Not because of their vicious or degrading tendencies; on the contrary, it is their better instincts that cause them to be swept back into the abyss.
Is there anything more degrading to woman than to live with a stranger, and bear him children?
The vile thought instilled into woman by the Church and Puritanism that sex expression without the purpose of procreation is immoral, has been a most degrading influence.
This error had a doubly bad effect, both as degrading the immediate department in which it occurred, and as affording a protection for falsehood in other branches of science.
This is a degrading confession, sir; I can only say in self-defence that perhaps (in your good nature) you have made yourself partly responsible for my shame.
Perhaps on account of this degrading limitation, perhaps for other reasons, the boy did not fancy the task imposed upon him.
He had even acquired a most ridiculous theory about the degrading effects of civilization, and wanted to go back to a state of barbarism.
No spectacle can be more humiliating to man's pride than this; nothing can give him a more degrading sense of his own nothingness.
Luther's views on "the captive, or enslaved, will" are declared to be the most degrading and demoralizing teaching that men have been offered during the last centuries.
He must be shown the many hideous scenes of coarseness, vulgarity, obscenity, and degrading immorality in Martin Luther's life.
It is hoped that the believers of God may show magnanimity and raise a great sum for the building.
Many Negroes often look upon menial labor as degrading and only enter it from utter necessity, and then as a temporary make-shift.
Having a divine founder it is then a divine society, seeking men to save them from the degrading power of sin and everlasting punishment in hell.
But all extra and useless duties to a soldier become odious, because they are always associated in his mind with the ideas of the odious and degrading punishment inflicted for the neglect of them.
The only thing that could tempt me to be so silly, would be to assist a friend in such a degrading task who was to have the whole profit and shame of it.
The idea which took possession of the mind of Mohammed was the degrading polytheism of his countrymen, the multitude of their idols, the grossness of their worship, and the degrading morals which usually accompany a false theology.
Among the Arabs each tribe worshipped a particular star, and set up its particular idol, so that a degrading polytheism was the religion of the land.
Now I maintain that Mohammed, in seeking to impress his degenerate countrymen with the idea of the one supreme God, amid a most degrading and almost universal polytheism, was a great reformer.
This degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from Paganism, tinged the subsequent theology of the Christian monks, and entered largely into the theology of the Middle Ages.
It recognized something higher and nobler than devotion to material gains, or a life of degrading pleasure.
Nothing is so valuable as the preservation of national life; nothing is so healthy as scope for energies; nothing is so contemptible and degrading as universal sycophancy to official rule.
For the State has driven alcohol into the homes, and has consigned not only the husband, but often the wife also, to the degrading influence of alcohol not only on Saturday but on Sunday.
But you can understand the reluctance at a confession so insulting to him, so degrading to me.
But for Jewesses, by one of the ancient laws against that persecuted people, far heavier and more degrading punishments were annexed to almost every offense.
His false humour was an attempt to arouse the antipathy about degrading WOMAN to the quadrumana.
I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of matter.
The State is required to protect the people from degrading influences, to prevent them from being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of others, and to prevent them being brutalized through the avarice or apathy of themselves.
He furnishes another melancholy instance of the utter inefficiency of mere learning or intelligence in preserving a man from the most vicious and degrading abuses.
With good feelings, good principles, as far as the understanding is concerned, and an intellect as clear and as powerful as was ever vouchsafed to man, he is the slave of degrading sensuality, and sacrifices every thing to it.
I say your poor mamma must have known that she was degrading the whole family--degrading us, Isabella.
On the other hand, a degrading life will produce bad effects on offspring, causing deterioration of the organic disposition and strengthening the tendency to evil it may have inherited, or weakening its tendencies towards the good.
She should be educated to believe it degrading to marry for a home, without love and adaptation, and equally wrong to marry her inferior.
But the unblushing exhibition of degrading superstition shown in the last sentence recalled their just severity.
And yet this very situation offered her that gleam of hope which had thrilled her; a hope so wild in its improbability, so degrading in its possibility, that at first she knew not whether despair was not preferable to its shame.
Private houses were rifled, even the communion service of the church was carried away, while the women were subjected to the most degrading insults, and ravished in open day!
It was not less light than in the brightest of the dog-days, and the weather was hot in proportion; but how degrading was the spectacle, to behold the Caliph bespattered like an ordinary mortal!
