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 Heberws 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 honour"able amongst all men; but whoremongers and adulterers God "will judge;" which was a great deal to say at a time when it was not agreed, even amongst philosophers, 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 restrained 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 legislators 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 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, after the laws and 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.

course.

There is a species of cohabitation, distinguishable, no doubt, from romiscuous concubinage, and which, by reason of its resemblance marriage, may be thought to participate of the sanctity and inocence 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 different 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 themselves to each other, their "intercourse must be the same, as to all moral purposes, as if they "were legally married; for the addition or admission of 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.

It is not at any rate the same thing to the children.

Again, as to 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, like marriage, depends on 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 mischief from so mean a temptation, that few crimes, within the reach of private wickedness, have more to answer for, or less to plead in their excuse.

Indecent conversation, and by parity of reason all the rest, are forbidden by St. Paul, Eph. iv. 29. "Let no corrupt communica"tion proceed out of your mouth;" and again, Col. iii. 8. "Put off "-filthy communication out of your mouth."

The invitation, or voluntary admission of impure thoughts, or the suffering them to get possession of the imagination, falls within the same description, and is condemned by Christ, Matt. v. 28. “Who66 soever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed "adultery with her already in his heart." Christ, by thus enjoining a regulation of the thoughts, strikes at the root of the evil.

CHAPTER III.

SEDUCTION..

THE seducer practises the same stratagems to draw a woman's person into his power, that a swindler does, to get possession of your goods, or money; yet the law of honour which abhors deceit, applauds the address of a successful intrigue: so much is this capricious rule guided by names, and with such facility does it accommodate itself to the pleasures and conveniency of higher life!

Seduction is seldom accomplished without fraud; and the fraud is by so much more criminal than other frauds, as the injury effected by it is greater, continues longer, and less admits of reparation.

This injury is threefold: to the woman, to her family, and to the public.

1. The injury to the woman is made up, of the misery she suffers from shame, of the loss she sustains in her reputation and prospects of marriage, and of the depravation of her moral principle.

1. This misery must be extreme, if we may judge of it from those barbarous endeavours to conceal their disgrace, to which women, under such circumstances, sometimes have recourse: compare this barbarity with their passionate fondness for their offspring in other cases. Nothing but an agony of mind, the most insupportable, can induce a woman to forget her nature, and the pity which

́even a stranger would show to a helpless and imploring infant. It is true, that all are not urged to this extremity; but if any are, it affords an indication of how much all suffer from the same cause. What shall we say to the authors of such mischief?

2. The loss which a woman sustains by the ruin of her reputation, almost exceeds computation. Every person's happiness depends in part upon the respect and reception they meet with in the world; and it is no inconsiderable mortification, even to the firmest tempers, to be rejected from the society of their equals, or received there with neglect and disdain. But this is not all, nor the worst. By a rule of life, which it is not easy to blame, and which it is impossible to alter, a woman loses with her chastity the chance of marrying at all, orin any manner equal to the hopes she had been accustomed to entertain. Now, marriage, whatever it be to a man, is that from which every woman expects her chief happiness. And this is still more true, in low life, of which condition the women are, who are most exposed to solicitations of this sort. Add to this, that where a woman's maintenance depends upon her character, (as it does, in a great measure, with those who are to support themselves by service,) little sometimes is left to the forsaken sufferer, but to starve for want of employment, or to have recourse to prostitution for food and raiment.

3. As a woman collects her virtue into this point, the loss of her chastity is generally the destruction of her moral principle: and this consequence is to be apprehended, whether the criminal intercourse be discovered or not.

II. The injury to the family may be understood by the application of that infallible rule, "of doing to others what we would that others should do unto us."-Let a father or a brother say, for what consideration they would suffer this injury in a daughter or a sister and whether any, or even a total loss of fortune, would create equal affliction and distress. And when they reflect, upon this, let them distinguish, if they can, between a robbery committed upon their property by fraud or forgery, and the ruin of their happiness by the treachery of a seducer.

:

III. The public at large lose the benefit of the woman's service in her proper place and destination, as a wife and parent. This, to the whole community, may be little; but it is often more than all the good which the seducer does to the community can recompense. Moreover, prostitution is supplied by seduction; and in proportion to the danger there is of the woman's betaking herself, after her first sacrifice, to a life of public lewdness, the seducer is answer able for the multiplied evils to which his crime gives birth.

Upon the whole, if we pursue the effects of seduction through the complicated misery which it occasions; and if it be right to estimate crimes by the mischief they knowingly produce, it will appear something more than mere invective to assert, that not one half of the crimes for which men suffer death by the laws of England, are so flagitious as this.*

CHAPTER IV.

ADULTERY.

A NEW sufferer is introduced, the injured husband, who receives a wound in his sensibility and affections, the most painful and incurable that human nature knows. In all other respects, adultery on the part of the man who solicits the chastity of a married woman, includes the crime of seduction, and is attended with the same mischief.

The infidelity of the woman is aggravated by cruelty to her children, who are generally involved in their parent's shame, and always made unhappy by their quarrel.

If it be said that these consequences are chargeable, not so much upon the crime, as the discovery, we answer, first, that the crime could not be discovered unless it were committed, and that the commission is never secure from discovery; and secondly, that if we allow of adulterous connexions, whenever they can hope to *escape detection, which is the conclusion to which this argument conducts us, we leave the husband no other security for his wife's chastity, than in her want of opportunity or temptation; which would probably deter most men from marrying, or render marriage a state of jealousy and continual alarm to the husband, which would end in the slavery and confinement of the wife.

The vow, by which married persons mutually engage their fidelity, is "witnessed before God," and accompanied with circumstances of solemnity and religion, which approach to the nature of an oath. The married offender therefore incurs a crime little short of perjury, and the seduction of a married woman is little less than subornation of perjury;-and this guilt is independent of the discovery.

*Yet the law has provided no punishment for this offence beyond a pecuniary satisfaction to the injured family; and this can only be come at, by one of the quaintest fictions in the world, by the father's bringing his action against the seducer, for the loss of his daughter's service, during her pregnancy and nurturing.