wretchlessness

By a merciful law of nature, the delusion is unsuspected, for assuredly, if any wholly unhumorous person once realised the full extent of his privation, nothing could save him from "wretchlessness" and despair.

More Toasts Marion Dix [Editor] Mosher

For till lately, from my youth up, I was given over to all wretchlessness and unclean living, and was by nature a child of the devil, and to every good work reprobate, even as others.

Westward Ho! 2007

Vice was a doctrine to them, and wretchlessness of unclean living was reduced to a system of philosophy.

Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Morley, John, 1838-1923 1905

Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches. 1889

Vice was a doctrine to them, and wretchlessness of unclean living was reduced to a system of philosophy.

Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) John Morley 1880

Julian and Lillyston had never shunned his society, either when he breathed the odour of sanctity, or when he sank into the slough of wretchlessness.

Julian Home 1867

Although Walter's football triumphs prevented him from losing self-respect and sinking into wretchlessness or desperation, they did not save him from his usual arrears of punishment and extra work.

St. Winifred's, or The World of School 1867

I was given over to all wretchlessness and unclean living, and was by nature a child of the devil, and to every good work reprobate, even as others.

Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth Charles Kingsley 1847

Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul, which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time.

A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6 1830

To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious mystery of life and the "wretchlessness of unclean living" -- (as our

Studies in Early Victorian Literature Frederic Harrison 1877