Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/79

 sall never take them for Christians till they reform; let them read their Reproof at large in Levit. XV, to which I refer.

I cannot quit this Part without making some Reflections upon parallel Cases. I have heard some serious and learned Divines say, that it is a worse Crime, and deserves a severer Censure from Man, (observe they did not speak of what either of them merited above) for a Man and Woman under Promises of Marriage to lie together before the Marriage is compleated, than a simple or single Fornication between two who have no design of Matrimony, that is in short, between what we ordinarily call a Whore and a Rogue; and I confess, though at first I hesitated a little at it, I am fully satisfied it is so; and the Reasons the said serious Divines gave me confirm me in that Opinion.

a Man to commit a single Fornication, say they, he Sins, against, and his own Soul, there is no Room to deny that; the Scripture is clear, and the Laws of God and Man concur in the Censure, as they do in the Prohibition: But for a Man to make a Whore of the very Woman who he intends and really designs to make his Wife, or, in plain English, to make a Whore of his Wife; he defiles his own Bed, pollutes his own Seed, spreads Bastardy in his own Race, and shews a most wicked vitiated Appetite, that could not with-hold himself from her meerly as a Woman, till the Performance of a lawful Marriage might make it seasonable, as well as lawful; such a Man satisfies the brutal Part at the expence of his Wife's Fame, his Child's Legitimacy, and to the scandal and offence of all good People that shall hear it, and