"Impiety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overwhelming case can be made out for the statement that no nation can prosper or even continue to exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... impiety, loathsome and dread, With a chaos of darkness our Spain overspread, Thou wast the first light which dispell'd with its flames The hell-born obscurity, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of lending their influence to a system fraught with such consequences. The system positively denies the distinction between good and evil. It declares that we can not sin; that we are God, and God can not offend against himself; that sin is all simply an old lie; that impiety, immorality and vice of frightful mien are wedded in eternal decrees, and that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... to indicate, before beginning to prove them in greater detail. I have taken this course, in order, if possible, to gain the attention of those who believe, that the principle that every man is bound to seek what is useful for himself is the foundation of impiety, rather than of piety ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... appertain to our most holy faith, Thank God, we've the original in keeping, We have his hand and seal to it—we - And I shall lead him easily to think How very dangerous for the state it is Not to believe. All civic bonds divide, Like flax fire-touched, where subjects don't believe. Away with foul impiety! ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... them: he mentioned the promise he had made, to devote himself to their service; and the oath he had taken, to propose whatever he thought might facilitate the accomplishment of their father's design, with honour to them and happiness to their people: these motives, which he could not resist without impiety, he hoped would absolve him from presumption; and trusting in the rectitude of his intentions, he ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... 2—Anon., Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the Stage (1704) and anon., Some Thoughts Concerning ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... great Greek philosopher, who, in maintaining truth, incurred the charge of infecting the young men of Athens with impiety, and was put to death by being made to drink hemlock. His life and teaching are known to us through the writings of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the son of Prometheus, and is styled the father of the Greek nation of post-diluvian times. When Jupiter determined to destroy the human race on account of its impiety, it was his first design, OVID tells us, to accomplish it with fire. But his own safety demanded the employment of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... service was concluded, Sir Percivale asked who the aged king might be. Then he was told that it was none other than King Evelake who accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to Britain. And on a certain occasion, the king had approached the Holy Grail nigher than was reverent and, for his impiety, God had punished him with blindness. Thereupon he repented and, entreating God earnestly, had obtained his petition that he should not die until he had seen the spotless knight who should be descended from him in the ninth degree. (This his desire was fulfilled later when Sir Galahad ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... and virtue, we may impress it for that service; and good it were to rescue so worthy a faculty from so vile abuse. It is the right of reason and piety to command that and all other endowments; folly and impiety do only usurp them. Just and fit therefore it is to wrest them out of so bad hands, to revoke them to ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... announced one day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves to the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the Pagans was soon succeeded by resentment; and the most pious of men were exposed to the unjust but dangerous imputation of impiety. Malice and prejudice concurred in representing the Christians as a society of atheists, who, by the most daring attack on the religious constitution of the empire, had merited the severest animadversion of the civil magistrate. They had separated themselves ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... my face, you Jews, and pierce my side, Buffet and scoff, scourge and crucify me, For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he Who could do no iniquity hath died, But by my death cannot be satisfied My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety: They killed once an inglorious man, but I Crucify him daily, being now glorified. O let me then his strange love still admire. Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment; And Jacob came, clothed in vile harsh attire, But to supplant, and with gainful intent: God clothed himself in vile man's flesh, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... threw doubts into some minds. It was asserted, however, that this English-woman was rich, and that she had passed her life in traveling through every country in the world, because her family had thrown her off. Why had her family thrown her off? Because of her natural impiety? ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the hero's reckless defiance is shocking to Greek feeling. As the play goes on, this is subtly and delicately indicated by the attitude of the chorus. They enter overflowing with pity. They are slowly chilled and alienated by the hero's violence and impiety; but they nobly decline, at the last crisis, the mean advice of Hermes to desert Prometheus and save themselves; and in the final crash they share ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... only a consequence of their impiety. God, whom nothing longer withheld, let things take ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... assigned, and man is created from earth and water. The four Ages follow, and in the last of these the Giants aspire to the sovereignty of the heavens; being slain by Jupiter, a new race of men springs up from their blood. These becoming noted for their impiety, Jupiter not only transforms Lycaon into a wolf, but destroys the whole race of men and animals by a Deluge, with the exception of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who, when the waters have abated, renew the human race, by throwing stones behind them. Other ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... irrigate those barren Arabian deserts, &c. cure us of our epidemical diseases, scorbutum, plica, morbus Neapolitanus, &c. end all our idle controversies, cut off our tumultuous desires, inordinate lusts, root out atheism, impiety, heresy, schism and superstition, which now so crucify the world, catechise gross ignorance, purge Italy of luxury and riot, Spain of superstition and jealousy, Germany of drunkenness, all our northern country of gluttony and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... put first, a plural pronoun may sometimes follow without obvious impropriety: as, "So Judah was carried away out of their land."—2 Kings, xxv, 21. "Israel is reproved and threatened for their impiety and idolatry."—Friends' Bible, Hosea, x. "There is the enemy who wait to give us battle."—Murray's Introductory Reader, p. 36. When the idea of plurality predominates in the author's mind, a plural verb is sometimes used before a collective ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... degrees to be a colonel, and though a person of no parts either in body or mind, yet made by Cromwell one of his pageant lords. He was a fellow fit for any mischief, and capable of nothing else; a sordid lump of ignorance and impiety, and therefore the more fit to share in Cromwell's designs, and to act in that horrid murther of his Majesty. Upon the turn of the times, he ran away for fear of Squire Dun [the common hangman], and (by report) is since dead, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... than his fury, he gave license to his vassals to infest the Christian villages; and they did it like a river which overflows its bed, after having rid itself of the embarrassment of its dikes. He was not content with that, but in order to give greater flights to his impiety, he excused it among the neighboring Moros under the name of a religious war; and under that title he invited to it the Borneans, Tidorans, and Joloans, so that confederated with him into one body they might unfurl the banners of the perfidious ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... But I repeated the service and performed the rites only as a matter of business;—I thought only of the food and the clothes that my sacred profession enabled me to gain. And because of this selfish impiety I was reborn, immediately after my death, into the state of a jikininki. Since then I have been obliged to feed upon the corpses of the people who die in this district: every one of them I must devour in the way that you saw last night... Now, reverend Sir, let me beseech you to perform ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... 789,[169] the Seventh General, which cites the words of Justinian given above in one of his laws. The bishops say in their own character—and they are bishops who describe themselves "as sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, that is, of the Arabian impiety"—"It is the priesthood which sanctifies the empire and forms its basis; it is the empire which strengthens and supports the priesthood. Concerning these, a wise king, most blessed among holy princes, said: ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... character out more explicitly and more at length, but even he could not have made her more living or more tragic, or represented more subtly in her relation to Oedipus both the mother's protecting love and the mother's authority. As for her "impiety," of which the old commentaries used to speak with much disapproval, the essential fact in her life is that both her innocence and her happiness have, as she believes, been poisoned by the craft of priests. She and Laius both "believed ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... high mass at the cathedral on the following Sunday. Gerande was in an ecstasy, as if heaven had opened to her view. Old Scholastique could not contain her joy, and at last found irrefutable arguments' against the gossiping tongues which accused her master of impiety. She spoke of it to her neighbours, her friends, her enemies, to those whom she knew not as well as to those ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... liberty they naturally became exasperated and turned against their dastardly oppressors. But from their point of view it was absolutely necessary to find out if the Spaniards were mortal. If they were not, it would be an act of impiety ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... thought of the common man, "To know how to say and do those things that are pleasing to the gods, either in prayers or in offerings, this is piety which brings prosperity to individuals and to states. The reverse is impiety which ruins everything." "It is natural," says Xenophon at the end of his treatise on Cavalry, "that the gods should favor those especially who not only consult them in need, but honor them in the day of prosperity." Religion was first of all a contract; the Greek sought to delight the gods ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... son had been as futile as to make excuses for death; but she tried it. "You'll overlook the partiality of a mother, Miss Percival? What am I to do? It's not that I want him to lap syrup from a spoon—far from that. Idleness leads to impiety, and impiety anywhere, from Tattersal's to the public, we all know. But think of what stings me. I can't abide the thought that here am I, large Mrs. Benson, with money to spare, turning my back upon my fatherless child. Yet nothing short of ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... God does hear and see And understand every impiety; Though it in dark recess or thought ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... neck of her remorse and returning fondness, that wish treading almost on the brink of impiety, but still held back by the strength of her devotion to her lord, that 'father, mother, nay, or both were dead', rather than Romeo banished. If she requires any other excuse, it is in the manner in which Romeo echoes her frantic grief and disappointment in the next scene at being banished from ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... quotations, but here is one more: "The author of this book is a Christian like you; his faith is that of a Catholic deeply and strongly convinced; therefore his mission is not to deny dogmas, but to combat impiety under one of its most dangerous forms, that of erroneous belief and superstition.... Away with the idol which hides our Saviour! Down with the tyrant of falsehood! Down with the black god of the Manichaeans! Down with the Ahriman of the old idolaters! Live God alone ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Under each of these divisions is included much that is of extreme interest, especially to contemporaries who have passed through the same succession of emotional experience, and it is highly probable that Caturras and Gaspar, pieces as witty as anything in Bocage but free from Bocage's coarse impiety, will always interest literary students. But it is as the singer of love that Joao de Deus will delight posterity as he delighted his own generation. The elegiac music of Rachel and of Marina, the melancholy of Adeus and of Remoinho, the tenderness ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... my ears—I was stunned. What he had said I feared might be true. Giant despair felled me to the earth. He had recalled, and lighted up with a glare from the pit, remembrances with which I knew not how to cope. It was true I had spoken with daring impiety of subjects whose sacredness I now began to appreciate. With trembling hands I opened the Bible. I read and re-read the mysterious doom recorded by the Redeemer himself against blasphemers of the Holy Ghost—monsters set apart from the human race, and damned and dead, even ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... With regard to her impiety—for such it should be called—it did not arise from arrogance, nor was it based in any way upon the higher learning of her period. Simply she did not possess the religious instinct. She understood it sympathetically—in ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... answer that he had so oft solicited in their favour that his own conscience accused him that they used his labours for no other end but to be a patron to their impiety. For he had before made intercession for William Harlow, James Fussell, and others that were convict of the former tumult. They proudly said 'that if it was not stayed both he and the Baillies should repent it.' Whereto he answered 'He would not hurt ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... victory of 1759 was a fitting reward of Wolfe's valour, punished the infamies of the Bigot regime and withdrew Canada from the focus of the terrible chastisement which awaited France soon after—in the Reign of Terror—for her impiety and immorality. The victory of April, 1760, was a comforting incident—a species of compensation to a handful of brave and faithful colonists, for the crushing disaster which had befallen their cause, the preceding September. It was the crowning—though bootless ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... a la Cassette replied with a sudden turn of her masked face and a murmur of surprise and protest against this impiety. A low, merry laugh came out of the Monk's cowl, and the Huguenotte let her form sink a little in her chair ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... they lost of earning for themselves immortal honors from God and man! If, instead of raising the standard of revolt, they had waged war upon their own passions, and fought with the Catholic reformers against impiety, they would be hailed as true soldiers of the cross. They would be welcomed by the Pope, the Bishops and clergy, and by all good men. They might be honored today on our altars, and might have a niche in our temples, side by side with those ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... speak forth Jehovah's interest in the helpless. "Leave thy fatherless children to me," he said, by his prophet Jeremiah, at a time when misery, desolation, and destruction were falling on Judea and her sons for their awful impiety. "Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust in me." "A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... incurable frivolity will get possession of the high society, and come entirely to direct thought. Licentiousness of language will accompany wicked manners, and lend a seduction the more to vice. Libertinism becomes the fashion. Impiety a la mode, miserable vanities, will supplant a noble pride to achieve a reputation in letters: it will become necessary to raise a doubt, wherever truth has been admitted. Amidst the din of feasts and the music of the ball-room, they will sap the foundations of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... a man eminently fitted to close an old age and to inaugurate a new, to demonstrate the paradoxical situation of the Popes by the inexorable logic of his practical impiety, and to fuse two conflicting world-forces in the cynicism of supreme corruption. The Emperors of the Julian house had exhibited the extreme of sensual insolence in their autocracy. What they desired of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... great deal to crush me, because I know, in the first place, that my own intentions were correct, that I feel in my heart a deep reverence for religion, that impiety is very abhorrent to me; and in the second, I place firm reliance on the judgment of some who have encouraged me. You and Mr. Lewes are quite as good authorities, in my estimation, as Mr. Dilke or the editor of the Spectator, and I ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... wherein