grew, and was the guest of James and Lucretia Mott, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... 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 is ungodly. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... 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 of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... unbelief, disbelief; incredulity, incredulousness &c adj.^; want of faith, want of belief; 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^, theophobist^. V. be irreligious &c adj.; disbelieve, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Augusta. Scott, the under-preceptor, put in by Lord Bolingbroke, and of no very orthodox odour, was another complaint. Cresset, the link of the connexion, has dealt in no very civil epithets, for besides calling Lord Harcourt a groom, he qualified the Bishop with bastard and atheist,' particularly to one of the Princess's chaplains, who, begged to be excused from hearing such language against a prelate of the church, and not prevailing, has drawn up a narrative, sent it to the Bishop, and offered to swear ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... begins: "Moons wander round the earth, earths round suns, the whole host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou.'' In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of God, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, unassailable true propositions: the moon goes round about the earth, the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Nor can this 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
... By so many risks attended. But I think you both are wrong, Since in this case, having heard that The affliction this man suffers Christian sorcery hath effected Through abhorrence of our gods, By that atheist sect detested, Neither of these feelings should Be your motive to attempt it. I then, who, for this time only Will believe these waves that tell me— These bright fountains—that the beauty Which so oft they have ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the divine sovereignty. Chapter VI. The 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 ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... i. 62-79, actually speaks of the great atheist in language taken from the Saviour Religions (see ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one has said, "called ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... 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
... to circulate during his lifetime, and naturally increased in virulence and volume after his death. At that period in human history, it was popularly recognized that nothing good could be true, and nothing vile could be false of an atheist—which was what Spinoza, of course, was reputed to be. Oldenburg even, for years unflaggingly profuse in expressions of devoted friendship and humble discipleship, an eager and fearless advocate ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... out his hands, in the once practised and now natural foreign gesture. "I'm not an atheist. Of course I believe in God, and I thank Him for all ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... loud hymns, Chanted by kneeling multitudes, the wind Shrieks in the solitary aisles. When he Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all The laws that God or man has made, and round Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,— Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven, And celebrates his shame in open day, Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt'st off The horrible example. Touched by thine, The extortioner's hard hand foregoes the gold Wrung from the o'er-worn poor. The perjurer, Whose ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the most violent and prevailed, and made me apprehensive that they 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 ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... Whatever may be thought of particular faiths and 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... it, has been making in this neighbourhood. It is quite dreadful. Everybody, down to the poorest, claiming a right to think for himself, and set his betters right! There's one worse than any of the rest—but he's no better than an atheist—a carpenter of the name of Weir, always talking to his neighbours against the proprietors and the magistrates, and the clergy too, Mr Walton, and the game-laws; and what not? And if you once show ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... most of these regrets are foolish, and quite on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The Atheist and the Acorn,— ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... pitiless rites have floated with man's blood The skull-pil'd Temple, not for this shall wrath Thunder against you from the Holy One! But (whether ye th' unclimbing Bigot mock With secondary Gods, or if more pleas'd Ye petrify th' imbrothell'd Atheist's heart, The Atheist your worst slave) I o'er some plain Peopled with Death, and to the silent Sun Steaming with tyrant-murder'd multitudes; Or where mid groans and shrieks loud-laughing TRADE More hideous packs his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the Hindoos, who was a notorious atheist, and a contemner of all diety, and who boasted that he knew of no God except the king, and neither believed nor feared any other, happened one day to sit dallying among his women, when one of them plucked a hair from his breast, which hair being fast-rooted, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... the great wheels 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to use the modern phrase, between science and religion, was thus developed early in ancient Greece; and by the fifth century it is clear that it had become acute. The philosopher Anaxagoras was driven from Athens as an atheist; the same charge, absurdly enough, was one of the counts in the indictment of Socrates; and the physical speculations of the time are a favourite butt of that champion of orthodoxy, Aristophanes. To follow up these speculations ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... busy-looking active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, I learned afterwards.) ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... lands: it may be questioned if there are really any such beings. Hume, known as a famous sceptic, is reported to have said to Ferguson, as together they looked up into the starry sky: "Adam, there is a God." Voltaire, the atheist, prayed to God in a thunderstorm. Ingersoll, when charged with being an atheist, indignantly refuted the charge, saying: "I am not an atheist; I do not say that there is no God; I am an agnostic; I ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the face had instantly vanished. "I tell you there is nothing in it," he cried, with ringing violence. "There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist." Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful concentration. "This business is perfectly natural. There is no ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... religion would have a divine, or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained, therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true. The atheist, or non-theist, of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the 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, and a judge; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... quite an atheist," said her teacher, with a deprecatory smile and gesture. "Life, nature, the universe, with their teeming and ever-unfolding wonders tell me that there is a Force—a controlling power and intelligence behind them. We call that force 'God.' We say that God is omnipotent, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... 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 God, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... not so much against social institutions themselves that Shelley revolted as against their abuses, which were still more flagrantly apparent in his time than in ours. When he repudiated Christianity and declared himself an atheist, what he actually had in mind was the perverted parody of religion mainly offered by the Church of his time; and, as some one has observed, when he pronounced for love without marriage it was because of the tragedies that he had seen in marriages without love. Much must be ascribed ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you "a damned Atheist" in the post-office at Pisa. He finds that you had "a little turned-up nose," a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose, you were ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy," and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and only a few ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... human nature which enables the heart of man, under similar circumstances, to bear the occurrence of such a scene as we have described, unmoved. The man was hardened—an infidel, an atheist; but, notwithstanding all this, a sense of awe, wonder, and even, in some degree, of terror, came over his heart, which nearly unnerved him. Most atheists, however, are utter profligates, as he was; or silly philosophers, who, because they take their own reason for their guide, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and 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 the way ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... eyes of the beholder, excited general enthusiasm. Imitation is a proof and consequence of it; and many an orthodox believer, who trembled in private, ridiculed religion in public, because he had heard that the king was an atheist; and many a gallant soldier, who hated the sight and smell of snuff, disfigured his nose and lip with rappee, because such was the royal fashion. As a general, he was looked upon as the first of his time. The feeble moment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... 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
... most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and, in a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him proof of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him. [The law with respect to oaths ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... wholly with the Atheists; for the Atheists do not say that God does not exist, or that God cannot exist, but that we cannot know that he exists. So says Mr. Holyoake, a leading modern Atheist. This is what Mansel also asserts, only he goes farther than they, contending that the very idea of God is impossible to the human reason. It is true that he believes in God on grounds of revelation, which the Atheists do not; but he agrees with them ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... "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 reason for doubting ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... 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
