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Updated: May 18, 2025
When a nation is wholly given over to lying and cheating in trade, or to hypocritical observances in religion, or to practical atheism, or to gross superstitions, or abominable dissoluteness in morals, or to the rule of feeble kings controlled by hypocritical priests and harlots, is it presumptuous to predict the consequences?
When these are told that in France young fellows famous for their dissoluteness, and raised to the highest dignities of the Church by female intrigues, address the fair publicly in an amorous way, amuse themselves in writing tender love songs, entertain their friends very splendidly every night at their own houses, and after the banquet is ended withdraw to invoke the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and call themselves boldly the successors of the Apostles, they bless God for their being Protestants.
Sterne died poor, if he did not die insolvent. At his death, a subscription was got up for the support of his wife and daughter. Churchill was imprisoned for debt, occasioned by his dissoluteness and extravagance, Cowper characterizing him as "spendthrift alike of money and of wit." Chatterton, reduced to a state of starvation and despair, poisoned himself in his eighteenth year.
In the main, then, we have, outside Italy, two very distinct halves of the Roman world: the Eastern, with its large cities, its active civic life, its high culture, its contributions to science, art, and luxury and, it must be added, its general dissoluteness with here and there its pronounced leanings to Oriental fanaticism; and the Western, with very few large towns, with a life more determined by clans and tribes or country districts, with comparatively little social culture, contributing almost nothing to art or science, stronger in its contribution of natural products and virile men than in those of the more refined or artificial luxury.
"Can you not understand now, Kenneth, how I came to fall so low? Can you not understand this dissoluteness of mine, which led them to dub me the Tavern Knight after the King conferred upon me the honour of knighthood for that stand of mine in Fifeshire? You must understand, Kenneth," he insisted almost piteously, "and knowing all, you must judge me more mercifully than hitherto."
Lament grievously and be sorry, because thou art still so carnal and worldly, so unmortified from thy passions, so full of the motion of concupiscence, so unguarded in thine outward senses, so often entangled in many vain fancies, so much inclined to outward things, so negligent of internal; so ready to laughter and dissoluteness, so unready to weeping and contrition; so prone to ease and indulgence of the flesh, so dull to zeal and fervour; so curious to hear novelties and behold beauties, so loth to embrace things humble and despised; so desirous to have many things, so grudging in giving, so close in keeping; so inconsiderate in speaking, so reluctant to keep silence; so disorderly in manners, so inconsiderate in actions; so eager after food, so deaf towards the Word of God; so eager after rest, so slow to labour; so watchful after tales, so sleepy towards holy watchings; so eager for the end of them, so wandering in attention to them; so negligent in observing the hours of prayer, so lukewarm in celebrating, so unfruitful in communicating; so quickly distracted, so seldom quite collected with thyself; so quickly moved to anger, so ready for displeasure at others; so prone to judging, so severe at reproving; so joyful in prosperity, so weak in adversity; so often making many good resolutions and bringing them to so little effect.
There must have been other reasons unknown to me; what I saw was much dissoluteness and shamelessness, and a great deal of improper conduct.
Everywhere misfortune was kneeling, for the rich, the healthy, the happy hardly pray; all around in the church were women, widowed or old, without love, women deserted, women whose home was a torture, praying that existence might become more merciful, that the dissoluteness of their husbands might cease, the vices of their sons amend, the health of those they loved grow stronger.
Lincoln was quite without any elegant and sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained.
And so an ingenious idea! it is not only he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the eighties, 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class'; 'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall: that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that the causes of it are world-wide, elemental; and that we ought to hang up a lamp before Laevsky, since he is the fated victim of the age, of influences, of heredity, and so on.
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