The backwoodsmen were forced by their surroundings to exercise a grudging charity towards the various forms of religious belief entertained among themselves—though they hated and despised French and Spanish Catholics.
— from The Winning of the West, Volume 1 From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 by Theodore Roosevelt

[238] symbol of the ideal journal, one of the small globules of quicksilver which you shall find on any of these encircling hills, so powerless to draw to it an atom of filth or rubbish, but ever attracting the smallest particle of incorruptible silver and gold?
— from A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed. by W. C. (William Chauncey) Bartlett

Sober thinkers endeavored to save some form of religion by explaining away the monstrous legends, and attributing them to the wayward imagination of poets.
— from Perpetua. A Tale of Nimes in A.D. 213 by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

True, on one or two occasions the women at Newgate had behaved in a somewhat refractory manner, for their poor degraded human nature could not conceive of pure disinterested Christian love working for their good without fee or reward; but even at these times their better nature very soon reasserted itself, and penitence and tears took the place of insubordination.
— from Elizabeth Fry by Emma Raymond Pitman