... reason, good sense], neither the whirling wheele of Fortune can chaunge neither the deceitful cavilling of worldlings separate, neither sickenesse abate, neither age abolish." Then follows a dialogue between Euphues and an atheist,[89] in which I need not say the latter is utterly routed; and the book ends with a collection of letters[90] between Euphues and various people who ask and get his advice on their ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... house! You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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
... found Livingstone I cared no more for missions than the veriest atheist in England. I had been a press reporter, and my business was to follow armies and to describe battles; to attend conventions and report speeches, but my heart had not been touched with sympathy for missions. ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... and, if that fails, turn atheist! We might fall foul of the four Gospels, get our book burned by the hangman, and then it would sell ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... spoken word, but silent as to the mental 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 ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... 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
... Some Atheist or vile Infidell in loue, When I doe speake of thy diuinitie, May blaspheme thus, and say I flatter thee, And onely write my skill in verse to proue. See myracles, ye vnbeleeuing! see A dumbe-born Muse made to expresse the mind, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... 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 so prevailing in this Island. Their Pretension to be Free-thinkers, is no other than ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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. The ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... ever heard," Chris smiled. "It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, 'Foh a fack, Mis' Martin, you jis' tawk like a house afire; but you ain't got de show I has.' 'How's that?' Martin asked. 'Well, you see, Mis' Martin, you has one ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Henry. Oxford'll make a snivellin' parson out of you, an' Cambridge'll turn you into a snivellin' atheist. I know them places well, Henry. I'm acquainted with people from both of them. All the Belfast mill-owners send their sons there, so's they can be made into imitation Englishmen. An' I tell you there's no differs between ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Atheist in his garden stood, At twilight's pensive hour, His little daughter by his side, ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... choice of which I was not responsible, made me 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 ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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
... that famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, entered the House of Commons, it is said that a fellow member approached him with the remark, "Good God, Bradlaugh, what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" Bradlaugh's ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... Montaigne the traditional deism of the pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... fancied she had nearly come to the conclusion that, if only she could do it pleasantly, without pain or fear, the best thing would be to swallow something and fall asleep; for like most people she was practically an atheist, and therefore always thought of death as the refuge from the ills of life. But although she was often very uncomfortable, Florimel knew nothing of such genuine downright misery as drives some people to what can be no more to their purpose than if a man should strip himself naked ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789. Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Imagine an atheist with a religion more attractive than religion itself; a republican full of politeness and interest for kings; a gentleman of the privileged classes tender and solicitous for the people, endowed with the most startling eloquence, attacking all the ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the Atheist that puzzles one so much as those who find it convenient to admit the one point to start from—"There is a God," be He styled in redundant reverence, "Nature," "Providence," or "Heaven." The vacuity behind that is too dark and abysmal to be a home for their soul, and therefore they will ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the world; he said so to me. Beauchamp's for rigging out a yacht to give him a 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. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and avarice have stained the virtues or the reputation of Tribonian. In a bigoted and persecuting court the principal minister was accused of a secret aversion to the Christian faith, and was supposed to entertain the sentiments of an atheist and a pagan, which have been imputed, inconsistently enough, to the last philosophers of Greece. His avarice was more clearly proved and more sensibly felt. If he were swayed by gifts in the administration of justice, the example of Bacon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... 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
... development, it necessarily outgrows its ancient ideas of God, which were only temporary and provisional. A man who has a higher conception of God than those about him, and who denies that their conception is God, is very likely to be called an Atheist by men who are really far less believers in a God than he. Thus the Christians, who said the Heathen idols were no Gods, were accounted Atheists by the People, and accordingly put to death; and Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as an unbelieving blasphemer, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... acting. Since then I have been attended by continued success, which I cannot but ascribe to my virtuous resolve to face poverty and distress rather than profit a moment longer by the beneficence of an atheist. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a good deal of Zaluski's character, because my own existence and growth pointed out what he was not. Still, to study a man by a process of negation is tedious, and though I knew that he was not a Nihilist, or a free-lover, or an atheist, or an unprincipled fellow with a dangerous temper, yet I was curious to see him as he ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... concerned in that about which he was employed. So that he was very far from being an hypocrite, 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 that under the Reformation all men took ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... denied some power greater than ourselves; that because he never tried to define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within the corners of a phrase, therefore his creed was materialistic. We do not say of Newton that he was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity he did not go further and define to us in equations Him who made gravity; and as we understand more of the Buddha, as we search into life and consider his teaching, as ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... hypostasis of which on both sides, was 'Nature,' or 'the Universe': that both agreed in the order of the existing system, but the one supposed it from eternity, the other as having begun in time. And when the atheist descanted on the unceasing motion and circulation of matter through the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, never resting, never annihilated, always changing form, and under all forms gifted with the power ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... said to the Count de Moustier but one hour ago. But I did not speak to him of the Almighty, because he is an atheist. Yet if we were prudent and merciful it was because we are religious. When men are irreligious, the Lord forsakes them; and if bloodshed and bankruptcy follow it is not to be ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... is a spacious place for him who's gold, to spend, But for the poor it is the house of suffering without end: I wander idly through its streets, as lost us if I were A Koran in an atheist's house, which hath no welcome there.' 'A sigh, a sigh for Bagdad, a sigh for Irak's land! For all its lovely peacocks, and the splendors they expand: They walk beside the Tigris, and the looks they turn on me Shine o'er ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Daniel Massinger Lord Byron and H. Walpole's ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... macrocosm, and that light and darkness are the two great principles of existence, the one of animate, the other of inanimate nature. He held that soul and life are every day shed from the sun upon all objects open to his beams. For such doctrines as these he was denounced as practically an atheist! Fortunately the times have changed, though we have still much to learn in the way of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... had spoken. My position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain is peculiar, but good, according to my opinion. I have enough family ties to be sustained by several should I be attacked by many, and this is the essential point. It is true that, thanks to my works, I am regarded as an atheist and a Jacobin; aside from these two little defects, they think well enough of me. Besides, it is a notorious fact that I have rejected several offers from the present government, and refused last year the 'croix d'honneur'; this makes amends and washes away half my sins. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... When the Holy Father gave his blessing from his window, and more especially at his audiences in the gallery of the Louvre, which were always crowded, precautions were taken against any outbreak of the indiscretion or levity to which the French are prone. We saw the atheist Lalande himself fall at the Pontiff's feet and kiss his slipper. In the public buildings which the Pope honored with his presence he was received as a sovereign. No one dared to betray more curiosity than piety; and it often happened to me to ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... exposition of the principles of that famous atheist will be sufficient for the present purpose, and that without entering farther into these gloomy and obscure regions, I shall be able to shew, that this hideous hypothesis is almost the same with that of the immateriality of the soul, which has become so popular. To make this evident, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... in order to hasten that event. "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 ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God: though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... of his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical or revolutionary spirit and all its works. From the early days when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he denounced Condorcet as a fanatical atheist, with "every disposition to the lowest as well as the highest and most determined villainies," he invariably suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious, high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny into the foundations of morals, of religion, of social order. To ...