is to be found such ample provision, and that according to the word of God, for comely order against confusion; for peace and unity of the Church against schism and division; for truth of the faith against all error and heresy; for piety and unblamableness against all impiety and scandal of conversation; for equity and right against all mal-administrations, whether ignorant, arbitrary, or tyrannical; for the honor and purity of all Christ's ordinances against all contempt, pollution, and profanation; for comfort, quickening, and encouragement of the saints in all ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... ([Cross] 1178), "shall have its hour; the last of the seven epochs symbolized by the seven days of creation has arrived, the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the empire and the papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away together.... But upon their ruins shall appear a new nation of God, a nation of prophets illuminated from on high, living in poverty and solitude. Then the divine mysteries shall be revealed, and the saying of Joel ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... by equatorial sun or blanched with the northern cold—is an equal with you before the heavenly Father, and equally with you entitled to all the rights of human nature." . . . "You cannot deny these rights without impiety. God has so linked the National welfare with National duty that you cannot deny these rights without peril to the Republic. It is not enough that you have given liberty. By the same title that we claim liberty do we claim equality also. . . ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... transcending every question of interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something that came to me so forcibly ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... be possible here to give even an outline of the nature and constitution of this extraordinary society—of its secrets and mysteries—of the deep dissimulation, consummate hypocrisy, and shocking impiety of its founder and his associates—of their Jesuitical arts in concealing their real objects, and their incredible industry and astonishing exertions in making converts—of the absolute despotism and complete system of espionage established throughout the order—of the blind ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... new edict of Montesquieu's, and the necessity of arming themselves in case of violence on the marshal's part: thus it was nothing less than the beginning of a civil war, for which the pretexts were the impiety of the regent's court and Dubois's sacrileges; pretexts which would arouse the anathemas of an essentially religious province, against a reign so little worthy to succeed ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... anxiety to improve and benefit her sex, but has devoted all her faculties to the erection of an altar on which she might worship herself, and only herself—who has even afforded cause, by the frequently extreme levity of her expressions, for the charge of lending countenance to licentiousness and impiety—whose writings, in fine, are calculated to inflict serious injury upon the tastes, the understandings, and the hearts of her youthful female readers, by accustoming them to a vicious and ridiculous style, by filling their minds ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... l'histoire de l'instruction publique depuis 1789," I., 391. "The kernel of boarding-scholars, (holders of scholarships) was furnished by the Prytanee. Profound corruption, to which the military regime gives an appearance of regularity, a cool impiety which conforms to the outward ceremonies of religion as to the movements of a drill,... steady tradition has transmitted this spirit to all the pupils that have succeeded each other for ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... universe, having made all reasonable creatures one for another, to the end that they should do one another good; more or less according to the several persons and occasions but in nowise hurt one another: it is manifest that he that doth transgress against this her will, is guilty of impiety towards the most ancient and venerable of all the deities. For the nature of the universe, is the nature the common parent of all, and therefore piously to be observed of all things that are, and that which now is, to whatsoever first was, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... year 1429, a Cordelier by name Brother Richard, fulminated from the pulpit a vigorous sermon against the amulette then much in vogue, and called "Mandragora." He convinced his auditors, both male and female, of its impiety and inutility, and caused hundreds of those pretended charms which, upon that occasion, were voluntarily delivered up to him, to be publicly burnt. It is no doubt, to these mandragoras that an old chronicler alludes in ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... recalled to the old Canadians who had left their homes many years before. These old voyageurs who had been constantly called upon to face death had been deprived of all religious succour during the long years, but they had not been held by a spirit of impiety. The missionaries were to them the ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... "Impiety did not move me, great goddess," said Hercules in his own defense, "but only the direst necessity. How otherwise could I ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... his son Nadab; and after he had reigned two years, he was killed by Baasha, who usurped the crown and destroyed the whole race of Jeroboam, a man remarkable for his impiety.—All the succeeding kings of Judah were descendants of Rehoboam, which fulfilled the promise made by God to David, that he would "establish his house and the throne of his kingdom for ever:" this was a declaration that the Messiah was to ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... who could were slain by the men of Potidaia who put out to them in boats. The cause of the high tide and flood and of that which befell the Persians was this, as the Potidaians say, namely that these same Persians who perished by means of the sea had committed impiety towards the temple of Poseidon and his image in the suburb of their town; and in saying that this was the cause, in my opinion they say well. The survivors of his army Artabazos led away to Thessaly to join Mardonios. