C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Infidelity
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
The nurse of infidelity is sensuality.
Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip.
What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
Infidelity, like death, admits of no degrees.
Freethinkers are generally those that never think at all.
No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God.
An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism, upon which a man can firmly fix his foot.
I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.
There never yet was a mother who taught her child to be an infidel.
To destroy the ideas of immortality of the soul is to add death to death.
General infidelity is the hardest soil which the propagators of a new religion can have to work upon.
They that deny a God destroy a man’s nobility.
There is but one thing without honor, smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or to be—insincerity, unbelief.
When once infidelity can persuade men that they shall die like beasts, they will soon be brought to live like beasts also.
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster?
There is one single fact, which 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.
They that deny a God, destroy a man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he is not kin to God by his spirit he is a base and ignoble creature.
I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief—in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.
A skeptical young man one day conversing with the celebrated Dr. Parr, observed that he would believe nothing which he could not understand. “Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man’s I know.”
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.
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.
Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable has a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something.
No men deserve the title of infidels so little as those to whom it has been usually applied; let any of those who renounce Christianity, write fairly down in a book all the absurdities that they believe instead of it, and they will find that it retakes more faith to reject Christianity than to embrace it.
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.