"Deism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Autobiography, and its details have been carefully supplemented by his latest editor, Mr. Lee. His literary activity was various and considerable. His greatest work—a treatise which has been rashly called the foundation of English deism, but which rather expresses the vague and not wholly unorthodox doubt expressed earlier by Montaigne, and by contemporaries of Herbert's own, such as La Mothe le Vayer—was written in Latin, and has never been translated into English. He was an English ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Bible, you must either accept Deism or Atheism. Deism admits the existence of a God of infinite power and intelligence. A Deist need have no trouble in believing a miracle. The question with him is not, can God work miracles, and thereby reveal himself to man, but has he done it. Reason teaches us that intelligent ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... others, who educated him in an utter contempt for the doctrines they were appointed and paid to teach. It was when but a mere youth that Father Lejay, one of Voltaire's instructors, predicted that he would yet be the Coryphaeus of Deism in France. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... was the Templar heresy? On this point we find a variety of opinions. According to Wilcke, Ranke, and Weber it was "the unitarian deism of Islam"[179]; Lecouteulx de Canteleu thinks, however, it was derived from heretical Islamic sources, and relates that whilst in Palestine, one of the Knights, Guillaume de Montbard, was initiated by the Old Man of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... attraction at the houses of the leaders of society, the ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was there this year) 'violated all the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers.' It was the day of Anglomania on the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name to conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to the great ladies,—'when the footmen were in the room,' adds the shocked Horace,—lionizing Hume 'who is the only thing they believe in implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks,' ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... that he was ready with any adequate answer to the argument which Butler had brought forward in the previous decade of the century. We do not see that he is aware as yet of there being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural religion. He was ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost from view. Hence it has seemed fit to center this study about the man who stated the situation with the most unmistakable and uncompromising ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as their key-note, the one great idea of his bold crusade,—to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Sanctorum," and found, he says, all Christian history there, and much of profane history. Neither is he a Mahometan; but he nevertheless makes a hero of Mahomet, whom he loves for his Ishmaelite fierceness, bravery, and religious sincerity,—and because he taught deism, or the belief in one God, instead of the old polytheism, or the belief in many gods,—and gave half the East his very good book, called the Koran, for his followers to live and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... he does so, kindles into the most fearful wrath and dooms him and all his posterity to temporal, spiritual, and eternal death. Such is the doctrine which is advanced, in order to secure the omnipotence of God, and to exalt his sovereignty. But is it not a great leading feature of deism itself, that it exalts the power of God at the expense of his infinite moral perfections? So we have understood the matter; and hence, it seems to us, that Christian divines should be more guarded in handling the attribute of omnipotence. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... evidently stretches his complaisance towards the national religion, while perhaps in his heart he was even then disposed to think there was no middle course between natural religion and the Church of Rome. The first creed which he examines is that of Deism; which he rejects, because the worship of one sole deity was not known to the philosophers of antiquity, and is therefore obviously to be ascribed to revelation. Revelation thus proved, the puzzling doubt ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... perhaps put these thoughts in a more striking light. If you think the most important of the discussions of our day to be that between natural and revealed religion, between deism and the Gospel, you have not well discerned the signs of the times. The fundamental discussion is now between men who believe in God, in the soul, and in truth, and men, who, denying truth, deny at the same ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville |