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... Judas," he laughed, his pale face a-grin, "I shall find room for you in Babbiano, and work too, if you do it as well as this. Come; the men are here now. Let us go forward whilst they are at their prayers. But we must not disturb them," he added, more seriously. "I will not be guilty of an impiety. We can lie ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... a sacred city, and the soldiers were affected rather by the impiety of the act than by the actual destruction that was being wrought. As General Wilson and Frank rode back to the spot where General Barclay was stationed, a mass of Russian infantry moved down the hill towards the bridges, and at ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect imagination ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... the world continually? Not, indeed, that a long train of good influences has been frequently set agoing in the Sabbath school—for Sabbath schools are but of recent origin. But people have always been led along to virtue or vice, to piety or impiety, to bless the world or to prove a curse to it, by one another. A word or a look from a relative, or friend, or acquaintance, in the school or somewhere else, has often given a turn to the whole character. A ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... {184} Law—For the Hone that set the razor that shaved the rats—Rev. Dr. Samuel Parr, who most seriously disapproves of all parodies upon the hallowed language of Scripture and the contents of the Prayer-book, but acquits Mr. Hone of intentional impiety, admires his talents and fortitude, and applauds the good sense and integrity of his juries—Religion without hypocrisy, and Law without impartiality—O ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... fancying there could be any harm in taking such a liberty, we entered the pagoda unceremoniously, and one of our artists set to work sketching the bronze image which the natives worship as a deity, a figure not quite three inches in height; but the Hindoos were shocked at our impiety, and soon ousted the Admiral and his party. Close by was a little tank or pool of water, beautifully spangled over with the leaves and flowers of the water-lily. Here several groups of Indian girls had assembled ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... undoubted authority that there never was such a man as Jesus, or show that he was a wicked impostor and deservedly lost his life. Show moreover, that there never were such men as the apostles of Jesus, or that they were likewise impostors, and all suffered death for their wicked impiety! Give the particulars of Saul's madly forsaking the honourable connexion in which he stood, for the sake of practising a fraud which produced him an ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... not only careful to hide the good which he did, but willingly incurred the suspicion of evil which he did not. He forgot what himself had formerly asserted, that hypocrisy is less mischievous than open impiety. Dr. Delany, with all his zeal for his honour, has justly condemned this part ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... Country, is, first, to establish it by Law; and, after that, every way to secure and promote the Exercise of it on the one Hand; and, on the other, to prohibit and punish Wickedness, and all Manner of Impiety, that can fall under the Cognizance of Magistrates. But thus much I think to be necessary in the Civil Administration of all Governments, for the temporal Interest of the Whole, before true Christianity comes in Question, which is a private Concern of ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... leather cap, and grey hair, which he chose to wear rather than a periwig." St. Evremond was a kind of Epicurean philosopher, and drew his own character in the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. "He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... nay, a thousand times, ever since I have been engaged in public matters, I have hardly heard anything else but that. It is precisely your own case, when, as a bishop, people reproach you for your impiety; or, as a musketeer, for your cowardice; the very thing of which they are always accusing ministers of finance is the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... arbitrement of those who ruled The capital City; what was struggled for, And by what combatants victory must be won; The indecision on their part whose aim 130 Seemed best, and the straightforward path of those Who in attack or in defence were strong Through their impiety—my inmost soul Was agitated; yea, I could almost Have prayed that throughout earth upon all men, 135 By patient exercise of reason made Worthy of liberty, all spirits filled With zeal expanding in Truth's holy light, The gift of tongues might fall, and power arrive From the four ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... one would say) healthy: but so sound, as things that are hollow; thy bones are hollow; Impiety has ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Woman's claim to the ballot has been shown to rest in justice on the very foundation stone of democratic government—has been, from the Christian standpoint, as completely exonerated from the charge of impiety as ever anti-slavery and anti-polygamy were, and the fact which was the slogan of the anti-suffragists still remains: the mass of the women do not want it. We do not quarrel with the fact, but state it to give the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... astrological speculations. He certainly does not wish to go as far as the honest carpenter in the "Miller's Tale," who glories in his