— Burke • John Morley
... man was Tom Hankin, shoemaker. A man of strong contrasts was Tom; an octogenarian when I first knew him, and an atheist, as he proudly boasted, "all his life." My last interview with him took place a few days before his death, when he knew that he was hovering on the brink of the grave; and it was then that Hankin offered me his complete argument for the non-existence ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... sixteenth century, wrote a small tract, which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of infant damnation, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Caelius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise De Amplitudine beati Regni Dei, to prove that Heaven has more inhabitants than Hell,—or, in his own phrase, that the elect are more numerous than the reprobate. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... plans providence did 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 ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... host, taking up the cup, with a smile, drank a health to hereafter; adding, "He was for something present."—"Why," says Adams very gravely, "do not you believe another world?" To which the host answered, "Yes; he was no atheist."—"And you believe you have an immortal soul?" cries Adams. He answered, "God forbid he should not."—"And heaven and hell?" said the parson. The host then bid him "not to profane; for those were things not to be mentioned nor thought ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 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
... superior man. He says the schools invented by the genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist, he is ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... examining. They are very easily examined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other. These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great men of science, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Suppose an atheist, playing the part of a bigot, should be in power again in that country, do you believe that he would faithfully and religiously administer the trust of appointing pastors to a church which, wanting every other support, stands in tenfold need of ministers who will be dear to the people committed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... about it. I have done wrong as against my fellows, but worse than that, I have sinned against God. The notion of sin implies the notion of God. Sin is wilful transgression of the law of God. An atheist can have no conception of sin. But bring God into human affairs, and men's faults immediately assume the darker tint, and become men's sins. Therefore the need of prayer if these evils are to be blotted out. If I had done crime ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 degree. In fact, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... 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
... hectored out of everything. For this the Duke of York, who all say hath been very strong for his father-in-law at this trial, hath turned him away: and every body, I think, is glad of it; for he was a pestilent rogue, an atheist, that would have sold his King and country for 6d. almost, so covetous and wicked a rogue he is, by all men's report. But one observed to me, that there never was the occasion of men's holding their tongues ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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 soul to ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... some indication that displeased him. "You are above these weaknesses; but what would you have? I am neither philosopher nor physician. I believe in God; I am of the religion of my fathers; every one cannot be an atheist who pleases." Then turning to the priest—"I was born in the Catholic religion. I wish to fulfil the duties which it imposes, and to receive the succour which it administers. You will say mass every day in the adjoining ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... adamant! Heaven made thee wiser than thy fellows, gave thee eyes to look into the secrets of nature, a sagacious heart, and a skilful hand; but thy pride has poisoned all these fair gifts, and made an ungodly atheist of one who might ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the atheist. "Divinities are senseless, useless, barriers to progress and ambition, a curse to man. Gods, ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... 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 so prevailing in this Island. Their Pretension ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... have a strange power to impose on weak understandings. If, when you were in Egypt, you had laughed at the worship of an onion, the priests would have called you an atheist, and the people would have stoned you. But I presume that, to have the honour of being initiated into the mysteries of that reverend hierarchy, you bowed as low to it as any of their devout disciples. Unfortunately my neck was not so pliant, and therefore I ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... have stained the virtue or the reputation of Tribonian. In a bigoted and persecuting court, the principal minister was accused of a secret aversion to the Christian faith, and was supposed to entertain the sentiments of an Atheist and a Pagan, which have been imputed, inconsistently enough, to the last philosophers of Greece. His avarice was more clearly proved and more sensibly felt. If he were swayed by gifts in the administration of justice, the example of Bacon will again occur; nor can the merit of Tribonian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... equally active, but more wise. He owns his belles-lettres books have given no great profits; in my opinion he must have lost even by some. But he makes a fortune by juvenile and useful compilations. You know I always told you he wanted literary taste—like an atheist, who is usually a disappointed man, he thinks all belles lettres are nonsense, and denies the existence of taste; but it exists! and I flatter myself you will profit under that divinity. I have much to say on this subject and ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Emperor. The one set of men had never heard of the bayonet, and the other set had faith in nothing but the bayonet, believing it to be as "holy" as M. Michelet asserts it to be. The pikemen were the most pious of men, and could have eaten an Atheist with relish, after having roasted him. The grenadiers were Atheists, and cared no more for Christianity than for Mahometanism, their chief having testified his regard for the latter, and consequently his contempt for both, only the year before, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... 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 of Galileo so alarmed him, that he well-nigh renounced the pursuits ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Newton was no atheist. None better than he knew the mysterious character of his law. That it has worked from all eternity "directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance" he knew and told his fellow-creatures. That is all he knew and all that any man ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just his—that ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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
... hard were they upon her that she fancied she had nearly come to the conclusion that, if only she could do it pleasantly, without pain or fear, the best thing would be to swallow something and fall asleep; for like most people she was practically an atheist, and therefore always thought of death as the refuge from the ills of life. But although she was often very uncomfortable, Florimel knew nothing of such genuine downright misery as drives some people to what can be no more to their purpose than if a man should strip himself naked because ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... senses. A 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 he is ignorant who is an atheist. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... same; for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates, in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... order nothing but ravages and destruction can prevail. To ensure the government of the masses, it was indispensable that morality, religion, and belief should be established—and, to affect the multitude, that religion should be clothed in external forms. "My friend," said Voltaire, to the atheist Damilaville, "after you have supped on well-dressed partridges, drunk your sparkling champaigne, and slept on cushions of down in the arms of your mistress, I have no fear of you, though you do not believe in God.—-But if you are perishing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... inculcated the most 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 any good." ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Bolingbroke, and of no very orthodox odour, was another complaint. Cresset, the link of the connexion, has dealt in no very civil epithets, for besides calling Lord Harcourt a groom, he qualified the Bishop with bastard and atheist,' particularly to one of the Princess's chaplains, who, begged to be excused from hearing such language against a prelate of the church, and not prevailing, has drawn up a narrative, sent it to the Bishop, and offered to swear to it. For Lord Harcourt, besides being ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the face of the world, while all Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations left no mark on history. And so it was, not with his republican ardours alone, but with all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced his contemporaries outside his immediate circle; the public only noticed him to execrate the atheist, the fiend, and the monster. He felt that "his name was writ on water," and languished for want of recognition. His life, a lightning-flash across the storm-cloud of the age, was a brief but crowded ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... that he 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
... the opinion of the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these superstitions, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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 ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... America had won the admiration of our country. I myself admired his eloquence, his patriotism, his courage in office as Prime Minister of France; but his dying words rolled like a wintry sea over all nations, "I am lost!" Gambetta was an atheist, a man whose public indignities to womanhood were demonstrated from Paris to Berlin. Gambetta's patriotism for France could never atone for his atheism, and his infamy towards women. His death, in the ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... fist, Nor enter the debate an atheist; But when they say there is a God I ask Why Bartlett, then, is suffered ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... non-praying man as a star outstrips a clod of earth. A non-praying man lives like a beast. "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but this man doth not know, but this man doth not consider;" Isa. i. 3. The prayerless man is therefore of no religion, except he be an Atheist, or an Epicurean. Therefore the non-praying man is numbered among the heathens, and among those that know not God, and is appointed and designed by the sentence of the word to the fearful wrath of God; Psal. lxxix. 6; ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... put it out of his power to be of use to Raoul on some more material point. As between himself and the Frenchman, there existed a remarkable moral discrepancy; for, while he who prided himself on his religious ancestry and pious education had a singularly pliable conscience, Raoul, almost an Atheist in opinion, would have scorned a simple lie when placed in a situation that touched his honor. In the way of warlike artifices, few men were more subtle or loved to practise them oftener than Raoul Yvard; but, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... sorry," replied Blake. "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
