Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 1210 |
| AUTHOR: | Timothy Dwight (1752–1817) |
| QUOTATION: | For what end shall we be connected with men, of whom this is the character and conduct?… Is it, that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man? |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Dwight, president of Yale, preached this sermon on July 4, 1798, at New Haven, Connecticut. In 1798, much of the anti-French feeling was directed at the Jeffersonians, who were the champions in America of the French Revolution. In the congressional elections that year, the Jeffersonians lost heavily as the Federalists won control of both the House and the Senate. In this sermon, Dwight warned that a victory for the Jeffersonians meant lustful moral depravity.—Saul K. Padover, Jefferson, pp. 251–52 (1942). |
| SUBJECTS: | Morality |