A failure to maintain a higher state

Usage examples of backsliding.

In the meantime Wilhelmina was daily and hourly exposed to the mortifying animadversions of her mamma, who, with all the insolence of virtue, incessantly upbraided her with the backslidings of her vicious life, and exhorted her to reformation and repentance.

Griffin suspected she had too solid a grasp of what she wanted to do much backsliding now, but she had to realize that herself.

To a scientist, the scene would seem irrefutable proof that the new theory is truethe human race is backsliding toward the primordial bog.

Quilp accompanied this admission with such an awful wink, indicative of old rovings and backslidings, that Mrs.

Quilp did in his own person represent and embody that Evil Power, who was so vigorously attacked at Little Bethel, and who, by reason of her backslidings in respect of Astley’s and oysters, was now frolicsome and rampant.

Alms to so eminent a religious house in its persecution and need provided an infallible means of acquiring merit, and there must be many in so large a town willing to pay a modest price to buy off reprobation for minor backslidings.

He had a liking for long sermons, and a sad abhorrence of amusements, and sat out the morning and the evening services regularly—and kept up his dissenting connection too, and gave them money—and appeared in print, in all charitable lists—and mourned over other men's backslidings and calamities in a lofty and Christian way, shaking his tall bald head, and turning up his pink eyes mildly.

And he praised the father of men, that the very backslidings of those he loved had brought about their repentance and uplifting.

But the doomed young rebel (otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign of grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his backslidings to the baronet.

Some of you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile at so much 'hysterics.