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Updated: May 20, 2025
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.
That state has fallen by the hands of the parricides of their country, called the Revolutionists and Constitutionalists of France: a species of traitors, of whose fury and atrocious wickedness nothing in the annals of the frenzy and depravation of mankind had before furnished an example, and of whom I can never think or speak without a mixed sensation of disgust, of horror, and of detestation, not easy to be expressed.
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.
In an age where everything disliked by those who think with the majority is called disaffection, it may perhaps be ill interpreted, when I venture to tell you that this universal depravation of manners is owing to the perpetual bandying of factions among us for thirty years past; when without weighing the motives of justice, law, conscience, or honour, every man adjusts his principles to those of the party he hath chosen, and among whom he may best find his own account: But by reason of our frequent vicissitudes, men who were impatient of being out of play, have been forced to recant, or at least to reconcile their former tenets with every new system of administration.
But neither public calamities, nor the sorrow and indignation of all good men, including his most loyal and attached adherents, could check the shameless profligacy of his palace-life. The diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys, both of whom were familiar with the court, picture the disgraceful depravation of morals, which was stimulated by the king's example.
But it is no less true, that the passion of the sexes for each other, exists in the most innocent and uncorrupted heart. Can it then be reasonable to condemn such a moderate indulgence of this passion, as interrupts no employment, and impedes no pursuit? This indulgence, in the present civilized state of society, requires no infringement of order, no depravation of character.
It is Father Le Conte, if I am not mistaken, who tells us how Want of Duty in this Particular is punished among the Chinese, insomuch that if a Son should be known to kill, or so much as to strike his Father, not only the Criminal but his whole Family would be rooted out, nay the Inhabitants of the Place where he lived would be put to the Sword, nay the Place itself would be razed to the Ground, and its Foundations sown with Salt; For, say they, there must have been an utter Depravation of Manners in that Clan or Society of People who could have bred up among them so horrible an Offender.
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.
Only great cities produce those unhealthy and unnatural human growths whose monstrosities are their stock in trade, whose power of life lies in their depravation. She tells us that these horrors weighed upon her, and caused her to try various solutions of the ills that are, and are permitted to be.
We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their entertainers.
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