incredulity of aught besides his credo, and who yet is afterwards befooled by the very impostor of whose astrological pursuits he had reprehended the impiety. "Men," he says, "should know nothing of that which is private to God. Yea, blessed be alway a simple man who knows nothing but only his belief." In his little work "On the Astrolobe," Chaucer speaks with calm reasonableness of superstitions ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and that, repenting of the deed, he caused a tomb to be erected over his grave, where afterwards the parish church was built. See the story at large in Mr. Edw. Jones's Welsh Music. But we may reasonably conclude that this is all a fable, both when we consider the impiety of building a church for divine worship over the grave of a dog, an impiety not consistent with the genius of that age; and when we consider, also, that the establishment of parochial cures, and the building of our country churches in Wales, began soon ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... in the palace of Herod by the impious creatures of his court! This was, without doubt, one of the most sensible insults which Jesus Christ received. But do not suppose, Christians, that this act of impiety ended there. It has passed from the court of Herod, from that prince destitute of religion, into those even of Christian princes. And is not the Savior still a subject of ridicule to the libertine spirits which compose them? They worship Him externally, but internally ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... their reverence to their religion; nor will their bodies be long exempted from their share of trouble; for if they do not very quickly satisfy the priests of the truth of their repentance, they are seized on by the Senate, and punished for their impiety. The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them in letters, as in forming their minds and manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse, very early, into the tender and flexible ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... anything and has not any desire or will. Elsewhere, he conceives God as pure energy; a prime mover unmoved. Certain modern physicists still cling to this Aristotelian god. This conception of a deity was far from the beliefs of his age, and it is not strange that Aristotle was charged with impiety and with having taught that prayer and sacrifice were of no avail. He fled from Athens and shortly ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Great Mediator and Redeemer, for our past transgressions, and that through the grace of His Holy Spirit we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to His righteous requisitions in time to come; that He would interpose to arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice so offensive to Himself and so ruinous to mankind; that He would make us deeply sensible that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people;" that He would turn us from our transgressions ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... signing their works with their name appears to be as old as art itself. The odium excited against Phidias for his alleged impiety in inscribing his name upon the shield of his celebrated statue of Minerva, is a familiar example, which will occur to every reader; and there can be no doubt that the usage was also known to the painters ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... So rob us of ourselves, we take no mark Though round about us thousand trumpets clang! What moves thee, if the senses stir not? Light Kindled in heav'n, spontaneous, self-inform'd, Or likelier gliding down with swift illapse By will divine. Portray'd before me came The traces of her dire impiety, Whose form was chang'd into the bird, that most Delights itself in song: and here my mind Was inwardly so wrapt, it gave no place To aught that ask'd admittance ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... not dare, if thus they dare Be impudent to Heaven, and play with prayer, Play with that fear, with that religious awe, Which keeps men free, and yet is man's great law! What can they but the worst of Atheists be Who, while they word it 'gainst impiety, Affront the throne of God with their false deeds? Alas! this wonder in the Atheist breeds. Are these the men that would the age reform, That Down with Superstition cry, and swarm This painted glass, that sculpture, to deface, But worship pride and avarice in their place? Religion ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... submitted to indignities for which the annals of warfare, except among the most ferocious savages, can scarcely supply a parallel. That the Almighty might not seem to be insulted in the persons only of living creatures formed in His own image, the fresh impiety was perpetrated of derisively stuffing leaves torn from French Bibles into the gaping wounds of the dead lying on this field of carnage. Nor did the Roman Catholics of Orange fare much better than their reformed neighbors. Mistaken for enemies, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... strange in all this—so strange that when my grandfather came back, for the first time in the history of Heathknowes, no chapter was read, no psalm sung or prayer read. Somehow it seemed like an impiety in the face of what was going on down there. Mr. Richard talked far the most. At first his mood was all of stormy anger, and the replies of the other, as ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... his companions by the dragon. Overthrow of the dragon, and production of armed men from his teeth. Thebes. Actaeon devoured by his hounds. Semele destroyed by lightening, and the birth of Bacchus. The prophet Tiresias. Echo: and the transformation of Narcissus. Impiety of Pentheus. Change of the Tyrrhenian sailors to dolphins. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... that Act, in an Address to the people of Great Britain:—"Nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country, a religion that has deluged your Island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world." And "That we think the Legislature of Great Britain is not authorized by the Constitution to establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets." The attack was of a two-fold nature. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... reported as follows: "Plaies are banished for a time out of London, lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it, being already begonne. Would to God these comon plaies were exiled for altogether as seminaries of impiety, and their theatres pulled downe as no better than houses of baudrie. It is an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so rich that they can build suche houses. As moche I wish also to our comon beare baitinges used on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... congenial to his tastes, and sufficient employment for his talents. He would have exhibited in his own life and character their vices and their superficial virtues, their extravagance, libertinism, and impiety, their politeness, courage, and wit. He might have borne a distinguished part in the petty statesmanship, the intriguing diplomacy, and the wild speculations of that period. But here, among the stern rebels of the Revolution and the practical statesmen of the early Republic, this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration to clergymen, is fed ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... below stairs. Both uncles and aunts saw that the ruin of Bessy and her family was as complete as they had ever foreboded it, and there was a general family sense that a judgment had fallen on Mr. Tulliver, which it would be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness. But Maggie heard little of this, scarcely ever leaving her father's bedside, where she sat opposite him with her hand on his. Mrs. Tulliver wanted to have Tom fetched home, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to Congress as the speech of a great leader, and asserted that the issue in America was for all free people a question of upholding the eternal principles of liberty, morality and justice. "War for such a cause, though it be civil war, may perhaps without impiety be called 'God's most perfect instrument in working out a pure intent[322].'" The disaster to the Northern army, its apparent testimony that the North lacked real fighting men, bolstered that British opinion which regarded military measures against the South as folly—an impression ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... was in the grip of the savage was as simple as it was sinister. The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... price than the annual tribute of a goshawk such as are native to the island. Old and worn he retired to Majorca, living off the products of the estates belonging to his commandery situated in Catalonia. The impiety and the vices of the hero horrified the family and scandalized the island. Three young Moorish girls and a Jewess of great beauty were his companions in the guise of servants where they occupied a whole wing of the Febrer mansion, which was much larger at that time ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... lord. He was a fresh-colored young man of thirty, rather good-looking, with side whiskers, keen, eager glance, and an air of perpetually doing business. Though a native of Germany, he spoke English as well as many Lane Jews, whose comparative impiety was a certificate of British birth. Michael Birnbaum was a great man in the local little synagogue if only one of the crowd at "Duke's Plaizer." He had been successively Gabbai and Parnass, or treasurer and president, and had ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... our judges, not seek to sway them by entreaties; that they may judge rightly according to the laws, and not by favor. For you are sworn. And how should I persuade you to break your oath, who am charged by Meletus with impiety. For by so doing, I should be persuading you to disbelief in the gods, and making that very charge against myself. To you and to the god I leave it, that I may be judged as shall be best ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... it will be found, that they every-where disclaim the Impiety of such as endeavour to make a Religion to their Practices; and each upon himself, and very often make such Reflections upon each other, and, / upon his Actions, as reasonable Beings, who disbelieve not a future State of Rewards and Punishments (and who one Day propose ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... but to the sin and the suffering of the fallen state, and the change of order from the keeping of the garden to the tilling of the ground. We cannot say how far it is right or agreeable with God's will, while men are perishing round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come a time when the service of God shall be the beholding ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more Perfections, the cause of Man's error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection, justice or ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... owne hearts; the drift whereof is (hee being as at the first incased in a subtile Serpents skinne) onely to enthrall and invassall them slaues to himselfe. The first of these mentioned, are slie and masked Atheists, who ouer-shadow their secret impiety, loose and dissolute behauiour with some outward conformitie and shew of religion, snatching (as they thinke) a sufficient warrantize thereof from those disorders they obserue among men, and therfore passe vncensured, hauing a ciuill, but dissembled carriage. The second be Sorcerers, ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... eastward again at daybreak. Sometimes Phaethon, his rash, inexperienced son, would take the reins and drive the solar chariot too near the earth, causing the fruits to perish, and the grass to wither, and the wells to dry up. Sometimes, too, the great all-seeing divinity, in his wrath at the impiety of men, would shoot down his scorching arrows, causing pestilence to spread