... 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 ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... Moissey, the uncompromising atheist and Internationalist, was demonstratively absent, much to the distress of his mother and resentment of his father. His Biblical-looking wife was at the table. So were Elsie and Emil. They were as uncompromising in their atheism as Moissey, but they had consented ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... their proximity to Britain and their threatening aspect, of sufficient importance to excite the alarm and rouse the political antipathies of the Vicar of Stockton upon Tees! Mr. Faber's Antichrist is an "infidel king, wilful king, an atheistical king, a professed atheist," of short duration, and his influence of limited geographical extent. He is not in most of these features the Antichrist of prophecy, whose baleful influence is co-extensive with Christendom, and whose duration is to be 1260 years. Mr. Faber's ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... boy, and laughed 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 vex him ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... great and 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 unhappy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 with this bias. He has found this faith growing up in himself; ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... [With 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 meet ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... 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, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... 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, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... "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 signs of ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... intimate friends was wont to 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 conversation that she ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... you just now 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
... Turned atheist, and burnt the family Bible before his weeping wife and terrified children and gaping servant-girl, Mr. Williams, a Sunday-school teacher, known hitherto only as a mild, respectable man, a teetotaler, and a good parent and husband. He did not take to drinking; but he did ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... miserable house! You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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, then wander ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... realities. I open the first letter of the alphabet; what means this 'Ah,' this 'Alas,' these deep and long-drawn sighs of humanity, which at once encounter me there? And then presently there meet me such words as these, 'Affliction,' 'Agony,' 'Anguish,' 'Assassin,' 'Atheist,' 'Avarice,' and a hundred more—words, you will observe, not laid up in the recesses of the language, to be drawn forth on rare occasions, but many of them such as must be continually on the lips of men. And indeed, in the matter of abundance, it is sad to note how much richer our vocabularies ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... longer the donation was in coming back, the more Mazarin thought that forty millions were worth a little risk, particularly of so hypothetic a thing as the soul. Mazarin, in his character of cardinal and prime minister, was almost an atheist, and quite a materialist. Every time that the door opened, he turned sharply round towards that door, expecting to see the return of his unfortunate donation; then, deceived in his hope, he fell back again with a sigh, and ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... around these. The field was somewhat widely examined and much discussion awakened,—discussion earnest, though courteous. The religious element largely predominated, and great harmony prevailed. True, an atheist attempted to throw in a firebrand by making a cat's paw of the Jew, but wholly failed, not exciting a single remark in reply. A U. S. judge was present, several State judges, a number of governors and ex-governors, lawyers, ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... nor cold, are unduly elated by prosperity, and cast down by adversity; and in either case suffer from unrest, but 'tis their own fault, and perhaps they suffer most in what are called good circumstances. Theodorus, who was surnamed the Atheist, used to say that he held out arguments with his right hand, but his hearers received them with their left; so awkward people frequently take in a clumsy manner the favours of fortune; but men of sense, as bees extract honey from thyme ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... works in night conceal, For 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 could ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 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
... happiness of a class of beings, placed in circumstances where their will is everlastingly defeated by an irresistible power—the abolitionists say, is to prove them destitute of the sympathies of our nature—not human. It is to declare with the Atheist, that man is independent of the goodness of his Creator for his enjoyments—that human happiness calls not for any of the appliances of his bounty—that God's throne is a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Proper Thing, the great inane gods of the ante-bellum heavens, he had never acknowledged and now, though locally their altars remained and their worship persisted, he knew they were forever dead, blown into the dust-bin of the things that were, tossed there in derision by that atheist, the War. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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 assailant, says he is "Socinianized all over." Locke, in his reply, says "there ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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 by gravity alone, are slowly congregating ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... following anecdote. Haydn, meeting 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
... idea? This is now the question. In answering it I shall assume no ground but that which all parties say is true. The Christian, the Deist and Atheist will admit that we have learned all we know, and that we have learned only through the aid of the five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling are the porters of the mind. One or another of these bring to the mind every thought that it receives. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Westminster-abbey, and many others, against the clergy and quality. As for religion, Brown never professed any, and used to say, that he understood the world better than to have the imputation of righteousness laid to his charge: and the world, to be even with him, really thought him an Atheist. But though Brown never made any professions of religion, yet it proceeded more from affectation than conviction. When he came upon his death-bed, he expressed remorse for his past life, and discovered at that period, sentiments which he had never ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... tongue Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction. We triumph'd over these. On the same scaffold Where the last Louis pour'd his guilty blood, Fell Brissot's head, the womb of darksome treasons, And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet, And Hebert's atheist crew, whose maddening hand Hurl'd down the altars of the living God, With all the infidel's intolerance. The last worst traitor triumph'd—triumph'd long, Secured by matchless villany. By turns Defending and deserting each accomplice As interest prompted. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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, that ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... of his life maintain, that he had very orthodox notions concerning the nature of God and of all the moral virtues; notwithstanding the general notion of his being a downright atheist; that he was affable, kind, communicative of what he knew, a good friend, a good relation, charitable to the poor, a lover of justice, and a despiser of money. This last quality is a favourable circumstance in his ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 not ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... succeeded in his tricks. The affairs of this kind-hearted grocer are troubling him. Were we within a yard of that round-shouldered man from the country, we should smell leather; for he works on his bench, and is unmarried. Here comes an atheist who is a joker and stubborn as a mule. There goes a man of no business at all: very probably it is the best occupation he is fitted for, as he has no concentrativeness. The schoolmistress crossing the street is an accomplished teacher, is very sympathetic, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... no the thing I shou'd be, Nor am I even the thing I cou'd be, But twenty times, I rather wou'd be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me Mugwump and went his way. Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... despotism of the Middle Ages,—the latter of self-denying monasticism in its best ages. The Brahman is like Thomas Aquinas with his dogmas and metaphysics; the Buddhist is more like a mediaeval freethinker, stigmatized as an atheist. The Brahman was so absorbed with his theological speculation that he took no account of the sufferings of humanity; the Buddhist was so absorbed with the miseries of man that the greatest blessing seemed to be entire and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... 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 ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... combination is such as the world has not seen." Then, stopping a moment, he said: "One should add that this chief priest who does not believe in the gods, and this god who reviles the gods, fears them in his character of atheist." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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 ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... of course a Hindu. While in drunken moments professing himself an atheist and blaspheming the gods, yet when suffering from illness caused by his excesses he was a prey to superstitious fears and as wax in the hands of his Brahmin priests. Although his territory was small and unimportant, yet the ownership of a Bengal coalfield and the judicious investment by ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... he says is true: 'He that errs in a question of faith, after having used reasonable diligence to be rightly informed, is in no fault at all'; how comes an atheist, or an infidel, a Turk, or a Jew, to be in any fault? Does our author think that no atheist or infidel, no unbelieving Jew or heathen, ever used reasonable diligence to be rightly informed? * * * If you say, he ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not AEsop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... small towns if a woman tries to investigate spiritualism, she is immediately called a spiritualist. If she takes an interest in mesmerism and psychology, she is called visionary. If she takes an interest in the religious discussion of the day, she is called an atheist. If she takes an interest in pathology she is called strong minded, and who does not abhor the so-called strong minded woman. A woman may be essentially womanly and take an interest in all these things. Brain was given to woman for ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... anything else that could be brought against him. They say he is an Atheist. Would that be any use? He gave a lecture on 'Culture as a Creed' about three months ago which made some folk mad. The other professors are Christians, and, of course, all the preachers took it up. He compared Buddha with Christ, and said—oh, I remember!—that Shakespeare was the Old Testament ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... page 115.) Yet the general experience of Eton must have been painful; and it is sad to read of this gentle and pure spirit being goaded by his coarser comrades into fury, or coaxed to curse his father and the king for their amusement. It may be worth mentioning that he was called "the Atheist" at Eton; and though Hogg explains this by saying that "the Atheist" was an official character among the boys, selected from time to time for his defiance of authority, yet it is not improbable that Shelley's avowed opinions may even then have won for him a title which he proudly claimed in after-life. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... waving his stick at Surprise Hill, "is a German. Nobody but a German atheist would have fired on us at breakfast, lunch, and dinner the same Sunday. It got too hot when he put one ten yards from the cook. Anybody else we could have spared; then we ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... bearings, and the harmonies which flow from its all-pervading spirit out into every condition of life, we might, perhaps, say that man could get along well enough without religion. If this world were made up merely of business and pleasure, perhaps the atheist's theory would suffice, and we might feel indifferent whether controlled by plastic matter or intelligent mind. We will admit that happiness, in one sense of the term, does not essentially depend upon religion. Nay, we must admit this proposition. A man may be ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... were sometimes of the most extraordinary kind. There were several abbeys that possessed 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 were preserved ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... That religion held the world. It is true, there were exceptions. There was a small and objectionable race called Jews; there were possibly some Druids in Southern Britain; and here and there was a solitary atheist who represented no one but himself. These few exceptions were the freaks amongst mankind. Apart from them mankind was united in its general beliefs about the gods. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... and philosophers against the teachings 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, two are atheists." The ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... I think he was an Atheist: For no man but an Atheist can do this. I say, it cannot be, but that the man that is such as this Mr. Badman, must be a rank and stinking Atheist; for he that believes that there is either God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, or Death, ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... unfaith, tacit and avowed, of what we are pleased to call the lower classes; the classes who compose the majority of Christ's Congregation; and they are responsible for all the cynicism of the open and active enemies of our faith. It is they who make it possible for the infidel and the atheist to point the finger of scorn at us and say, 'See how these Christians love to do the ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... philosophy avowedly atheist it seems difficult to understand how there can be any doubt that the eternal distinction between right and wrong betokens the presence in this world of men of a supreme power and a supreme mind. "How comes it," let us ask with Emerson, "that the universe ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Francisco. Their hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": "Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, will be heard no more": the Scotsman newspaper writes of him as "probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic glare of his ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... as "atheist" and "infidel"—epithets that do not frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... a-coming to blows.” Morris had merely been declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur. He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit for such work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with the generalization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations.” On another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should have died hereafter”) and I were ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... The Atheist, The Shakers, The Infidel, The Millerites, The Agnostic, The Mormons, The Baptist, The Laurence Oliphant The Methodist, Harrisites, The Catholic, and the other The Grand Lama's people, 115 Christian sects, the The Monarchists, Presbyterian excepted, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had thrown ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... wander round the earth, earths round suns, the whole host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou.'' In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of God, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, unassailable true propositions: ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... every age, in every clime, among all classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed— transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... 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 of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... a very busy-looking active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, I learned afterwards.) ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained, therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true. The atheist, or non-theist, of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... there is in blasphemy a certain discharge of power 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 was a poor wretched creature squirming ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... disagreement what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionist, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... enjoyable and helpful. Afterwards we came back and I had a discussion with two others on Christianity, the work of the Church, Salvation Army, Y.M.C.A., and other such organisations. It was very interesting, for one of them was an out-and-out atheist who was under the impression that Christians were all hypocrites, cranks, ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... than for either 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 ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... interest because they are the only documents we 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
... state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order—in the principles revealed or affirmed by religion—and are inseparable from them. There is no state without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but if there were no God there could be no politics, theological principles are the basis of political principles. The created universe is a dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its parts cohere and are essential to one another. All has ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... 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 most stupendous of Facts, which ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... witchcraft was general at that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, affirmed his belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what things ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... These are the principles I want you to maintain, that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and no creeds—Jew or Christian, Protestant or Catholic, Gentile or Mormon, pagan or atheist. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... my Son with a proper love and fear of God, as the foundation and sole pillar of our temporal and eternal welfare. No false religions, or sects of Atheist, Arian (ArRian), Socinian, or whatever name the poisonous things have, which can so easily corrupt a young mind, are to be even named in his hearing: on the other hand, a proper abhorrence (ABSCHEU) of Papistry, and insight into its baselessness and nonsensicality ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... Innumerabili and the "De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... vengeance? Before the reconstruction, the old rubbish must be cleared away, and Augean stables must be cleansed. He is now at issue with the whole Catholic regime, and the whole Catholic world abuse him. They call him a glutton, a wine-bibber, an adulterer, a scoffer, an atheist, an imp of Satan; and he calls the Pope the scarlet mother of abominations, Antichrist, Babylon. That age is prodigal in offensive epithets; kings and prelates and doctors alike use hard words. They are like angry children and women and pugilists; their vocabulary of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... sight as this. These too are trees of God which are full of sap. These, too, are trees, which God, not man, has planted. Mind, I do not say that I should have said so, if I had not learnt to say so from the Bible. Without the Bible I should have been, I presume, either an idolater or an atheist. And mind, also, that I do not say that the Psalmist learnt to call the cedars trees of God by his own unassisted reason. I believe the very opposite. I believe that no man can see the truth of a thing unless God shews it ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... we can but perceive inexorable necessity in the shape of rigid and unswerving laws, collected in one focus by Pope, and dignified with the name of God; so that the difference betwixt a Deist of the old, and an Atheist of the modern school, is one of mere words—they both commence with an assumption, the Atheist only defining his terms more strictly, the subject-matter in both instances being the same. The only difference being, the one deceives ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... clearly understood that I believe in nothing. I do not even give the nothing I believe a name; or I should be an atheist. I have never had inside my head so much as a hint of heaven and hell. I think it most likely we are worms in the mud; but I happen to be sorry for the other worms under the wheel. And I happen myself to be a sort of worm that turns when he can. If I care nothing for ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... no 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
... convention, whom he frankly informed that since his fortieth year—that is to say, since 1849—he believed nothing, not having been able to find any proof for his belief. During the last years of his life Darwin supported an atheist ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman. Those who did not believe the story of Jonah ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... character in which 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
... example," the minister went on, stimulated by this encouragement, "he's an atheist, pure and simple." A sympathetic shudder went around the table at the word. George alone smiled. "Old Krebs was a free-thinker; I used to get my glasses of him. He was at least a conscientious man, a good workman, which is more than can be said ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... as the present. This work claims the attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its subject. Mr. John Morley writes in sympathy with Voltaire, so far as Voltaire was an enemy of the Christian religion; but in antipathy to him, so far as Voltaire fell short of being an atheist. A similar sympathy, limited by a similar antipathy, is observable in the same author's still more extended monograph on Rousseau. It is only in his two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," that Mr. Morley finds himself able to write without reserve in full moral accord with ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of the divine sovereignty. Chapter VI. The 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. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... acknowledge the being of the Gods. This is not only a weak, but a false, argument; 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 and territories, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... thou arguest like an atheist and a beast, and standest in this full flat against the Son of God (Mark 7:9-13). Must a gift, and a little of the glory of the butterfly, make thee that thou shalt not do for, and honour to, thy father and mother? 'A wise son maketh a glad ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... says 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 scholarism in an ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... 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 every ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... the next man has just lost his wife, his home, and his money, but here in the war he has been driven to prayer and has found God. He has lost everything, but he tells us with a brave smile that he has gained all, and now wishes to prepare for the ministry to preach the Gospel. Next is a young atheist, an illegitimate child, a circus actor, who has now found God and wants to know how to relate his life to Christ. The next man is a jockey, who in the midst of his sins enlisted in order that he might die for others and try to atone ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... 