Lectures on female prostitution : its nature, extent, effects, guilt, causes, and remedy / by Ralph Wardlaw.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on female prostitution : its nature, extent, effects, guilt, causes, and remedy / by Ralph Wardlaw. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    opposite to virtue and to piety?—trembling to touch the unclean thing themselves, and solicitous to preserve others from the taint ? Has the reason why they do not come to the bible, why they refuse to stud}, or even to read or have any thing to do with it,—been really a conscientious appre- hension of having their principles contaminated, their refined moral sensibilities impaired, the warmth of their devotion cooled ?—The answers to such questions I leave to the con- science of every one of my hearers who has ever heard the imputation of lascmous and immoral tendency thrown upon that book which we believe to be the Book of God.— Further; in objecting, whether gravely or jeeringly, to par- ticular portions of the book, have these persons shown any disposition to make the allowance, which every well-informed and candid mind ought to make, and will make, for the diversity of customs and manners, of modes of speech, and peculiarities of association, and other similar circumstances, in different countries, and periods, and states of society ?— Or, without regarding these, let me rather ask, in what state of mind, and on what occasions, are such objections usually offered ? Is it in the spirit of seriousness or of lightness ? of sober earnest or of jest ? of piety or of profaneness ? of temperance or of social excitement ? of ribaldry or of purity ? —And let it be further considered, of what a different com- j)lexion and tendency arc the passages commonly referred to, from the sly inuendos, the studied refinements, the lus- cious and enticing pollutions, of voluptuous writing; where the excitement of the passions is felt to be the writer’s end in all that he discloses, and where the very drapery of con-
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