CHAPTER II.

FORNICATION.

THE first and great mischief, and by conse quence the guilt, of promiscuous concubinage, consists in its tendency to diminish marriages, and thereby to defeat the several beneficial purposes enumerat ed in the preceding Chapter.

Promiscuous concubinage discourages marriage by abating the chief temptation to it. The male part of the species will not undertake the incumbrance, expense, and restraint of married life, if they can gratify their passions at a cheaper price: and they will undertake any. thing, rather than not gratify

them.

The reader will learn to comprehend the magnitude of this mischief, by attending to the importance and variety of the uses to which marriage is subservient; and by recollecting withal, that the malignity and moral quality of each crime is not to be estimated by the particular effect of one offence, or of one person's offending, but by the general tendency and consequence of crimes of the same nature. The libertine may not be conscious that these irregularities hinder his own marriage, from which he is deterred, he may allege, by different considerations; much less does he perceive how his indulgences can hinder other men from marrying: but what will he say would be the consequence, if the same licentiousness were universal? or what should hinder its be coming universal, if it be innocent or allowable in him?

2. Fornication supposes prostitution; and prosti tution brings and leaves the victims of it to almost certain misery. It is no small quantity of misery in the aggregate, which, between want, disease, and insult, is suffered by those outcasts of human society,

who infest populous cities; the whole of which is a general consequence of fornication, and to the increase and continuance of which, every act and instance of fornication contributes.

3. Fornication produces habits of ungovernable lewdness, which introduce the more aggravated crimes of seduction, adultery, violation, &c.* Likewise, however it be accounted for, the criminal commerce of the sexes corrupts and depraves the mind. and moral character more than any single species of vice whatsoever. That ready perception of guilt, that prompt and decisive resolution against it, which constitutes a virtuous character, is seldom found in persons addicted to these indulgences. They prepare an easy admission for every sin that seeks it; are, in low life, usually the first stage in men's progress to the most desperate villanies; and, in high life, to that lamented dissoluteness of principle, which manifests itself in a profligacy of public conduct, and a contempt of the obligations of religion and of moral probity. Add to this, that habits of libertinism incapacitate and indispose the mind for all intellectual, moral, and religious pleasures; which is a great loss to any man's happiness.

4. Fornication perpetuates a discase, which may be accounted one of the sorest maladies of human nature; and the effects of which are said to visit the constitution of even distant generations.

The passion being natural, proves that it was intended to be gratified; but under what restrictions, or whether without any, must be collected from different considerations.

The Christian scriptures condemn fornication absolutely and peremptorily. "Out of the heart," says our Saviour, "proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, thefts, false witness, blasphe

* Of this passion it has been truly said, " that irregularity has no limits; that one excess draws on another; that the most easy, therefore, as well as the most excellent way of being virtuous, is to be so entirely." Ogden, Sermon xvi.

mies; these are the things which defile a man. These are Christ's own words; and one word from him upon the subject is final. It may be observed with what society fornication is classed; with murders, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. I do not mean that these crimes are all equal, because they are all mentioned together; but it proves that they are all crimes. The Apostles are more full upon this topic. One well-known passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews may stand in the place of all others; because, admitting the authority by which the Apostles of Christ spake and wrote, it is decisive: Marriage and the bed undefiled is honourable amongst all men; but whore-mongers and adulterers God will judge," which was a great deal to say, at a time when it was not agreed even amongst philosophers themselves that fornication was a crime.

The scriptures give no sanction to those austerities, which have been since imposed upon the world under the name of Christ's religion, as the celibacy of the clergy, the praise of perpetual virginity, the prohibitio concubitus cum gravida uxore; but, with a just knowledge of, and regard to the condition and interest of the human species, have provided, in the marriage of one man with one woman, an adequate gratification for the propensities of their nature, and have restricted them to that gratification.

The avowed toleration, and in some countries the licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication; and has contributed, with other causes, so far to vitiate the public opinion, that there is no practice of which the immorality is so little thought of or acknowledged, although there are few, in which it can more plainly be made out. The legislatures who have patronized receptacles of prostitution ought to have foreseen this effect, as well as considered, that whatever facilitates fornication diminishes marriages. And as to the usual apology for this relaxed discipline,

the danger of greater enormities if access to prostitutes were too strictly watched and prohibited, it will be time enough to look to that, when the laws and the magistrates have done their utmost. The greatest vigilance of both will do no more, than oppose some bounds and some difficulties to this interAnd, after all, these pretended fears are without foundation in experience. The men are in all respects the most virtuous, in countries where the women are most chaste.

There is a species of cohabitation, distinguishable, no doubt, from vagrant concubinage, and which, by reason of its resemblance to marriage, may be thought to participate of the sanctity and innocence of that estate; I mean the case of kept mistresses, under the favourable circumstance of mutual fidelity. This case I have heard defended by some such apology as the following:

"That the marriage rite being different in different countries, and in the same country amongst dif ferent sects, and with some scarce any thing; and, moreover, not being prescribed or even mentioned in scripture, can be accounted of only as of a form and ceremony of human invention: that, consequently, if a man and woman betroth and confine them. selves to each other, their intercourse must be the same, as to all moral purposes, as if they were legally married for the addition or omission of that which is a mere form and ceremony, can make no difference in the sight of God, or in the actual nature of right and wrong.

To all which it may be replied,

1. If the situation of the parties be the same thing as marriage, why do they not marry?

2. If the man choose to have it in his power to dismiss the woman at his pleasure, or to retain her in a state of humiliation and dependence inconsistent with the rights which marriage would confer upon her, it is not the same thing.

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It is not at any rate the same thing to the children. Again, as the marriage rite being a mere form, and that also variable, the same may be said of signing and sealing of bonds, wills, deeds of conveyance, and the like, which yet make a great difference in the rights and obligations of the parties concerned in them.

And with respect to the rite not being appointed In scripture the scriptures forbid fornication, that is, cohabitation without marriage, leaving it to the law of each country to pronounce what is, or what makes a marriage; in like manner as they forbid thefts, that is, the taking away of another's property, leaving it to the municipal law to fix what makes the thing property, or whose it is, which also, as well as marriage, depends upon arbitrary and mutable forms.

Laying aside the injunctions of scripture, the plain account of the question seems to be this: It is immoral, because it is pernicious, that men and women should cohabit, without undertaking certain irrevocable obligations, and mutually conferring certain civil rights; if, therefore, the law has annexed these rights and obligations to certain forms, so that they cannot be secured or undertaken by any other means, which is the case here (for whatever the parties may promise to each other, nothing but the marriage ceremony can make their promise irrevocable) it becomes in the same degree immoral, that men and women should cohabit without the interposition of these forms.

If fornication be criminal, all those incentives which lead to it are accessaries to the crime, as lascivious conversation, whether expressed in obscene or disguised under modest phrases; also wanton songs, pictures, books; the writing, publishing, and circulating of which, whether out of frolic, or for some pitiful profit, is productive of so extensive a