[f. prec. + -NESS.]
The quality or fact of being faithless. a. Want of fidelity, disloyalty, perfidy. b. Want of good faith, insincerity. c. Want of religious belief; infidelity.
1605. Bp. Hall, Medit. & Vows, I. § 10. So great distrust is there in man … from his impotence or faithlesnes.
1726. Pope, Letter to Hugh Bethel, 9 Aug., Lett. (1737). 320. I am sorry for his death, and wish he had lived long enough to see so much of the faithlessness of the world, as to have been above the mad ambition of governing such wretches as he must have found it to be composed of.
1758. T. Edwards, Canons Crit. (1765), 344. Sharp are the pangs that follow faithlessness.
1790. Blair, Serm., III. xiii. 275. When the heart is sorely wounded by the ingratitude or faithlessness of those on whom it had leaned.
a. 1849. J. H. Evans, in Spurgeon, Treas. Dav., Ps. lxxi. 17. The faithlessness of Abiathar, and the faithlessness of even his faithful Joab.
1849. Grote, Greece, II. xlvii. VI. 96. Perdikkas whose character for faithlessness we shall have … to notice.
1860. Ruskin, Mod. Paint., V. IX. xii. §4. 347. Faithlessness, or despair, the despair which has been shown already to be characteristic of this present century, and most sorrowfully manifested in its greatest men; but existing in an infinitely more fatal form in the lower and general mind, reacting upon those who ought to be its teachers.
