Human depravity

“ It is said that he had arrived at that last stage of human depravity, when cruelty becomes pleasing for its own sake, when the sight of pain as pain, where no advantage is to be gained, no offence punished, no danger averted, is an agreeable excitement. ”

“ In a word, since men hardened in crime still sometimes sympathize with the recital and expression of elevated sentiments, ought we not to believe that all men have more or less in them of the good, the well doing, the just, but that poverty and ignorance, in falsifying, in stifling these Divine instincts, are the first causes of human depravity? ”

“ The frequency of a crime detracts not from its deformity, and sin is sin though an angel should commit it. And the general application of these ugly features of human depravity demonstrates the chilling truth, that he who has fallen can never hope to rise. ”

“ This moral indignation is not half strong enough in those who profess to talk the most about human depravity. And the objection to them is, not that they feel too much or speak too strongly, the actual wickedness, the actual and distinct sins of the wicked; but they speak too vaguely and generally of human wickedness; that they speak with too little discrimination to every man as if he were a murderer or a monster ”

“ It is impossible to contemplate this collected aggregate of the prisoners annually discharged upon the Public, without feeling a strong anxiety to remedy an evil rendered extremely alarming, from the number which composes the dismal catalogue of Human Depravity. ”

“ Human depravity, goaded on by every motive which spiritual wickedness could suggest, celebrated such a carnival as must have staggered even a Nero. Men, women, and children were torn limb from limb, after suffering every possible outrage and indecency. ”

“ If these are the general sentiments of man, what must be their depravity—what must be their degeneracy—who can blot out and erase from the bosom the virtue that is most deeply rooted in the human heart, and twined, within the cords of life itself? Aliens from nature! Apostates from humanity! And yet, if there be a crime more fell, more foul; if there be anything worse than a wilful persecutor of his mother, it is that of a deliberate instigator and abettor to the deed ”

“ There is nothing, my lords, to be found in the history of human turpitude; nothing in the nervous delineations and penetrating brevity of Tacitus; nothing in the luminous and luxuriant pages of Gibbon, [2] or of any other historian, dead or living, who, searching into measures and characters with the rigor of truth, presents to our abhorrence depravity in its blackest shapes, which can equal, in the grossness of the guilt, or in the hardness of heart with which it was conducted, or in low and groveling motives, the acts and character of the prisoner. ”

“ Moral depravity tends always to a corrupt and tortured body. Certain diseases are the product of certain crimes. The whole catalogue of human pains, from a toothache to the angina pectoris, is but a witness to a state of sin expressed by an experience of suffering. Carry this law into the experience of eternal sin. The bodies of the wicked live again as well as those of the righteous. You have therefore a spiritual body, inhabited and used, and therefore tortured, by a [pg 1035] guilty soul,—a body, perfected in its sensibilities, inclosing and expressing a soul matured in its depravity. ”

“ That many infants have been vessels of wrath and fire-brands of hell.”
Here we have a full, clear, perfect definition of total depravity, as held by Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. It is here taught that all mankind are by nature, “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all that is good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” Every human being, according to this theory, that God ever made, is “wholly inclined to all evil”—to lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc., etc., etc. All men, then, by nature are liars, thieves, and murderers. ”

“ XLIII. The depravity of disposition, indicated by an act, is a material consideration in several respects. Any mark of extraordinary depravity, by adding to the terror already inspired by the crime, and by holding up the offender as a person from whom there may be more mischief to be apprehended in future, adds in that way to the demand for punishment. By indicating a general want of sensibility on the part of the offender, it may add in another way also to the demand for punishment. ”

“ In truth, none seem to have any title to assert human nature to be necessarily and universally evil, but those whose own minds afford them one instance of this natural depravity; ”

“ It is the observation of a moral writer of eminence, 'That there is some degree of virtue in a man's keeping his vices to himself:' for, as [354] example is allowed to be more efficacious than precept in recommendation of virtue, where men act as it were in opposition to the depravity of human nature, how must the open and public example of lewdness draw men into the tide of wickedness, when their own passions and inclinations serve as winds to carry them down the stream! Men like these deserve punishment as public as their crimes. ”

“ Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters of the poor. When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull, prostitution had no meaning. We were clean, I tell you. We did not dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all the lesser animals of to-day clean. It required man, with his imagination, aided by his mastery of matter, to invent the deadly sins. The lesser animals, the other animals, are incapable of sin. ”

“ To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-in many ways an expression of rape of other people's work and resources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also the subject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit, generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexuality and its powerful action even outside the biological realm of human life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among the pure. ”

“ From the height of your refined, self-confident immorality, you deign to stoop to those 'depraved, coarse people.' You enlighten them, and play the benefactor to them; that is to say, with the means supplied to you by their labour, you inoculate them with your depravity, and blame, correct, and best of all 'punish' them, as unreasoning or vicious infants bite the breasts that feed them. ”

“ Some male sex deviants do not stop with infecting their often-innocent partners: they descended through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder. ”

“ When we speak of total depravity, it has reference to certain conditions. Man is not totally depraved now, and the reason is, there has been an atonement; but do away that, as many do, and total depravity would reign, and men would live and die totally degraded beings. ”

