Infidelity

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• There is but one thing without honour; smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be: Insincerity, Unbelief.
  • Thomas Carlyle Chartism (1839), Ch. 8

• He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:--'Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know.'
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge 21 April 1811

• Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little,—diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God's mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness.
  • Bishop Hall Select Thoughts, or Choice Helps for Pious Spirits

• No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God.
  • Johann Paul Friedrich Richter Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man's Lawyer 1796-97 First Flower-Piece

• Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay Edinburgh Review October 1840, review of Ranke's History of the Popes

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

• No matter where the skeptical thought originates, or how it gets access to our minds, we see at once that it flattens the level of life and every aspiration. It makes our character less vigorous. The gospel is not simply a philosophy of religion or law of life, but it is an apocalypse, showing the heavens to our thought, and so bringing its spiritual benedictions to every heart and life.
  • R. S. Storrs, p. 347.

• Admit their maxims, and the universe returns to a frightful chaos; all things are thrown into disorder upon the earth; all the notions of virtue and vice are overthrown; the most inviolable laws of society are abolished: the discipline of morality is swept away; the government of states and empires ceases to be subject to any rule; the whole harmony of political institutions is dissolved; and the human race becomes an assemblage of madmen, barbarians, cheats, unnatural wretches who have no other laws but force, no other curb than their passions and the dread of authority, no other tie than irreligion and independence, no other gods than themselves.
  • Massillon, p. 348.

• The nurse of infidelity is sensuality. Youth are sensual. The Bible stands in their way. It prohibits the indulgence of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.
  • Richard Cecil, p. 348.

• What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
  • Edward Young, p. 348.

• There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism, upon which a man can firmly fix his foot.
  • Emmons, p. 348.

• There is one single fact that one may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity; namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death-bed.
  • Hannah More, p. 348.

• The infidelity that springs from the heart is not to be reached by a course of lectures on the evidences of Christianity; argument did not cause, and argument will not remove it.
  • Mark Hopkins, p. 348.

• There never yet was a mother who taught her child to be an infidel.
  • Henry W. Shaw, p. 349.

• Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?
  • Prof. Shedd, p. 349.

• I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.
  • Samuel Johnson, p. 349.

• Freethinkers are generally those that never think at all.
  • Laurence Sterne, p. 349.

• Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.
  • Warburton, p. 349.

• When you see a mad dog, don't argue with him unless you are sure of your logic.
  • Charles Spurgeon, p. 349.

• In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well- meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect. I believe that it is safe to say that Christianity is indebted for none of its progress in the world to rational conflicts with infidelity. I do not believe that a single great wrong has ever been overthrown by meeting the advocates of wrong in argument.
  • Josiah Gilbert Holland, p. 349.

Unsourced

• Infidelity is one of those coinages,—a mass of base money that won't pass current with any heart that loves truly, or any head that thinks correctly. And infidels are poor sad creatures; they carry about them a load of dejection and desolation, not the less heavy that it is invisible. It is the fearful blindness of the soul.
  • Chalmers

• When once infidelity can persuade men that they shall die like beasts, they will soon be brought to live like beasts also.
  • South