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Updated: May 20, 2025
The ancient turned upon these masterpieces of depravation the flash of intellectual scorn; the modern eyes them with a certain moral patience, and something of that curious kind of interest, looking half like sympathy, which a hunter has for the object of his chase. The Rameau of the dialogue was a real personage, and there is a dispute whether Diderot has not calumniated him.
It was the depravation of that instinct which had in the beginning of the summer drawn Calvinists and Lutherans forth in armed bodies, twenty thousand strong, to worship God in the open fields.
The Biblical and Christian conception of the primitive history of man does not at all demand the conception of a gradual sinking down of mankind from a supernatural height of a gradual depravation of our species which many representations seem to assume.
For the extension of the ways of thinking which are proper in politics, to other than political matter, means at the same time the depravation of the political sense itself. Not only is social expediency effacing the many other points of view that men ought to take of the various facts of life and thought: the idea of social expediency itself is becoming a dwarfed and pinched idea.
Let us then beware, and take warning from their example: let us not suffer our self-love to beguile us: let us not vainly persuade ourselves, that although prosperity and wealth may have caused us to relax a little too much, in those more serious duties which regard our Maker, yet that we shall stop where we are; or, at least, that we can never sink into the same state of moral depravation.
Laws, my lords, suppose reason; for who ever attempted to restrain beasts but by force; and, therefore, those that propose the promotion of publick happiness, which can be produced only by an exact conformity to good laws, ought to endeavour to preserve what may properly be called the publick reason; they ought to prevent a general depravation of the faculties of those whose benefit is intended, and whose obedience is required; they ought to take care that the laws may be known, for how else can they be observed? and how can they be known, or at least, how can they be remembered in the heats of drunkenness?
The aspect of the last forty years of the seventeenth century the age of the Restoration and the Revolution is far from being encouraging, and some features marking many of their literary works are positively revolting. Of the social evils of the time, none infected literature so deeply as the depravation of morals, into which the court and aristocracy plunged, and many of the people followed.
In general, this contradiction is looked upon as if a conception of the primitive history of man, remaining conformable to the Bible, could only be brought into harmony with a depravation theory, and not with an elevation theory; but certainly without reason.
It consecrated all vices, it wallowed in filth, and its depravation was such that the history of those times forms a dangerous picture, which it is not good for all men so much as to look upon. God, however, having dissembled for forty centuries, bethought him of his creation.
Virtue presented singly to the imagination or the reason, is so well recommended by its own graces, and so strongly supported by arguments, that a good man wonders how any can be bad; and they who are ignorant of the force of passion and interest, who never observed the arts of seduction, the contagion of example, the gradual descent from one crime to another, or the insensible depravation of the principles by loose conversation, naturally expect to find integrity in every bosom, and veracity on every tongue.
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