Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/76

 Philosophy, or common Sense, will trespass or break through.

I hope I have hitherto kept the Bounds of Decency, and given no Offence, though I am reproving one of the most notorious Breaches of conjugal Modesty; a thing even Nature her self abhors, tho' Nature vitiated may be said to be the Occasion of it; I say, Nature, under any just Regulation of Sense, Nature, abstracted from criminal Habits, abhors it; and, which is more, Nature speaks plainer in her Reproofs of that Crime than I dare do, while the Product of those impure and unlawful, however matrimonial Liberties, carry the indelible Marks of their Parents unhappy Excesses and Intemperances in their Faces, and on the blotch'd and bladdred Skin of their Posterity for many Years, nay, to their dying Days. As if Nature had declared to them, that she was able to shew her Resentment for the Breach of her tacit and secret Inhibitions; and that though they broke in upon her in secret by the power of an inflamed and vitiated Appetite, and thought themselves out of the reach of Punishment, yet that she was able to do her self Justice upon them, in a manner that they could not escape, and which should fix a lasting Infamy upon both the Offence and the Offender, by a Punishment which they should neither be able to avoid or to conceal.

I need explain my self no farther. Nature does it for me; and I have, by her Indulgence, a full liberty to touch this tender Part with the strictest Observation of my own Rules, since she has spoken it aloud, and has made the Crime of the Parent flagrant in the very Pictures of their Posterity.