Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/142

 There's an immediate Answer that stops every body's Mouth; and the Virtue of the Lady is no more struck at, nor can be; for 'tis the Road of Nature, joined with the direction and limitation of the Law, and that as well the Laws of and Man; of which at large in its Place,

how then comes it to pass that People marry that would have no Offspring? And from what Principles do these People act who marry, and tell us, they hope they shall have no Children? This is to me one of the most unwarrantable and preposterous Things that I can think of in all the Articles of Matrimony; nor can I make out; if I were to set up to defend it, I say, I could not for my Life make it out, that there is the least pretence in it to Honesty; or to Modesty, nay, I would not undertake to justify the Morality of it.

let us first see if it can be reconciled to Modesty; for that is the particular Point I am upon, and whether it does not come justly under the Reproach of the Matrimonial Whoredom that I am speaking of.

you should come to a Lady of the greatest Modesty and Virtue in the World, and put it close to her upon any weighty Part of the Subject, as about Settlements, inheriting Estates, and the like, she would not scruple, tho' perhaps with some little Reluctance, at that Kind of the Question, that she expects to have Children when the Gentlemen and she comes together: Modesty obliges the Lady to shun and avoid the Discourse as much as she can; but she tacitly owns she is to be understood so in the very Nature of the Thing; and if she is talked to among her own Sex, where she could be free, and they were so weak as to ask her such a