Convictions Sentence Examples

It is good that there are no convictionsfor dishonesty.

The appeal court overturned 18 convictionsfrom the first trials.

They had five convictionsfor burglary & theft between them.

His convictions gained weight from the simplicity, uprightness and diligence of his character; but they need a more effective justification than he was able to give them.

During the conflict between Paganism and Christianity when many Christians "testified" to the truth of their convictions by sacrificing their lives, the word assumed its modern technical sense.

This is no doubt accounted for by the extreme poverty which prevails among the lower classes, though beggars, on the other hand, are very few, the convictions being 8.95 per 100,000 against 258.15 per 100,000 for the province of Rome.

Sardinia has less convictions for serious crimes than any other compartimento of south Italy.

The remedy proposed by Descartes is (while not neglecting our duties to others, ourselves and God) to let doubt range unchecked through the whole fabric of our customary convictions.

Several hundred arrests were made, and a few convictions were secured.

Impelled by his convictions and talent, supported by the emperor Napoleon III.

Crispi, whose strong anti-clerical convictions did not prevent him from regarding the papacy as preeminently an Italian institution, was determined both to prove to the Catholic world the practical independence of the government of the Church and to retain for Rome so potent a centre of universal attraction as the presence of the future pope.

MacTaggart; Lotze's immediate convictions are matter of interest to a biographer but to no one else.

The Christians suffered from systematic persecution, and many historians, with a strange lack of historical insight, have poured denunciation upon him for an attitude which was the natural outcome of his convictions.

During the eighteen years that he was inquisitor-general it is said that he burnt 10,2 20 persons, condemned 6860 others to be burnt in effigy, and reconciled 97,321, thus making an average of some 6000 convictions a year.

His keenly logical intellect, and his impatience of authority where it clashed with his own convictions, quite unfitted him for that unquestioning obedience which the Church demanded.

The fullest revelation of his religious convictions is given in his correspondence with Voltaire, which was published along with that with Frederick the Great in Bossange's edition of his works.

And meanwhile the religious convictions of the highest minds in Israel were undergoing a marked change.

David's character must be judged partly in the light of the times in which he lived and partly in connexion with the great truths which he represents, truths whose value is not impaired should they prove to be the convictions of later ages.

The act of 1670 gave to informers a pecuniary interest (they were to have one-third of the fine imposed) in hunting down Nonconformists who broke the law, and this and other statutes were unduly strained to secure convictions.

Dr Peckard, vice-chancellor of the university of Cambridge, who entertained strong convictions against the slave trade, proposed in 1785 as subject for a Latin prize dissertation the question, " An liceat invitos in servitutem dare."

They roused a determined spirit of opposition, founded on deep-seated convictions.

His weakness as a philosopher is his tendency to base the laws of the universe on the experience-born, thought-produced convictions of one man - himself.

This change of policy on his part, frequently ascribed to the fascination of the king's conversation, arose in reality from the nature of his own convictions.

Yet he never made any secret of these gifts; Metternich was aware of them, and he never suspected Gentz of writing or acting in consequence against his convictions.

If he failed in his wider schemes of reform, this was only one more illustration of a truth of which other " enlightened " sovereigns besides himself had experienced the force, namely, that it is impossible to impose any system, however admirable, from above on a people whose deepest convictions and prejudices it offends.

The fervour of his political convictions effected a change in the style and tenor of his verse.

Manning, afterwards cardinal archbishop. The State in its Relations with the Church was his practical contribution to a controversy in which his deepest convictions were involved.

Gladstone seized the opportunity to give effect to convictions which had long been forming in his mind.

He was fundamentally too much a man of strong convictions to be correctly described as open-minded, for if nature ever determined any man's faith, it was his; the root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, being the feeling for God.

His father, William George Spencer, was a schoolmaster, and his parents' religious convictions familiarized him with the doctrines of the Methodists and Quakers.

In the Georgics we are struck by the great advance in the originality and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies and convictions.

In many cases sober convictions or submissive assent supplied the want of spontaneous enthusiasm.

As a preacher, his message was apparently simple; his two great convictions were the fatherhood of God, and that all religious systems which had any stability lasted because of a portion of truth which had to be disentangled from the error differentiating them from.

Belief in the fact of the Incarnation of the eternal Word, as it is stated in the words of Ignatius quoted above, or in any of the later creeds, stands or falls with belief in the Holy Ghost as the guide alike of their convictions and destinies, no mere impersonal influence, but a living voice.

That whatever he did was done for the service of God, that success or failure depended on the inscrutable will of the Almighty and not on himself, were his guiding convictions, which he transmitted to his successors.

Moreover, there gradually developed a group of radicals who were convinced that Luther had not the courage of his convictions.

The fact seems to be that intellectual speculation was as strong in America as in Puritan England; the assumption that the inhibition of its expression was good seems wholly gratuitous, and contrary to general convictions underlying modern freedom of speech.

His convictions on this matter were so much intensified by his later experiences as army chaplain that in 1521 he prevailed upon the authorities of the canton of Zurich to renounce the practice altogether.

The sincerity of his patriotism and his political convictions was proved in1801-1804and in 1814.

One of his first public acts was to hold the well-known Easter synod of 1049, at which celibacy of the clergy (down to the rank of subdeacon) was anew enjoined, and where he at least succeeded in making clear his own convictions against every kind of simony.

In 1804, having shown his unwillingness to sacrifice his convictions for the purpose of furthering the designs of Napoleon, he was removed from the office of tribune, being at the same time nominated to a lucrative post, which, however, he thought it his duty to resign.

He is keen, positive, logical, combining with curious dashes of scepticism many genuine moral convictions and a good knowledge of the various national religions and mythologies whose relative value he is able to appreciate.

There is everywhere a readiness to handle traditional, largely historical, materials with a sovereign freedom, controlled and limited by doctrinal convictions and devotional experiences alone.

When it became clear that the idea of doctrinal change would find no acceptance at Rome, the Reformers appealed to the divine authority of the civil power against that of the popes; and princes within their several states succeeded, as the result of purely political struggles and combinations, in establishing the form of religion best suited to their convictions or their policy.

According to this the Catholic Church is not a visibly organized body, but the sum of all " faithful people " throughout the world, who group themselves in churches modelled according to their convictions or needs.

Louis Blanc possessed a picturesque and vivid style, and considerable power of research; but the fervour with which he expressed his convictions, while placing him in the first rank of orators, tended to turn his historical writings into political pamphlets.

The very sincerity of her piety and strength of her religious convictions led her more than once, however, into great errors of state policy, and into more than one act which offends the moral sense of a more refined age; her efforts for the introduction of the Inquisition into Castile, and for the proscription of the Jews, are outstanding evidences of what can only be called her bigotry.

Luther, like his countrymen of to-day, judged the contents of the New Testament by the light of his leading convictions; and in his German translation, which occupies the same place in Germany as the Authorized Version of 1611 does in English-speaking lands, he even placed four of the books (Hebrews, James, Jude, Apocalypse) in an appendix at the end, with prefaces explanatory of this drastic act of criticism.

As the marquess of Winchester said of himself, he was sprung from the willow rather than the oak, and he was not the man to suffer for convictions.

But we should quite misunderstand this pessimism if we held it to mean that Jeremiah saw no signs of private morality and individual spiritual convictions among his people.

The church gradually expressed her most peculiar convictions in dogmas, which were formulated by philosophical methods, but were irreconcilable with Neoplatonism (the Christological dogmas); and the further this process went the more unrestrainedly did theologians resign themselves to the influence of Neoplatonism on all other questions.

Although Governor Brown represented the poorer class of white citizens he had taken a course in law at Yale College, had practised law, and at the time of his election was judge of a superior court; although he had never held slaves he believed that the abolition of slavery would soon result in the ruin of the South, and he was a man of strong convictions.

A lifelong Southern Democrat, he was forced to lead (nominally at least) a party of Northern Republicans, with whom he had no bond of sympathy save a common opposition to secession; and his ardent, aggressive convictions and character, above all his complete lack of tact, unfitted him to deal successfully with the passionate partisanship of Congress.

In so far as he had any decided political convictions, he seemed to be animated with that reactionary spirit which was predominant in Europe at the time of his birth, and continued in Russia to the end of his father's reign.

