Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/296

 2. the Woman's Part; to say nothing of the vitious and Beastly Part, and her want of Modesty, in respect only to her Sex; yet besides all that, here is a Testimony of most egregious Folly; a perfect neglect of her own Virtue, and of her Reputation: Abandoning the first to gratify the Man, and risquing the last on a bare verbal Promise, which it is not only possible he may break, and probable he will break, but highly improbable that he should not; nay, according to the Custom of Men, according to the profess'd Notion, and the common Language of the Town, she ought never to expect the performance of such a Promise. He's a Rogue, say they, that gets a Woman with Child before Marriage; and he's a Fool that marries her afterwards: He's a Knave that promises to marry her; but he's a Fool that performs it.

3. return to the Man's Part. How absurd a Thing is it to make a Whore of his own Wife; to expose her for a Whore, who he proposes to embrace as an honest Woman ever after; to draw her in to be exposed, to be flouted at, to be jested with, and insulted all her Days, to be the scorn of her Neighbours, slighted and shunned by modest Women, and laughed at by every Body; and all this to gratify a present Gust of vitious Desire, which, in a few Days, would be satisfied without the hazard of Reputation, without Reproach, and without Reproof? How ridiculous does it make the Man, and how ashamed is he afterwards to think of it, even as long as he lives? And it may be, that very Child born, the Product of this Matrimonial Whoredom, shall live to upbraid his own