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All history shows that, in exact proportion as nations advance in civilisation, the accounts of miracles taking place among them become rarer and rarer, until at last they entirely cease.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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More quotes by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The contraction of theological influence has been at once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Abortion... was probably regarded by the average Roman of the later days of Paganism much as Englishmen in the last century regarded convivial excesses, as certainly wrong, but so venial as scarcely to deserve censure.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized infants and the Calvinistic doctrine of reprobation . . . surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan creed.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The morals of men are more governed by their pursuits than by their opinions. A type of virtue is first formed by circumstances, and men afterwards make it the model upon which their theories are framed.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Spain and southern Italy, in which Catholicism has most deeply implanted its roots, are even now, probably beyond all other countries in Europe, those in which inhumanity to animals is most wanton and unrebuked.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The animal world being altogether external to the scheme of redemption, was regarded as beyond the range of duty, and the belief that we have any kind of obligation to its members has never been inculcated - has never, I believe, been even admitted - by Catholic theologians.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky