S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Immorality
When men of rank and fortune pass away their lives in criminal pursuits and practices they render themselves more vile and despicable than any innocent man can be, whatever low station his fortune and birth have placed him in.
Do we not see that slothful, intemperate, and incontinent persons destroy their bodies with disease, their reputations with disgrace, and their faculties with want?
The inservient and brutal faculties controlled the suggestions of truth; pleasure and profit, overswaying the instructions of honesty, and sensuality perturbing the reasonable commands of virtue.
Is it not wonderful that base desires should so extinguish in men the sense of their own excellence as to make them willing that their souls should be like the souls of beasts, mortal and corruptible with their bodies?
Through the want of a sincere intention of pleasing God in all our actions, we fall into such irregularities of life as, by the ordinary means of grace, we should have power to avoid.
Nor could they have slid into those brutish immoralities of life had they duly manured those first practical notions and dictates of right reason which the nature of man is originally furnished with.