Ductus deferens

“ This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it doggedly. Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final No; until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious; a vain rebel against God's law. And then from that Vision Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an earth gray and stern rolling on beneath a dark despair. ”

“ Their eyes are forever open to human misery. They walk amid desecrated affections, insulted virtue, and blasted hopes. They have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and are moral pests. ”

“ The millstones of envy and malice are weighing down that mortal mind to the depths of its evil nature, where the cankering chains of sin will hold it until suffering balances the account, loosens their cold clasp, subdues the perverse will, and quenches in agony the fires of remorse. Aggravation of error foretells its doom, repeating the pagan opinion, “Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.” ”

“ Who think that crying out to other nations, old in their iniquity, ‘We are no worse than you!’ (No worse!) is high defence and ‘vantage-ground enough for that Republic, but yesterday let loose upon her noble course, and but to-day so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers, foul to the eye and almost hopeless to the sense, that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with disgust. ”

“ Go with the canker-worm of festering corruption ever hanging, like an incubus, upon your prostituted heart, and may its fangs, charged with burning poison, pierce the very vitals of existence, till life itself shall become a burden and a curse! ”

“ Stand to me now in the place of God, who has forsaken me, and give me this one thing. They said you were taken with the fury of devils; they said you were relentless, mad with hate and the desire of vengeance. But you are not. They have spoken false of you,' she cried. 'You are calm and still. You look down upon this thing and despise it—you are so far above it—but you have no grudge against it. You will deal nobly by it. There are no petty passions in your nature. They told me you were sworn to withhold from me freedom, to keep me in the dust. But you will not refuse this thing. ”

“ It is the curse of such a nature - it is a main part of the heavy retribution on itself it bears within itself - that while deference and concession swell its evil qualities, and are the food it grows upon, resistance and a questioning of its exacting claims, foster it too, no less. The evil that is in it finds equally its means of growth and propagation in opposites. It draws support and life from sweets and bitters; bowed down before, or unacknowledged, it still enslaves the breast in which it has its throne; and, worshipped or rejected, is as hard a master as the Devil in dark fables. ”

“ Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. ”

“ The mischief wrought by this delusion was wide-spread and terrible. Society was paralyzed with alarm; evil spirits were thought to overshadow the land; every nervous influence, even every ordinary symptom of disease, was ascribed to demoniac power. ”

“ The innocent are awaiting their justification, and the criminals an end to their remorse. All breathe an unwholesome air, and disease will pronounce terrible decrees. Despair dwells there: Despair says, either give me death, or judge me. ”

“ She tried to find the cause of her defeat, overwhelmed by the despair with which good people see wrong and injustice triumph. She sought for the cause of her defeat, but she could find none, none. She was right—according to all laws, [247] human and divine, she was in the right; she alone was right. Oh, her agony was insupportable, more and more dreadful as she got farther from the fact, and could see it in its full hideousness, examine and analyse it in its full infamy. ”

“ With a tone and look of calm and fearless irony, the scholar thus spoke, and left the room; but when he was on the stairs, he paused, and caught at the balustrade,—the sickness as of terror at some danger past, or to be, came over him; and this contrast between the self-command, or simulation, which belongs to moral courage, and the feebleness of natural and constitutional cowardice, would have been sublime if shown in a noble cause. In one so corrupt, it but betrayed a nature doubly formidable; for treachery and murder hatch their brood amidst the folds of a hypocrite’s cowardice. ”

“ We ask ourselves, then, with painful curiosity, what chain of fatal causes could thus debase these unhappy creatures, who have known shame and chastity? There are so many declivities, alas, which verge to that fall! It is rarely the passion of the depraved for depravity; but dissipation, bad example, perverse education, and, above all, want, which lead so many unfortunates to infamy; and it is the poor classes alone who pay to civilisation this impost on soul and body. ”

“ With the entrance of the Punishment into his thoughts, the shadow of the fatal beam begins to attend—not on himself, but on the object of his hate. At every new temptation, it is there, stronger and blacker yet, trying to terrify him. When she defies or threatens him, the scaffold seems to be her strength and “vantage ground”. ”

“ Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God, crying:
We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!
We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed,—curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home. ”

“ And here, you may take this passing remark—How much more odious people are who have radical faults, than those who commit, I do not say positive crimes, but occasional weaknesses. Even a noble nature may fall into a great error; but what is that to the ever-enduring pride, envy, malice, and conceit of a little mind? Yes, I would at any time rather be the fallen than the one, so exult over the fall of another. ”

“ In the work which has now reached its close, many strange phases of humanity have been exposed. We have beheld, with astonishment and horror, the extent to which it is liable to be the agent and victim of delusion and ruin. Folly that cannot be exceeded; wrong, outrage, and woe, melting the heart that contemplates them; and crime, not within our power or province to measure,—have passed before us. But not the dark side only of our nature has been displayed. ”

“ I devoured them with a bitterness and a sadness born of despair. "Yes, you are right," I said to myself, "you alone possess the secret of life, you alone dare to say that nothing is true and real but debauchery, hypocrisy, and corruption. Be my friends, throw on the wound in my soul your corrosive poisons, teach me to believe in you."
While buried in these shadows, I allowed my favorite poets and text-books to accumulate dust. I even ground them under my feet in excess of wrath. ”