Some of the enthusiasts sank into a sceptical, reactionary frame of mind; while others, with deeper convictions or capable of more lasting excitement, attributed the failure to the fact that only halfmeasures and compromises had been adopted by the government.

And it is, indeed, difficult to suppose that agreement on this subject between different portions of the Church could have manifested itself at this time in the spontaneous manner that it does, except as the consequence of traditional feelings and convictions, which went back to the early part of the century, and which could hardly have arisen without good foundation, with respect to the special value of these works as embodiments of apostolic testimony, although all that came to be supposed in regard to their actual authorship cannot be considered proved.

Men owning the same religious convictions will naturally draw together into some sort of association.

He was neither for nor against the new movement, and professed to hold "no settled convictions" on the subject.

He held that strength of intellectual conviction cannot be regarded as valid, inasmuch as it is characteristic equally of contradictory convictions.

It is most difficult to appreciate aright this man of fervid imagination, of powerful and persistent convictions, of unbated honesty and love of truth, of keen insight into the errors (as he thought them) of his time, of a merciless will to lay bare these errors and to reform the abuses to which they gave rise, who in an instant offends us by his boasting, his grossness, his want of selfrespect.

Aristotle, who speaks highly of the sincerity of Eudoxus's convictions, while giving a qualified approval to his arguments, considers him wrong in not distinguishing the different kinds of pleasure and in making pleasure the summum bonum.

There seems no doubt that the condition of the workmen in the factories of Moravia and the oil-mines of Galicia was peculiarly unfortunate; the hours of work were very long, the Count convictions, and on the first day of the session Rieger S' g unless he could speak and write German.

The American Anti-Slavery Society, of which Garrison was the president from 1843 to the day of emancipation, was during all this period the nucleus of an intense and powerful moral agitation, which was greatly valued by many of the most faithful workers in the field of politics, who respected Garrison for his fidelity to his convictions.

The convictions, whatever their value, came, as he said, " flamingly from th.e heart."

Carlyle's strong convictions as to the misery and misgovernment of Ireland recommended him to men who had taken part in the rising of 1848.

Carlyle was the exponent of many of the deepest convictions of his time.

An opportunist to the last, he would readily have sacrificed any theological convictions he may have had in the interests of national uniformity.

He re-examined his convictions about justifying faith and whether they did lead to his declarations about Indulgences.

The teaching was not necessarily presented in the form of an over-elaborated moral lesson, but was associated with conceptions familiar to the land; and when these conceptions are examined from the anthropological standpoint, they are found to contain much that is strange and even abhorrent to modern convictions of a purely spiritual deity.

During what is relatively a very brief period deeper inquiry and newer knowledge have forced a slow, painful but steady readjustment of religious convictions.

His father Theodorus, one of the secretaries of the emperor Constantine Copronymus, had been scourged and banished for his zealous support of image-worship, and the son inherited the religious convictions of the father.

Jefferson had the full courage of his convictions.

Beneath a quiet surface he was fairly aglow with intense convictions and a very emotional temperament.

If Hippias, Polus and Thrasymachus defied conventional morality, they did so independently of one another, and in this, as in other matters, they were disputants maintaining paradoxical theses, rather than thinkers announcing heretical convictions.

A republican in his convictions, during his youth he had taken part in the Carbonarist movement in Lombardy.

An historical survey shows, indeed, that theosophy generally arises in connexion with religious needs, and is the expression of religious convictions or aspirations.

What they did was not only to keep the native race apart from social intercourse with themselves, but to shut them out from all participation in their own higher aims, and especially in their own religious convictions and ceremonial practices.

Seeing that the epic poems, as repeated by professional reciters, either in their original Sanskrit text, or in their vernacular versions, as well as dramatic compositions based on them, form to this day the chief source of intellectual enjoyment for most Hindus, the legendary matter contained in these heroic poems, however marvellous and incredible it may appear, still enters largely into the religious convictions of the people."

His opposition to protection in later years resulted from an honest change of convictions.

As attorney he was merely fulfilling his duty in obeying the command of the king; and in laying down the law on the disputed point, he was, we may be sure, speaking his own convictions.

Robert Lenthall, who joined the Newport company in 1640 when driven from Massachusetts, probably brought with him antipaedobaptist convictions.

The Persian kingsnone more so than Darius, whose religious convictions are enshrined in his inscriptions and, with the kings, their people, were ardent professors of the pure doctrine of Zoroaster; and the Persians settled in the provinces diffused his creed throughout the whole empire.

Crime had already diminished; it was calculated that the annual losses inflicted on the public by the depredations of the dangerous classes had appreciably fallen and a larger number of convictions had been secured.

There were almost no legal convictions and executions.

But all attempts to shake the prince's convictions fail.

His style, if occasionally somewhat turgid, was elevated and passionate, and it always bore the impress of that intensity of conviction which is the most powerful instrument a speaker can have to sway the convictions of an audience.

She was a woman of heroic nature and very strong convictions.

That God desires that all should be saved, and that the salvation of each depends on his own choice - these are the general convictions of modern theology.

We here see the influence of his convictions on the subject of "spiritualism."

There he married Anne de Tserclaes, and later on he proceeded by way of Basle to Zurich, where his Zwinglian convictions were confirmed by constant intercourse with Zwingli's successor, Bullinger.

He had assistance from two clerics of widely differing opinions - from Edmund Grindal, who was later, as archbishop of Canterbury, to maintain his Puritan convictions in opposition to Elizabeth; and from John Aylmer, afterwards one of the bitterest opponents of the Puritan party.

Eminently religious, and orthodox in his convictions, he did not seek to substitute a pagan for the Christian ideal.

His religious convictions were strengthened by his marriage to Johanna von Puttkamer, which took place in 1847.

He had passed his thirtieth year when, as he tells us, " he stood firm " in his convictions on all the subjects to the learning of which he had bent his mind fifteen years before.

There came a time, however, when Clement and more particularly his following had to acknowledge the vanity of these illusive dreams; and before his death, which took place on the 16th of September 1394, he realized the impossibility of overcoming by brute force an opposition which was founded on the convictions of the greater part of Catholic Europe, and discerned among his adherents the germs of disaffection.

Moreover, of one of his most central convictions, that of the sovereignty of God in election, he confesses that he could give no account.

The Liberal party had been instrumental in the reelection of Nunez, and looked for a policy in conformity with their views and political convictions.

When the question of primacy among American poets was canvassed by a group of the public men of Lincoln's time, the vote was for Whittier; he was at least one whom they understood, and who expressed their feeling and convictions.

In fact, it is with him the function of philosophy to classify and explain universal convictions and beliefs; but common-sense is not with him philosophy, nor is it the instrument of philosophy; it is simply the material on which the philosophical method works, and in harmony with which its results must ultimately be found.

The truth is that Cousin's doctrine of the spontaneous apperception of impersonal truth amounts to little more than a presentment in philosophical language of the ordinary convictions and beliefs of mankind.

I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions.

Ward in his Gifford lectures for 1896-1898 (Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1899), Huxley's challenge ("I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions") is one which a spiritualistic philosophy need not shrink from accepting at the hands of naturalistic agnosticism.

His execution was memorable from the part taken in it by the prince of Wales, who himself tried to reason the Lollard out of his convictions.

A paper on the " Roman Commonwealth" which belongs to this period, expresses convictions about religious liberty and the relations of religion to the state that were modified and deepened afterwards; objections to the sacerdotal conception of Christianity appear in another article; short work is made of ecclesiastical claims to infallibility in the interpretation of Scripture in a third; a scheme of utilitarian ethics, wider than that of Hobbes, is suggested in a fourth.

This opportunity of making a political confession of faith appears not only to have fortified him in his own convictions, but to have inspired him with the idea of imposing them on the public through the medium of his art.

It was to be foreseen that a similar assertion of independence would make itself heard in ethics also; and, indeed, amid the clash of dogmatic convictions, and the variations of private judgment, it was natural to seek for an ethical method that might claim universal acceptance from all sects.

Even in the second sense it hardly seems that the freedom of a man's will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong-doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise.

To obtain convictions the evidence of an informer was wanted, and the person selected was James Carey, a member of the Dublin Corporation and a chief contriver of the murders.

During a prolonged audience he had received from the pope assurances of private esteem and personal protection; and he trusted to his dialectical ingenuity to find the means of presenting his scientific convictions under the transparent veil of an hypothesis.

It remained the fact that Mr Chamberlain staked an already established position on his refusal to compromise with his convictions on a question which appeared to him of vital and immediate importance.

To its maintenance he had sacrificed " his religious convictions" and " the traditions of Russian policy " in consenting to uphold the integrity of Turkey; a sacrifice perhaps the less hard to make since, as he added, the Ottoman empire no longer existed.

When kids teased her about her outdated moral convictions, she got defensive and withdrew.

Up to 2012, there had been 4.2 million speeding convictionsin total, of which 2.2 million occurred in 2011.

In addition, there are around 3,500 quashed criminal convictionsa year.

People who have convictions for dishonesty or who are un discharged bankrupts are not allowed by law to manage or control charities.

Stewart, who has 18 separate convictions for 71 offenses, is serving a life sentence for the murder of his Asian cellmate.

Despite his Evangelical convictions, Haweis remained a staunch churchman.

However, central and local government should have more courage in their convictions to support plans which are environmentally acceptable and socially constructive.

It should also be noted that having a criminal record or unspent convictions is not an automatic barrier to becoming a custody visitor.

Gibbons, who the court heard had previous convictions for violence, admitted unlawful wounding on the first day of his trial last month.

Any failure to disclose convictions will also need to be taken into account.

The form only asked me to declare any unspent convictions and mentioned nothing about cautions.

All the above makes for an expansive independent label that possesses courage in their convictions and a determination to raise underground awareness.

The applicants complained of convictions and seizure orders of the State Security Courts as unjustified interference with freedom of expression.

I am not someone whose convictions are easily malleable.

During the 1970s there were a number of high profile convictions in the courts which were later found to have involved considerable police malpractice.

Unlike the translator, the interpreter renders the message in his/her mother tongue, giving the flavor, tone and convictions of the speaker.

For example, someone facing charges of child rape could have previous convictions for downloading child pornography from the internet revealed to the jury.

Can the moral realist explain the motivational force of our moral convictions?

Such tentative evidence is not yet sufficiently weighty to change the author's convictions that the universe must be finite in all respects.

It may be safely stated that Lotze would allow much latitude to individual convictions, as indeed it is evident that the empty notion of an absolute can only become living and significant to us in the same degree as experience and thought have taught us to realize the seriousness of life, the significance of creation, the value of the beautiful and the good, and the supreme worth of personal holiness.

Under the impression of the July revolution in Paris and of the orthodox and pietistic influences at Halle, Leo's political convictions were henceforth dominated by reactionary principles.

There are (I) the maison darrlt, temporary places of durance in every arrondissement for persons charged with offences, and those sentenced to more than a years imprisonment who are awaiting transfer to a maison centrale; (2) the maison de justice, often part and parcel of the former, but only existing in the assize court towns for the safe custody of those tried or condemned at the assizes; (3) departmental prisons, or inaisons de correction, for summary convictions, or those sentenced to less than a year, or, if provided with sufficient cells, those amenable to separate confinement; (4) maisons centrales and pnitenciers agricoles, for all sentenced to imprisonment for more than a year, or to hard labor, or to those condemned to travaux forces for offences committed in prison.

The policy of repression which in this capacity he pursued during the next five years secured for him many tangible rewards, in 1560 he was elevated to the archiepiscopal see of Malines, and in 1561 he received the cardinal's hat; but the growing hostility of a people whose religious convictions he had set himself to trample under foot ultimately made it impossible for him to continue in the Low Countries; and by the advice of his royal master he, in March 1564, retired to FrancheComte.

In a word, the study of biblical history, which is dependent in the first instance upon the written sources, demands constant attention to the text (which has had an interesting history) and to the literary features; and it requires a sympathetic acquaintance with Oriental life and thought, both ancient and modern, an appreciation of the necessity of employing the methods of scientific research, and (from the theological side) a reasoned estimate of the dependence of individual religious convictions upon the letter of the Old Testament.'

He expressed in an eager, disjointed, but condensed and laboured fashion, certain deep-lying convictions - that philosophy must come back from unsubstantial metaphysics to the solid facts of human nature and natural science, that the human body was no less important than the human spirit ("Der Mensch ist was er isst") and that Christianity was utterly out of harmony with the age.

In the course of his studies he discovered what he thought important variance between the teaching of the Church of England and that of the Bible, and he did not conceal his convictions.

It strengthened the hands of church democracy; it formed an alliance with the pure souls who held up to the church the ideal of apostolic poverty; it united itself for a time even with mysticism in a common opposition to the supremacy of the church; nay, it lent the strength of its convictions to the support of states and princes in their efforts to break the political power of the church.

In cases of conviction of wilful murder the reprieve, if any, is granted by the home secretary on behalf of the crown, and on convictions of murder the court seems now to have no power to reprieve except in the case of a pregnant woman.

On his return, "distrust of his own resolutions and convictions" led him to abandon for the time his intention of being a clergyman, and he settled down to the study of the law, "with a firm determination not to suffer it to engross my time so as to prevent me from pursuing other branches of knowledge."

A Glasgow professor, the Rev. Mr Simson, was attacked for Arminianism and Socinianism as early as 1717; and the battle raged between the more severe Presbyterians - who still hankered after the Covenant, approved of an old work The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646), and were especially convinced that preachers must be elected by the people - and the Moderates, who saw that the Covenant was an anachronism, thought conduct more important than Calvinistic convictions, and supported in the General Assembly the candidates selected by patrons, as against those chosen by the popular voice.

Eighty-three per cent of the annual convictions, summarily and on indictment, followed by committal to gaol, are for misconduct that is distinctly non-criminal, such as breaches of municipal by-laws and police regulations, drunkenness, gaming and offences under the vagrancy acts.

This is important as a preliminary stage, but philosophy properly begins when it attempts to coordinate or systematize those convictions in harmony, to conciliate apparent contradiction and opposition, as between the correlative notions of finite and infinite, the apparently conflicting notions of personality and infinitude, self and not-self; in a word, to reconcile the various sides of consciousness with each other.

As a politician " Labby " was the chartered jester of the House of Commons, but his pungent and somewhat cynical speeches were the expression of highly independent democratic convictions, deeply opposed to all forms of social privilege or Jingo imperialism.

What the Tribunal did not have and never saw was any record of an appeal which quashed either or both of the convictions.

Important Note Spent convictions are retained on police computers in accordance with the weeding rules for Criminal Convictions.

Such tentative evidence is not yet sufficiently weighty to change the author 's convictions that the universe must be finite in all respects.

An opposite view is the problem of wrongful convictions.

The leaders of the ministry knew that they might have to compromise on some of their convictions if they were to prosper in the community.

Unfortunately for him, when Taylor was caught, the court noted that he had two previous convictions for robbery.

For the average person, this may or may not be a problem depending on your convictions.

With Tom Cruise, you either love him for his good looks and acting ability, or you despise him for his radical views and religious convictions.

Shortly after the grisly discovery, police arrested three teenagers and a year later, the boys received convictions for the crime.

Many consumers find that they must choose between their organic convictions and their stretched budgets.

Behavioral problems studied included use of drugs and alcohol, running away, sexual acting out, and arrests and convictions for crimes.

For example, if your past convictions involved theft, employers may not be comfortable hiring you for positions where you'll have access to money or product inventory.

Some employers will only ask about felony convictions within the previous five years, but others will want to know about any prior convictions.

If charitable giving provides a window into a celebrity's personal beliefs and convictions, then Oprah's giving reveals that she has a very strong sense of personal heritage, and believes in the importance of giving back to the community.

Hoping to date someone who shares your religious convictions?

Scorpio is a water sign and, in general, water signs are profoundly governed by their emotions and convictions.

She isn't an overly emotional sign, she but clearly has convictions that govern her life.

Victor's passionate convictions earned him many lovers and wives through the decades.

In 2003 he captured Andrew Luster, who had fled to Mexico to avoid multiple rape convictions.

He is true to his convictions and beliefs, even when he has to go against the flow.

Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions.

The values we address today do not only resonate with people with deeply held religious convictions.

This was his acknowledgment of the impossibility of changing a man's convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view.