C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Atheism
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
By night an atheist half believes a God.
No atheist, as such, can be a true friend.
Atheism is rather in the life than in the heart of man.
No one is so much alone in the world as a denier of God.
Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.
Ingersoll’s atheism can never become an institution; it can never be more than a destitution.
Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism.
The thing formed says that nothing formed it; and that which is made is, while that which made it is not! The folly is infinite.
A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
It is a fine observation of Plato, in his Laws, that atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding.
God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it.
The statements of atheists ought to be perfectly clear of doubt. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material.
Atheism is the result of ignorance and pride, of strong sense and feeble reasons, of good eating and ill living.
An atheist is one of the most daring beings in creation,—a contemner of God, who explodes His laws by denying His existence.
Men are atheistical because they are first vicious, and question the truth of Christianity because they hate the practice.
As atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.
There are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power.
They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity.
When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none; and then they endeavor to persuade themselves so.
Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.
The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health, and power.
The great atheists are, indeed, the hypocrites, which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must need be cauterized in the end.
There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind cannot use its wings,—the clearest proof that it is out of its element.
The owlet atheism, sailing on obscene wings across the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and shuts them close, and, hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, cries out, “Where is it?”
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
I should like to see a man sober in his habits, moderate, chaste, just in his dealings, assert that there is no God; he would speak at least without interested motives; but such a man is not to be found.
The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.
Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe, will never be an atheist; the frame of man’s body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.
Religion assures us that our afflictions shall have an end; she comforts us, she dries our tears, she promises us another life. On the contrary, in the abominable worship of atheism, human woes are the incense, death is the priest, a coffin the altar, and annihilation the Deity.
Supposing all the great points of atheism were formed into a kind of creed, I would fain ask whether it would not require an infinite greater measure of faith than any set of articles which they so violently oppose.
Settle it, therefore, in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, that atheism is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every useful restraint, and to every virtuous affection; that leaving nothing above us to excite awe, nor round us to awaken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and earth: its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.
One would fancy that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervor of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it.
The truly great consider, first, how they may gain the approbation of God, and, secondly, that of their own conscience. Having done this, they would then willingly conciliate the good opinion of their fellow-men. But the truly little reverse the thing. The primary object with them is to secure the applause of their fellow-men; and having effected this, the approbation of God and their own conscience may follow on as they can.
Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.
Kircher, the astronomer, having an acquaintance who denied the existence of a Supreme Being, took the following method to convince him of his error. Expecting him on a visit, he placed a handsome celestial globe in a part of the room where it could not escape the notice of his friend, who, on observing it, inquired whence it came, and who was the maker.
“It was not made by any person,” said the astronomer.
“That is impossible,” replied the skeptic; “you surely jest.”
Kircher then took occasion to reason with his friend upon his own atheistical principles, explaining to him that he had adopted this plan with a design to show him the fallacy of his skepticism.
“You will not,” said he, “admit that this small body originated in mere chance, and yet you contend that those heavenly bodies, to which it bears only a faint and diminutive resemblance, came into existence without author or design.”
He pursued this chain of reasoning till his friend was totally confounded, and cordially acknowledged the absurdity of his notions.