Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/336

 easily then is this scandalous Excess to be cured? They have very little regard to Modesty, to the demands of their Reason or of Religion, who will not reduce themselves to a moderate Degree of Heat, in order to mortify such criminal Desires as these; if a little abatement of Wine, or of strong nourishing and rich Diets, and feeding more sparingly, would do it, they must have no desire to live within Bounds, like Christians, and like Men, who will not abate a little at the Trencher, that they may be able to abate in another Place.

and Drunkenness are too near a-kin to the Debaucheries of Love, as they may well be stiled, not to be called the Parents of the Vice. If you restrain the Original, you cut off the sequent Crime; if the Springs are cut off, the Streams will soon fail; if the Fountains are stopt, the Rivers will soon be dry; and they that will not suffer so small a Mortification as the denying themselves a little in the excesses of the Table and the Bottle, in order to abate some of the more criminal Excesses in the other Place, loudly tells us, they are in love with the Crime, that they are pleas'd with the Vice; and that it is not that they cannot restrain themselves, but that, delighting in the vile Part, they don't desire to restrain themselves, or to be restrained; that they will not remove the Fewel, lest the Fire should abate: Thus one Excess follows another; a Debauchery of one kind follows the Debauchery of another; the Matrimonial Whoredom follows the Drunkenness and the Gluttony, by the same Necessity, and as naturally as the Consequence follows the Cause; the Influx occasions the Efflux, and the Man is but the