“ To aggravate the matter still more, we have made the punishment more infamous than the crime. A man may commit great crimes which indicate deep depravity; may escape the legal punishment thereof by gold, by flight, by further crimes, and yet hold up his head unblushing and unrepentant amongst mankind. ”

“ The French police reports tell us: "The depravity [353] of morals is extremely great, and the new generation is growing up in a state of disorder which promises to have the most unfortunate and most far-reaching consequences to future generations. Sodomy and Sapphic love flourish with the same shamelessness as prostitution, and the progress of all these vices is terrifying." [975] From another source we learn: "Society has become terribly depraved; fornication, adultery, incest, and murder by poison or violence are the fruits of philosophism. Things are as bad in the villages as in Paris. ”

“ But in fact the bringing up of the victim purposely for the vice is the greatest and most abomi- nable expression of premeditated depravity, whereas pederastic rape is more often a manifestation of senile dementia.
In the presence of a symptom of disease, the most unbridled demoralization fades and its liability to punishment is correspondingly diminished. ”

“ But if the pervert can only gratify his instinct by injuring other people, he must be regarded as a dangerous lunatic, and placed under curative treatment. There must, however, be no question of legal punishment. ”

“ Universal depravity, garments rolled in blood, fantastic crimes unimagined before, which startled the earth with their sublime atrocity. The American people have and ought to have no special desire to follow that terrible example of guilt and misery. ”

“ The most flagrant depravity permeated every class of society. The beauties of a terrestrial paradise were polluted by scenes which proclaimed the shocking degradation of mankind; by crimes which cannot be conceived without dismay ”

“ Much has been heard of late respecting criminal immorality—i.e., the abuse of the sexual powers, which human law recognises as crime. The boundary of criminal immorality has of late been extended in the hope of protecting young girls. When fathers and mothers begin to realize what the destruction of their children by lust really means, natural horror is felt at the corruption or torture of young children of either sex, and a storm of righteous indignation compels an attempt to provide a remedy. ”

“ He has therefore to measure the force by which these motives will be opposed; or, in other words, the 'strength of the temptation.' Now the more depraved a man's disposition, the weaker the temptation which will seduce him to crime. Consequently if an act shows depravity, it will require a stronger counter-motive or a more severe punishment, as the disposition indicated is more mischievous. ”

“ To the doctrine of the total depravity of man, she thus applies the reductio ad absurdum method of proof: “If man be not utterly depraved, he must be in one of these two states—either perfectly good, without any mixture of sin ”

“ Others seem to think that he would deliver homilies of a severer character; would rate men roundly about total depravity, and tell of unconditional election, salvation without works, and imputed righteousness, and talk of hell till the women and children fainted, and the knees of men smote together for trembling. ”

“ It is surely a most unnatural crime, and cannot, even in the most abandoned, be viewed without horror; but in the decent matron, it is still more unpardonable.—Those wretches who daily advertise their assistance to women in this business, deserve, in my opinion, the most severe of all human punishments. ”

“ And if this depravity of a world of moral agents did not, contemplated simply as a destruction of their rectitude, appear equivalent to the gravest import of the terms "the people are destroyed," the misery inseparable from the depravity instantly comes in our view to complete their verification. ”

“ Unfortunately it must be admitted that the most revolting of these crimes are done by sane individuals who, by reason of satiety in normal sexual indulgence, lasciviousness, and brutality, and not seldom during intoxication, forget that they are human beings. ”

“ In the debauches and excesses that excited these temporary manias, in the recklessness of life and property they fostered, and in their disastrous effects on mind and body, are depicted more than in any other one trait the thorough depravity of the race and its tendency to ruin. ”

“ I. The sale and purchase and violation of children. II. The procuration of virgins. III. The entrapping and ruin of women. IV. The international slave trade in girls. V. Atrocities, brutalities, and unnatural crimes. That is what I call sexual criminality, as opposed to sexual immorality. It flourishes in all its branches on every side to an extent of which even those specially engaged in rescue work have but little idea. Those who are constantly engaged in its practice naturally deny its existence. ”

“ The old doctrine of total depravity is the only thing that can explain the falsehoods, the dishonesties, the licentiousness, and the murders which are so rife in the world. Education, refinement, and even a high order of talent, cannot overcome the inclination to evil which exists in the heart, and has taken possession of the very fibres of our nature.” See Edwards, Original Sin, in Works, 2:309-510; Julius Müller, Doct. ”

“ Men of all ranks and ages, done to death by his hand or his head, by poison, by the knife, by drowning, by starvation—women deceived or violated, and then murdered, while their kisses were yet warm on his lips—infants tortured to death in the very wantonness of cruelty, and crime that must have been nigh akin to madness, gibbered, and glared upon him. ”

“ A boy of chivalrous feeling, whose blood would boil at any other form of outrage on a girl, will read a newspaper account of rape or indecent assault with a pleasure so intense that indignation and disgust are quite crowded out of his mind.
If, repelled by the coarseness of the streets, the young man allows lust or passion to lead him into seduction, he commits a crime the consequences of which are usually cruel in the extreme; for in most cases the seduced girl sinks of necessity into prostitution. ”