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 ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... secur'd by others fires shall sit. Your Conventicling Miracles out-do All that the Whore of Babylon e'er knew: By wondrous art you make Rogues honest Men, And when you please transform 'em Rogues again. To day a Saint, if he but hang a Papist, Peach a true Protestant, your Saint's turn'd Atheist: And dying Sacraments do less prevail, Than living ones, though took in Lamb's-Wool-Ale. Who wou'd not then be for a Common-weal, To have the Villain covered with his Zeal? A Zeal, who for Convenience can dispense With Plays ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... was exciting the peasants against the French, and especially against 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 ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... before you answer. Not all the stones are thrown by the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Infidel. No, the most cruel stones, the ones that wound most deeply, are thrown from the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself. Money is the god of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God. And when the poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... always insisted that it was a mere question of definition between them, the hypostasis of which on both sides, was 'Nature,' or 'the Universe': that both agreed in the order of the existing system, but the one supposed it from eternity, the other as having begun in time. And when the atheist descanted on the unceasing motion and circulation of matter through the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, never resting, never annihilated, always changing form, and under all forms gifted with ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... with difficulties, and that the whole body of the clergy had taken up the matter against me; but he conjured me to be patient and peaceable, and he would endeavour to devise some plan to satisfy me. Amongst other things, he said 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 ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... directly in contact with those failures and has 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 so ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... in depth and extent of legal learning, was no common man. His knowledge was great and 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 unhappy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 first theist or the first ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... of his struggle upward, while his worldly ambition was aiding by sly insinuations and comparisons the deadly work already begun by the destruction of his dreams, Henri Gerard was nigh being an atheist. But the nature of the man was too finely sensual for this phase to be lasting, and when at length he found himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably sure of their complete fulfilment; when at length he found time to examine spiritual matters ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... expect May to bring me out again, and do think sometimes that I may take C. with me, and run down for two or three days. . . . I am reading the Martineau book, skippingly. . . . It seems that Miss M. was not an atheist, [340] after all. She believed in a First Cause, only denying that it is the God of theology,—which who does not deny?-denying, indeed, with Herbert Spencer, that it is knowable. But if they say that it is not knowable, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... parents; lived from youth all his days in Paris, kept a good table, and entertained all the "Encyclopedie" notabilities at his board; wrote "Systeme de la Nature," and was a materialist in philosophy and an atheist in religion, but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that they have made me, a terror, and a curse to all who call themselves patrician. For daring, remorseless! for brave, cruel! for voluptuous, sensual! for fearless, ruthless! for enterprising, reckless! for ambitious, desperate! for a man, a monster! for a philosopher, an atheist! Ha! ha! ha! ha! I am proud, minion, proud to be that I am—that which thou, Julia, shalt soon ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Religion: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Muslim 2-3%, Christian ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring for free love, and vowing ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... 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 of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the great body of the clergy had taken up the matter against me; he 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... 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 Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the attentive eye of observation, almost eludes my sight; and, losing thus in part my theory of a more perfect state, start not, my friend, if I bring forward an opinion, which at the first glance seems to be levelled against the existence of God! I am not become an Atheist, I assure you, by residing at Paris: yet I begin to fear that vice, or, if you will, evil, is the grand mobile of action, and that, when the passions are justly poized, we become harmless, and in the same ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the author of L'Homme Machine, a most rigorous materialist and atheist, enjoyed Frederick's favour on account of his writings. After his death the King himself delivered a funeral oration over him in the Academy. Voltaire was jealous of him, as he was of everyone who stood in his way, but La Mettrie ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... in his play of "Dr. Faustus," has imperfectly treated a subject which in Shakespeare's hands would have been made into a tragedy sublimer than Lear could he have thrown himself into it with equal earnestness. Marlowe, from the fact that he was a positive atheist, and a brawling one, had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and imagination to the consideration of religious questions, and had resolutely faced facts from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... well, how to irrigate a field? If it be true that secular knowledge, unsanctified by true religion, is a positive evil, all these consequences follow. Yet surely they are consequences from which every sane mind must recoil. It is a great evil, no doubt, that a man should be a heretic or an atheist. But I am quite at a loss to understand how this evil is mitigated by his not knowing that the earth moves round the sun, that by the help of a lever, a small power will lift a great weight, that Virginia is a republic, or that Paris is the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... to secure for me Bandello's Italian Novels at the sale to-morrow. To me they will be nuts. Redde a satire on myself, called 'Anti-Byron,' and told Murray to publish it if he liked. The object of the author is to prove me an atheist and a systematic conspirator against law and government. Some of the verse is good; the prose I don't quite understand. He asserts that my 'deleterious works' have had 'an effect upon civil society, which requires,' &c. &c. &c. and his own poetry. It is a lengthy poem, and a long preface, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... soul, and a superior man. He says the schools invented by the genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist, he is ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... silent as to the mental 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 ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... ignoring the great mass 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 ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... 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 ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... fragile, like Arachne's line: True piety, without cessation toss'd By theories, the practic part is lost, 190 And like a ball bandied 'twixt pride and wit, Rather than yield, both sides the prize will quit: Then whilst his foe each gladiator foils, The atheist looking on enjoys the spoils. Through seas of knowledge we our course advance, Discov'ring still new worlds of ignorance; And these discov'ries make us all confess That sublunary science is but ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... used about it. I have done wrong as against my fellows, but worse than that, I have sinned against God. The notion of sin implies the notion of God. Sin is wilful transgression of the law of God. An atheist can have no conception of sin. But bring God into human affairs, and men's faults immediately assume the darker tint, and become men's sins. Therefore the need of prayer if these evils are to be blotted out. If I had done crime against ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... answers this last 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
... cried the atheist. "Divinities are senseless, useless, barriers to progress and ambition, a curse to man. Gods, ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... appears, was a grievously misunderstood woman, and Heliogabalus a most exemplary monarch; even the dog in the manger may have been a nervous animal in search of rest and quiet. As for Shakespeare, he was an atheist, a syndicate, a lawyer's clerk, an inferior writer, a Puritan, a scholar, a nom de plume, a doctor of medicine, a fool, a poacher, and another man of the same name. Information of this sort crops up on every side. Even the newspapers are infected; truth lurks in the patent-medicine ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... his back toward Zion, and he is coming to meet us. So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them. His name was Atheist, and he asked them whither they were going? We are going to the Mount Zion, they answered. Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter. What is the meaning of your laughter? they asked. I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are to take upon ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... class of beings, placed in circumstances where their will is everlastingly defeated by an irresistible power—the abolitionists say, is to prove them destitute of the sympathies of our nature—not human. It is to declare with the Atheist, that man is independent of the goodness of his Creator for his enjoyments—that human happiness calls not for any of the appliances of his bounty—that God's throne is a nullity, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... system, and especially a strenuous antagonist of marriage, which he taught himself to esteem not only as an unnatural tie, but as eminently unjust towards that softer sex, who had been so long the victims of man; discarding as a mockery the received revelation of the divine will; and, if no longer an atheist, substituting merely for such an outrageous dogma a subtle and shadowy Platonism; doctrines, however, which Herbert at least had acquired by a profound study of the works of their great founder; the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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
... 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, by their friends ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... "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 ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... had shared the doctrines, and who now dreaded the fate of the atheist Hebert, was the painter, Jean Nicot. Mortified and enraged to find that, by the death of his patron, his career was closed; and that, in the zenith of the Revolution for which he had laboured, he was lurking in caves and cellars, more poor, more obscure, more despicable than he had been at the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... enough now, and poor, he that ground the poor!" At once she began to fawn. "But Mr. Sam'll see justice done. You'll speak a word for me to Mr. Sam? He's a professin' Christian, and like as not when this woman shows herself she'll turn out to be some red-hot atheist or Jesuit. To bring the like o' they here was just the dirty trick that old heathen of yours would enjoy. Some blasphemy it must ha' been, or the hand o' God'd never have struck 'en as ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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
... Canton to San Francisco. Their hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": "Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, will be heard no more": the Scotsman newspaper writes of him as "probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic glare of his French Revolution all Epics, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... 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 than all ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... gave judgment. On the very day on which Raleigh was condemned, there began that reaction in his favour which has been proceeding ever since. When the Lord Chief Justice called the noble prisoner a traitor and an atheist, the bystanders, who after all were Englishmen, though they had met prepared to tear Raleigh limb from limb, could bear it no longer, and they hissed the judge, as a little before they had hooted Coke. To complete the strangeness of this ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and died a 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 of Galileo ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 degree. In fact, the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... becoming speechless by the violence of our tears. 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 ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... mixture of extremes. There was no middle class. At the head of it was an emperor, often deified in his lifetime, and separated from even the noblest of the senators by a distance of immeasurable superiority. He, was, in the startling language of Gibbon, at once "a priest, an atheist, and a god." [8] Surrounding his person and forming his court were usually those of the nobility who were the most absolutely degraded by their vices, their flatteries, or their abject subservience. But even these men were not commonly ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... 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
... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... I collapsed physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months—a time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... 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 by the Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... means 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... 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 so prevailing ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... related also 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, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... your religion my son?" inquired the Archbishop of Rheims. "Pardon, monseigneur," replied Rochebriant; "I am ashamed of it." "Then why do you not become an atheist?" "Impossible! I should be ashamed of atheism." "In that case, monsieur, you should ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... years Will prove it true. This music leads us far From all our creeds, except that faith in law. Your quest for knowledge—how it rests on that! How sure the soul is that if truth destroy The temple, in three days the truth will build A nobler temple; and that order reigns In all things. Even your atheist builds his doubt On that strange faith; destroys his heaven and God In absolute faith that his own thought is true To law, God's lanthorn to our stumbling feet; And so, despite himself, he worships God, For where true souls are, there are ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... I was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... which he underwent, when his eye caught some indication that displeased him. "You are above these weaknesses; but what would you have? I am neither philosopher nor physician. I believe in God; I am of the religion of my fathers; every one cannot be an atheist who pleases." Then turning to the priest—"I was born in the Catholic religion. I wish to fulfil the duties which it imposes, and to receive the succour which it administers. You will say mass every day in the adjoining chapel, and you will expose the Holy Sacrament for forty hours. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... utter abandon with which Alexander committed his crimes, we are forced to conclude that he was an atheist and a materialist. There is a time in the life of every philosophic and unhappy soul when all human endeavor seems nothing more than the despairing, purposeless activity of an aggregation of puppets. But in Alexander VI we ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... an Episcopal clergyman of New York told me, the other evening, that General Butler was an Atheist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... limitations of its own, which are easily enough discoverable. The net result of very much conscientious missionary work in America is that the foreigner ceases to believe his traditional faith, refuses allegiance to any American substitute and becomes an infidel agnostic or atheist. The same thing is just as common in the realms of social, ethical and political faith as in ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... other than that Guicciardini invented it. Another story which owes its existence mainly, and its particulars almost entirely, to Guicciardini's libellous pen—the story of the death of Alexander VI, which in its place shall be examined—provoked the righteous anger of Voltaire. Atheist and violent anti-clerical though he was, the story's obvious falseness so revolted him that he penned his formidable indictment in which he branded Guicciardini as a liar who had deceived posterity that he might vent ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness—class distinctions ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... several minutes, in giving the people his blessing. If any Christian of Damascus had expressed his doubts of the truth of this story, the monks of the convent there would have branded him with the epithet of Framasoun (Freemason), which among the Syrian Christians is synonymous with Atheist, and he would for ever have lost his character among ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... was which chiefly pleased the waiter and the muleteers, who were his usual listeners, since they were together on the road. They would laugh and curse him in religious terms for a blasphemer and a wicked atheist, reproofs which he received as high applause. It was his custom to salute his friends with insults, which they took kindly from him, being what he was. They told me in low tones of awe, yet with a chuckle, that he had even ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... themselves—nevertheless shewed a certain disposition to cavil at those who exulted in it; and something approaching to an argument began. At last it was alleged by the most evangelical of the disputants that Charles Bradlaugh, the most formidable atheist on the Secularist platform, had taken out his watch publicly and challenged the Almighty to strike him dead in five minutes if he really existed and disapproved of atheism. The leader of the cavillers, with ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... 1819, at which time he boarded at the Vauquer Pension where he knew Eugene de Rastignac, then studying law, and Goriot and Vautrin. [Father Goriot.] Shortly thereafter, at Hotel Dieu, he became the favored pupil of the surgeon Desplein, whose last days he tended. [The Atheist's Mass.] Nephew of Judge Jean-Jules Popinot and relative of Anselme Popinot, he had dealings with the perfumer Cesar Birotteau, who acknowledged indebtedness to him for a prescription of his famous hazelnut oil, and who ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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 no—far other faith, far ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Sixty the minute; what's to note in that? You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands! Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demirep That loves and saves her soul in new French books— We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway: one step aside, They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line Before your sages,—just the men to shrink From the gross ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhapsody:—"No man of common sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of the earth. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The atheist will say, Wait a little. Some future Darwin will show how the simple forms came necessarily from inorganic matter. This is but another step by which, according to Laplace, "the discoveries of science throw final ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Blake. "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 my ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... inherited distrust was the cause of my dislike for good Brother Hotchkins; for I considered myself freed from racial prejudices, by the same triumph of my infallible judgment which had lifted from me the yoke of credulity. An uncompromising atheist, such as I was at the age of fourteen, was bound to scorn all those who sought to implant religion in their fellow men, and thereby prolong the reign of superstition. Of course that ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... only atheist is one Who hears no Voice in wind or sun, Believer in some primal curse, Deaf in God's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... reflexion of its Creator. This is, to me, one of those great difficulties of this absolute primary truth, to which I referred just now. Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself only; and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... threatening aspect, of sufficient importance to excite the alarm and rouse the political antipathies of the Vicar of Stockton upon Tees! Mr. Faber's Antichrist is an "infidel king, wilful king, an atheistical king, a professed atheist," of short duration, and his influence of limited geographical extent. He is not in most of these features the Antichrist of prophecy, whose baleful influence is co-extensive with Christendom, and whose duration is to be 1260 years. Mr. Faber's erudition is to be respected, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... made an appeal to Scripture as a defense for murdering thirty thousand men, women and children. Mirabeau quotes this from Rousseau in self-defense: "No true believer can be a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law inflicted death on an atheist, I should begin to put it into execution by burning the first man who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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. "Jack Sneaker," on the other hand, is a devoted adherent ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand! Nothing to live for in life—no hope beyond the grave. It plunged me into fits of ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... 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 not how! And ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... been touched in 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... men profuse, 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
... the greatest Parliamentarian of his day? What of Justin Huntly McCarthy, under his puerile mask a most dark, most dangerous conspirator, who, lightly swinging the sacred lamp of burlesque, irradiated with fearful clarity the wrath and sorrow of Ireland? What of Blocker Warton? What of the eloquent atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, pleading at the Bar, striding past the furious Tories to the very Mace, hustled down the stone steps with the broadcloth torn in ribands from his back? Surely such scenes will never more be witnessed at St. Stephen's. Imagine ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... branches 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... birth of two children, a separation followed; and he eloped with Miss Godwin in 1814. His wife committed suicide in 1816; and then the law took away from him the control of his children, on the ground that he was an atheist. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 beautiful ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... true 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 was a poor, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... footsteps; and he was supported by a garrison of two revolutionary regiments, besides a numerous artillery, and a large addition of volunteers, amounting in all to about ten thousand men, forming what was called a revolutionary army. This Chalier, was an apostate priest, an atheist, and a thorough-paced pupil in the school of terror. He had been procureur of the community, and had imposed on the wealthy citizens a tax, which was raised from six to thirty millions of livres. But blood as well as gold was his object. The massacre of a few priests and aristocrats confined in ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... are 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 ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... present. This work claims the attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its subject. Mr. John Morley writes in sympathy with Voltaire, so far as Voltaire was an enemy of the Christian religion; but in antipathy to him, so far as Voltaire fell short of being an atheist. A similar sympathy, limited by a similar antipathy, is observable in the same author's still more extended monograph on Rousseau. It is only in his two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," that Mr. Morley finds himself able to write without reserve in full ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the stage; that the Athenians applauded all that made them laugh; and believed that Jupiter himself laughed with them at the smart sayings of a poet. Mr. Collier[1], an Englishman, in his remarks upon their stage, attempts to prove that Aristophanes was an open atheist. For my part, I am not satisfied with the account either of one or the other, and think it better to venture a new system, of which I have already dropped some hints in this work. The truth is, that the Athenians professed to be great laughers, always ready for ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... the true image of the destroyer of the race. Nor does he belong to the old Greek world and to the Trojan time only; he is among us, and he can be translated into modern terms quite familiar. Polyphemus is an anarchist, an atheist, and a cannibal; the ancient poet wraps the three together in one mighty monstrosity. In the morning the Cyclops devoured two more companions for his breakfast, then drove his flocks afield, leaving the rest ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... 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 ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Desplein The Atheist's Mass Cousin Pons The Thirteen The Government Clerks Pierrette A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Modeste Mignon Scenes ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... pylorus—the physicians of Montpelier prophesied it would be hereditary in our family." He also gave directions to the priest Vignali as to the manner in which he wished his body to be laid out in a chambre ardente (a state-room lighted with torches). "I am neither an atheist," said Napoleon, "nor a rationalist; I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of that church, and receive ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... 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