over the land. Still other conceptions clustered around the sun. Now it was the wonderful treasure-house, into which no one could look and live; and again ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... soul, full of mere vacant hearsay and windy babble, is and was no image of Heaven's Law; whom it never struck that Heaven had a Law, or that the Earth—could not have what kind of Law you pleased! Human Statute-books, accordingly, are growing horrible to think of. An impiety and poisonous futility every Law of them that is so made; all Nature is against it; it will and can do nothing but mischief wheresoever it shows itself in Nature: and such Laws lie now like an incubus over this ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... on hope, Loue makes folks hardy, alas the flesh is fraile, Dispences now a little with the Pope: And fr[o] restrictions giues her heart more scope. O Liberty, Author of heresie. Why with such violent wing dost thou assaile, To hurry vertue to impiety. ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... nature of her indisposition she revealed to Julia alone. "That young lady keeps me on thorns. I never feel secure she will not say or do something extravagant or unusual: she seems to suspect sobriety and good taste of being in league with impiety. Here I succeed in bridling her a little; but encounter a female enthusiast in her own house? merci! After all, there must be something good in her, since she is your friend, and you are hers. But I have something more serious ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... account of the sub-Himalayan Bodos and Dhimals: "All diseases are ascribed to supernatural agency. The sick man is supposed to be possessed by one of the deities, who racks him with pain as a punishment for impiety or neglect of the god in question. Hence not the mediciner, but the exorcist, is summoned to the sick man's aid." ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... swayed with her as blown by the wind; they ceased to breathe in her periods; they groaned as the intensity of her fervor pressed upon them for response that they could not shape in words; they wept, they shouted, they prophesied, and over them swept ever the witchery of her wonderful voice, preaching impiety—the worship of Seraiah! ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... own consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister's impiety. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hands of Cardinal Consalvi, in case he should suffer any violence during his journey. It was only with trembling and prayer that he had set foot on the volcanic soil of France, which, from a distance, seemed alive with impiety and terror. The unfailing respect with which he had been treated had comforted him somewhat. Whenever he visited a church, the Parisians followed him with mingled curiosity, sympathy, and veneration: they knelt to him as he passed ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Miller. The intellectual result was chaotic, and Mrs. Warricombe settled at last into a comfortable private opinion, that though the record of geology might be trustworthy that of the Bible was more so. She would admit that there was no impiety in accepting the evidence of nature, but held to a secret conviction that it was safer to believe in Genesis. For anything beyond a quasi-permissible variance from biblical authority as to the age of the world she was quite unprepared, and ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... its due at last, and the diabolical villain has gone to his final account. Summon some scavenger to collect the vile remains, and bury them in a dung-hill. To give them Christian, decent burial would be treason to man, sacrilege to the Church, and impiety ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... thee deeply; with its own dear brook, Its own small pasture, almost its own sky! But covet not the Abode: forbear to sigh, As many do, repining while they look; Intruders—who would tear from Nature's book This precious leaf with harsh impiety. Think what the home must be if it were thine, Even thine, though few thy wants! Roof, window, door, The very flowers are sacred to the Poor, The roses to the porch which they entwine: Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day On which it ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... powder, held themselves justified in doing so, if possible, by vituperation, culumny, and every engine of moral torture. But a far more terrible weapon, and one which made Vesalius rage, and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the charge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a very ugly place. It was very easy to get into it, especially for a Netherlander: but not so easy to get out. Indeed Vesalius must have trembled, when he saw his master, Charles V., himself take fright, and actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... deceive others nor yourself, you who are neither insane nor insincere, you surely do not expect that the millennium is to be brought about by the triumph of what are called liberal opinions; nor by enabling the whole of the lower classes to read the incentives to vice, impiety, and rebellion which are prepared for them by an unlicensed press; nor by Sunday schools, and religious tract societies; nor by the portentous bibliolatry of the age! And if you adhere to the letter of the Scriptures, methinks the thought of that ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... had in one night most of them their fares mutilated. No one knew who had done it, but large public rewards were offered to find the authors; and it was further voted that any one who knew of any other act of impiety having been committed should come and give information without fear of consequences, whether he were citizen, alien, or slave. The matter was taken up the more seriously, as it was thought to be ominous for the expedition, and part of a conspiracy to bring about a revolution ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides |
