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Nor is the case much better among the vulgar, especially in great towns where the profaneness and ignorance of handicraftsmen, small traders, servants, and the like, are to a degree very hard to be imagined greater.
"Friend Judd," said I, for I was the only one who retained my gravity, "thee ought not to wear a mask, it is a bad sign." "I wear no mask, Mr Slick," he said, "I use no disguises, and it does not become a professing man like you to jeer and scoff because I reprove the man Peter for his profaneness."
Without profaneness, and in all sincerity, they might have thanked God for the, to them, harmless recreation. This I suppose possible in the case of some, but for you it is not so.
But if language and sentiments, which would not be tolerated among respectable people, and would excite indignation if addressed to the most uncultivated and coarse servant girl, not openly vicious, by an ordinary young man, and profaneness which would brand him who uttered it as irreligious, are improper amusements for the young and for Christians of every age, then at least fifty of these plays are to be condemned."
"It is not too late," said the old officer, "if you will listen calmly, and learn that there is no necessity for such profaneness as you have used. Oaths and exclamations cannot destroy facts, any more than sunbeams can dissolve iron: so, avoid, I pray you, idle or wicked words, and listen. You would prevent this marriage?"
But I always sorted myself with persons of ingenuity, temperance, and sobriety; for I loathed scurrilities in conversation, and had a natural aversion to immoderate drinking. So that in the time of my greatest vanity I was preserved from profaneness and the grosser evils of the world, which rendered me acceptable to persons of the best note in that country then.
I was awakened from the most delightful of dreams to a disgusting reality, and would have given kingdoms to have once more renewed my trance. The friends of Hector, though not all of them his equals in turbulence profaneness and folly, were of the same school. Their language, though less coarse, was equally insipid. Their manners, when not so obtrusive, were more bald.
For, while we might think of the many hours merged by them in apathy and needless sleep, with a wish that those hours could be recovered to the account of their existence, we might well wish that the hours could be struck out of it which they may sometimes give, instead, to conversation; in parties where ignorance, coarse vulgarity, and profaneness, are to support the dialogue, on topics the most to their taste; always including, as the most welcome to that taste, the depravities and scandals of the neighborhood; while all the reproach and ridicule, expended with good-will on those depravities, have the strange result of making the censors the less disinclined themselves to practise them, and only a little better instructed how to do it with impunity.
And, on the other side, what liberty, what profaneness, what whoredoms, nay, what sins of Sodom are committed in it, insomuch that it could be the saying of a friar to myself, while I was in it, that he verily thought there was no one city in the world wherein were more Atheists than in Rome.
"My neighbors," he says, "were amazed at my great conversion from prodigious profaneness to something like a moral life and sober man. Now, therefore, they began to praise, to commend, and to speak well of me, both to my face and behind my back. Now I was, as they said, become godly; now I was become a right honest man.
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