Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/22

Rh Subject; that as it cannot be handled decently, and cannot be discours'd of modestly, so it is not intended to be so, but that 'tis a meer Bait to the Curiosity of that Part of the reading World, whose Vices are prompted as much by a pretended reproving them as by the plainest Expressions: That it forms the same Ideas in their Minds, and they receive the Notions of Vice in as lively a form by the very Methods taken to expose and condemn the Facts, as if those Fads were represented to the Opticks in all their shameless Nudities, with the most vitious and corrupt Dress that could be put upon them on a Stage, or in a Masquerade.

I shall answer these People best by a Silence in my Introduction, and a speaking Performance. It is my Business to let them see they are mistaken, and that a truly modest Design may be pursued with the utmost Decency, even in treating of a Subject, in which all the vilest Breaches made upon Decency by a wicked and hitherto unreproved Behaviour are to be censured and exposed: As to a vicious Mind forming corrupt Ideas from the most modest Expressions, I have only this to say; The Crime of that Part is wholly their own, I am no way concerned in it: The healing fructifying Dews, and the gentle sweet refreshing Showers, which are God's Blessing upon the Earth, when they fall into the Sea are all turned Salt as the Ocean, ting'd with the gross Particles of Salt which the Sea-Water is so full of. The same warm cherishing Beams of the Sun which raise those sweet Dews from the Earth, shining upon the stagnate Waters of an unwholsome Lake or Marsh, or upon a corrupted Jakes or Dunghill,