“ The despot may plead he lights up the conflagration of empires, and encreases the miseries of human nature to the most horrible climax of anguish, by the command of this necessity. The priest may deceive, the lawyer defraud, and the physician poison, by the same impulse of necessity. ”

“ He spoke as men do in fevers. I could see that there were some about us who set him down as mad. There were those who jeered, as fools will at the sight of a man’s anguish, when, in the abandonment of his shame, he trails his soul in the dust. ”

“ Crying abuses—"bloated paupers," "bloated pluralists," and other corruptions hindering men from being wise and happy—had to be fought against and slain. Such a time is a time of hope. Afterward when the corpses of those monsters have been held up to the public wonder and abhorrence, and yet wisdom and happiness do not follow, but rather a more abundant breeding of the foolish and unhappy, comes a time of doubt and despondency. ”

“ With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life—here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two : here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption : an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside : a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together. ”

“ His recital finished, the abbé reflected long and earnestly.
"There is," said he, at the end of his meditations, "a clever maxim, which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature revolts at crime. Still, from civilization have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally stifle within us all good feelings, and lead us into guilt. ”

“ Why dread to sound the abyss which can be measured by everyone? Why fear to bring into the light of day unmasked wickedness, even though it confronts the public gaze unblushingly? Extreme turpitude and extreme excellence are both in the schemes of Providence ”

“ In an age of license to all sorts of vanity and wickedness, as lust, gluttony, avarice, envy, ambition, sloth, insolence, levity, contumacy, fear, rashness, private discords and public evils, extravagant and groundless wishes, vain confidences, sickly affections, shameless impieties, rapine authorized, and the violation of all things, sacred and profane: obligations are pursued with sword and poison; benefits are turned into crimes, and that blood most seditiously spilt for which every honest man should expose his own. ”

“ It will certainly be the sinner's ruin if it be not repented of in time. Is not destruction, a swift and sure destruction, to those wicked people, and a strange punishment to the workers of this iniquity? Fools make a mock at this sin, make a jest of it; it is with them a peccadillo, a trick of youth. But they deceive themselves with vain words, for because of these things, how light soever they make of them, the wrath of God, the unsupportable wrath of the eternal God, comes upon the children of disobedience, Eph. ”

“ One may imagine the emotions of shame, sorrow, and indignation with which the vast assembly, consisting of both sexes, listened to the words of an instrument, every sentence of which seemed to convey a personal indignity to the hearers—an outrage on all those ideas of decorum and decency in which they had been nurtured from infancy ”

“ That famine, frenzy, woe, and penury breathe.
These are the hired bravos who defend
The tyrant's throne—the bullies of his fear:
These are the sinks and channels of worst vice,
The refuse of society, the dregs
Of all that is most vile: their cold hearts blend
Deceit with sternness, ignorance with pride,
All that is mean and villainous, with rage
Which hopelessness of good, and self-contempt,
Alone might kindle; they are decked in wealth,
Honour and power, then are sent abroad
To do their work. ”

“ In actual outrages, in terrific visions, in mystical but real sufferings, which afflicted every sense and tortured every nerve, the animosity of the evil spirit evinced itself; and Almighty God permitted it, for she was of those chosen through much tribulation to ascend the steep path which is paved with thorns and compassed with darkness, but on which the ray of an unearthly sunshine breaks at times. ”

“ Disgust, fear, hypocrisy, slavishness and distrust, are the common expressions in the faces of the men, shewing the different races of which they are composed; opposed one to another in religion and fortunes, victors and vanquished, jealous and distrustful one of the other. The women are generally covered with a white cloth, looking like ghosts, or if uncovered, would look better veiled. If wearied with the dullness within, we go outside the walls, we find a few olive-trees on the north-west, a few young plantations on the west, and the rest barren and desolate. ”

“ For my part, I hate you, not only because of the injury you have done me and all the beliefs and laudable enthusiasms that you killed in me, but because you represent what are the most execrable and hideous things under the sun to me, hypocrisy and falsehood. ”

“ These impure spirits sully afresh the dwelling purged by penance, and there establish their home: — ‘and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.’ Now, if after each relapse our state becomes worse, if the devil’s yoke grows heavier, if we plunge deeper and deeper into evil, and our strength incessantly diminishes, where shall we be at last, and how come forth from the abyss? God can draw us out: — that we know; but if there is nothing to be despaired of, there is everything to be feared. ”

“ There are good and bad among all, and in all professions, but there is also a black spot in most, possibly all hearts, which may be developed to almost any extent, to change the justest, wisest, most moral men into 'human devils.' In reading the old reports and the expressions used by the judges in their summings-up and sentences, it is impossible not to believe that the awful power they possessed, and its constant exercise, had not only produced the inevitable hardening effect, but had made them cruel in the true sense of the word. ”

“ In this way they win over any who, did they but realise what they are doing, would shrink back with horror. The impudence and the domineering of some, and the thoughtlessness and imprudence of others, have combined to generate a pestilence in the air which penetrates everywhere and spreads the contagion. But let us pass to the apologist. ”