S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Wickedness
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. The human faculties and reason are in such cases deranged; and therefore this man has been dragged by the just vengeance of Providence to make his own madness the discoverer of his own wicked, perfidious, and cursed machinations in that devoted country.
Wickedness is a kind of voluntary frenzy, and a chosen distraction; and every sinner does wilder and more extravagant things than any man can do that is crazed and out of his wits only with this sad difference, that he knows better what he does.
Was ever any wicked man free from the stings of a guilty conscience, from the secret dread of divine displeasure, and of the vengeance of another world?
Tis scarce possible for any man to be so strangely infatuated, so wholly lost to common reason, as to believe that vicious courses, despising of religion, walking contrary to God, can be the means to entitle him to this future happiness.