"Alas, with what headlong step does Virtue,
overcome beneath vice, labor toward ruin?
Every semblance of Virtue exults no more,
the reins of madness are loosed by vice,
the Lucifer of justice grows faint; scarcely
does even a shadow of its shadow survive,
and it mourns the extinguished star of its own honor,
lacking light, abounding in night,
while the lightning of crimes flashes across the world,
the night of fraud clouds over the south wind:
yet no stars of the virtues
redeem the abyss of this night,
the evening of faith settles upon the world,
and the nocturnal chaos of fraud abounds.
Faith grows faint through fraud, and fraud too
deceives fraud with fraud, so guile presses upon guile,
the world's customs lack the custom of custom,
laws lack law, and right of its own
tenor loses its rights; now without right
does every right come to be, law thrives without law.
The world degenerates; already the golden
ages of the world degenerate; the world
is now clothed by the poverty of iron,
whom once nobility clothed in gold;
now, now hypocrisy is what frauds seek
as a cloak, and the reeking stench of crimes,
that it may lend a cloak to its depraved odor,
seeks for itself the balsams of the virtues.
So the nettle cloaks the poverty of its form with roses,
seaweed with hyacinths, dross with silver, dye with purple,
so that faces may sometimes redeem their crimes.
But crime strips off all its trappings,
nor does it color itself with the light of justice:
for vice glosses itself openly,
fraud itself becomes the tongue of its own madness.
What safety remains, when guile arms
even mothers against their own flesh?
When brotherly love labors under fraud,
and the right hand lies to its sister?
The right of honesty is reckoned reprobate,
to observe the honest, and the law
of piety, is dishonesty; to be chaste
is now, for all, a shame.
Without shame,
the man who is not human
strips himself of human practices.
Degenerate, then,
he puts on the degenerate acts of the beast,
and thus, unmanning himself, is to be unmanned."