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That many passages have passed in a state of depravation through all the editions is indubitably certain; of these the restoration is only to be attempted by collation of copies or sagacity of conjecture. The collator's province is safe and easy, the conjecturer's perilous and difficult.
So Dolomieu, speaking of the depravation incroyable des moeurs which accompanied the earthquake of 1783, recounts the case of a householder of Polistena who was pinned down under some masonry, his legs emerging out of the ruins; his servant came and took the silver buckles off his shoes and then fled, without attempting to free him.
Were the vanity of the self-sufficient philosopher susceptible of remorse, would he not, when he beholds this country, lament his presumption, in supposing he had a right to cancel the wisdom of past ages; or that the happiness of mankind might be promoted by the destruction of their morals, and the depravation of their social affections? Yours, &c. April 30, 1794.
Such literature as these tales of Diderot's, was the mirror both of the ordinary practical sentiment and the philosophic theory. A nation pays dearly for one of those outbreaks, when they happen to stamp themselves in a literary form that endures. There are those who hold that Louvet's Faublas is to this day a powerful agent in the depravation of the youth of France.
The incident will illustrate the greed of the priesthood and the depravation of sacrifice. It had become a system of bargaining and extortion. The sacrifices fed the priesthood more substantially than the gods. There was great advantage in starting with the human victim as the unit of value, and it is easy to see how substitution of animals became immensely profitable.
The original principles of the revolution, of themselves, naturally tended to produce such a depravation; but the suspension of religious worship, the conduct of the Deputies on mission, and the universal immorality of the existing government, must have considerably hastened it.
Cold, moisture, bad air, deficient nourishment, too frequent accompaniments of poverty, are peculiarly favorable to their production. The physical depravation thus induced is frequently transmitted to the brain in the next generation, and appears in the shape of mental disorder. Again, it is now well known that the qualities of the race are depreciated by the intermarrying of relatives.
Why, in meditating on Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier atmosphere of the West?
We have, according to the extent of the deficiency of certain articles of food, every degree of scorbutic derangement, from the most fearful depravation of the blood and the perversion of every function subserved by the blood to those slight derangements which are scarcely distinguishable from a state of health.
The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation.
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