... 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 ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... attendants, according 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 ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained, therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true. The atheist, or non-theist, of course draws no ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have been blind to its evil side. That, however, is not the case. We see clearly that he committed grave sins, and one cruel crime; but we remember also that he was an Atheist from his boyhood; we reflect how gross must have been the moral neglect in the training of a child who could be an Atheist from his boyhood: and we decline to judge so unhappy a being by the rules which we should apply to a Catholic. It seems to us that ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... 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 ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... sad to read of this gentle and pure spirit being goaded by his coarser comrades into fury, or coaxed to curse his father and the king for their amusement. It may be worth mentioning that he was called "the Atheist" at Eton; and though Hogg explains this by saying that "the Atheist" was an official character among the boys, selected from time to time for his defiance of authority, yet it is not improbable that Shelley's avowed ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Civilisation doctes et 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
... and made them all morally responsible for the sin committed by that pair. It rejected the doctrine that man can modify his own organism as absolutely irreligious, the physician being little better than an atheist, but it affirmed that cures may be effected by the intercession of saints, at the shrines of holy men, and by relics. It altogether repudiated the improvement of man's physical state; to increase his ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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 true believer." ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... further the success of the expedition—I, of course, 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 ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... he struggled to bring and ultimately succeeded in bringing back religious ordinances to France. He declared that no good government could exist for long without it. His traducers proclaimed him an atheist, and we hear the same claptrap from people now who have not made themselves acquainted with the real history of the man and his times. We do not say he was a saint, but he was a better Christian, both in profession and action, than most of the kings that ruled prior to and during his period. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... creative, manfully taking all its risks, not only do we lose the right to claim freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain it with all our strength. For that would be like assigning the service of God to a confirmed atheist. And men, who contemptuously treat their own brothers and sisters as eternal babies, never to be trusted in the most trivial details of their personal life,—coercing them at every step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane leading to nowhere, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... boy, young as he was, was an atheist; and he even reasoned in a logical manner for a mere child ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... images Cumber the weedy courts, and for loud hymns, Chanted by kneeling multitudes, the wind Shrieks in the solitary aisles. When he Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all The laws that God or man has made, and round Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,— Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven, And celebrates his shame in open day, Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt'st off The horrible example. Touched by thine, The extortioner's hard hand foregoes the gold Wrung ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... 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 ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not AEsop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... money, but here in the war he has been driven to prayer and has found God. He has lost everything, but he tells us with a brave smile that he has gained all, and now wishes to prepare for the ministry to preach the Gospel. Next is a young atheist, an illegitimate child, a circus actor, who has now found God and wants to know how to relate his life to Christ. The next man is a jockey, who in the midst of his sins enlisted in order that he might die for others and try to atone for ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... 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
... perfect order and government,—to consider their infinite number and astonishing dimensions,—without acknowledging the fulness of the power of an everlasting God, who created them, set them in their appointed places, and still controls them? Is it possible to be an astronomer and an atheist? Is it possible not to see in their relations to one another and to our own little planet an Almighty Wisdom as well as an Almighty Love? Could any "fortuitous concourse of atoms" have strewed the depths of space with those mighty and beautiful orbs, and defined for each the ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... forever. It punishes and rewards, but has no love in it. It is only dead, cold, hard, cruel, unrelenting law. Yet Buddhists are not atheists, any more than a child who has never heard of God is an atheist. A child is neither deist nor ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... speculation had taken a new form in Franklin, who was already a free-thinker, and by his "indiscreet disputations about religion" had come to be "pointed at with horror by good people as an infidel and atheist"—compromising, even perilous, names to bear in that Puritan village. Various motives thus combined to induce migration. He stole away on board a sloop bound for New York, and after three days arrived there, in October, 1723. He had but ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... disagree together, and kill each other with weapons that burst in our hands. Ah, my lord, with what mind must blessed Oro look down upon this scene! Think you he discriminates between the deist and atheist? Nay; for the Searcher of the cores of all hearts well knoweth that atheists there are none. For in things abstract, men but differ in the sounds that come from their mouths, and not in the wordless thoughts ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... he thus blasphemed My (solar) system went its round, My heart beat on, my head still dreamed,— But my poor atheist was drowned. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... Nor enter the debate an atheist; But when they say there is a God I ask Why Bartlett, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... 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
... the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much amiability and a feeble constitution, who sent to the illustrated journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain. This practitioner, a man with tufted whiskers and eye-glasses, presided over the radical committee of electors, and when the cure took up a little collection among his devotees ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... principles are no more "dragged" here than those of a Christian. For myself, I claim to be a Christian. No man ever heard me speak of Christ or of His doctrines, but with the profoundest reverence. Still, I welcome upon this platform those who differ as far as possible from me. And the Atheist no more "drags" in his Atheism, provided he only shows that Atheism itself demands woman's equality, and is no more out of order than I, when I undertake to show that Christianity preaches one law, one faith, and one line of duty ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... purpose, a fatal bias of scientists and philosophers against the teachings 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, two are atheists." The ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... was not liked. In fact, the schoolmaster having pronounced her an atheist, a kind of stigma attached to her. The cure, who had been consulted by Madame ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny IS THAT WHICH PHILOSOPHERS CALL MATTER or corporeal substance. And in doing of this there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it. The Atheist indeed will want the colour of an empty name to support his impiety; and the Philosophers may possibly find they have lost a great ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... 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
... yet you yourself perceive they are a part of health. Did you remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather for ourselves if we lived in the locality. What a world is this! Though a professed atheist, I delight to bear my testimony to the world. Look at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround our path! The river runs by the garden end, our bath, our fish-pond, our natural system of drainage. There ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... what such a person should be called. Whether revolutionist, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... 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, under the ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... Crusoe island. Then there's the religious difficulty. My Catholicism is the Catholicism of Charlemagne or Dante, qualified by a great deal of modern science and folklore which Father Dempsey would call the ravings of an Atheist. Well, my father's Catholicism is the ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, that faith ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Sweden. The Castle of Rheinsburg, near Neu-Ruppin, was given to the Prince for his residence. He spent happy hours there with famous men of letters in his circle, for he was actually free now to give time to literature and science. He corresponded frequently with Voltaire and became an atheist. He cared nothing for religion when he was king, and was remarkable for the religious toleration which he extended to his subjects. But the harsh treatment of youth had spoilt his pleasant nature, and his want of faith made him unscrupulous and hard-hearted. He grasped at ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... 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. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Paine lay without the pale of toleration. No circle of liberality was constructed wide enough to include him. Even the scouted Unitarian scouted Thomas. He was 'the infamous Paine,' 'the vulgar atheist.' Whenever mentioned in pious discourse it was but to be waved on one side as thus: 'No one of my hearers is likely to be led astray by the scurrilous blasphemies ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Daniel Massinger Lord Byron and H. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the pupils of Metrodidactus, though at one time banished from Cyrene, rose to honour under Soter, and was sent by him as ambassador to Lysimachus, He was called the Atheist by his enemies, and the Divine by his friends, but we cannot now determine which title he best deserved. It was then usual to call those atheists who questioned the existence of the pagan gods; and we must not suppose that ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
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