shadow, as profane Esau sold his birthright for a morsel, is self-murder of a most odious kind.

Q. 17. But you make also our friends that love us to be murderers of us, if they draw us to sin, or neglect their duty?

As the love of his own flesh doth not hinder, but further the drunkard's, fornicator's, and idle person's murder of his own soul; so your friend's carnal love to you may be so far from hindering, that it may further your destruction. They that draw each other to fornication, to gaming, to time-wasting plays, to gluttony and drunkenness, may do it in love. If they give you poison in love, it will kill you."

And if parents that are bound to feed their children do famish them, do you think they do not murder them by omission? So may they; and so may ministers murder the souls that they are by nature or office entrusted to instruct and diligently govern.

Q. 18. Are there any other ways of murder?

A. So many that it is hard to number them. As by rash anger, hatred, malice, by drunkenness disposing to it. By magistrates not punishing murderers: by not defending the lives of others when we ought, and abundance more, which you may read in Bishop Downam's tables on the commandments.

Q. 19. Must I defend my parents or children against the magistrate, or any one that would kill them by his commission? A. Not against justice, no doubt; what you must do against subjects who pretend an illegal commission to rob or kill yourself, parents, or children, or destroy cities and countries, is partly touched on under the fifth commandment, and partly matter unmeet for a catechism, or private, unlearned men's unnecessary discourse.

Q. 20. Are there more ways of self-murder?

A. Among others, excess of meat and idleness, destroy men's health, and murder millions.

CHAP. XL.

Of the Seventh Commandment.

Q. 1. WHAT are the words of the seventh commandment ? A. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

n Gal. iv. 17, 18.

Q. 2. What is the sin here forbidden?

A. All unlawful, carnal copulation, and every evil inclination, or action, or omission which tendeth thereto, or partaketh of any degree of unchastity or pollution.

Q. 3. Is all lust or inclination to generation a sin?

A. No: for 1. Some is natural to man, and that not as corrupt; but as God said, "increase and multiply," before the fall, so no doubt he inclined nature thereto. 2. And the regular propagation of mankind is one of the noblest, natural works that man is instrumental in; a man being a more excellent thing than a house or any work of art. 3. And God hath put some such inclination into nature, in great wisdom and mercy to the world for if nature had not some considerable appetite to generation, and also strong desire of posterity, men would hardly be drawn to be at so much care, cost, and labour, to propagate mankind; but especially women would not so commonly submit to all their sickness, pain, danger, and after-trouble which now they undergo. But if a few self-denying persons did propagate mankind only as an act of obedience to God, the multitude of the ungodly would not do it.

Q. 4. If it be so, why is any carnal act of generation forbidden? especially when it is an act of love, and doth nobody any harm?

A. God hath in great wisdom and mercy to man made his laws for restraining men from inordinate lust and copulation.

1. The noblest things are basest when corrupted. Devils are worse than men, because they were higher and better before. A wicked man is incomparably worse and more miserable than a beast or a toad, because he is a nobler nature depraved. And so human generation is worse than that of swine or dogs, when it is vicious.

2. Promiscuous, unregulated generation, tends to the utter ruin and vitiating of mankind, by the overthrow of the just education of children, on which the welfare of mankind doth eminently depend. Alas, all care and order is little enough, and too little to keep corrupted nature from utter bestiality and malignity, much more to make youth wise and virtuous, without which it had been better never to have been born! When fathers know their own children, and when mothers have the love, and encouragement, and household advantage of order, which is necessary, some good may be done. But lawless

• Heb. xiii. 4; Gen. i. 22, 28; ix. 7; xxii. 17, and xxvi. 4, 24.

exercise of lust will frustrate all. 1. Women themselves will be slaves, or their advantage mutable and uncertain; for such lust will serve its turn of them but for novelty, and will be still for change; and when a younger or a fairer comes, the mother is cast off and hated." And then the next will hate her children, or at least not love them as a necessary education doth require. And when the father hath forsaken the mother, it is like he will forsake the children with her. And when women's lusts are lawless as well as men's, men being uncertain what children are their own, will be regardless both of their souls and bodies so that confusion would destroy religion and civility, and make the world worse than most of the American savages are, who are taught by nature to set bounds to lust.

And besides all this, the very lust itself thus increased by lawless liberty would so corrupt' men's minds, and fantasies, and affections, into a sordid, beastly sensuality, that it would utterly indispose them to all spiritual and heavenly, yea, and manly, employments of heart and life; men would grow sottish and stupid, unfit to consider of heavenly things, and incapable of holy pleasures.

Q. 5. But if these evil consequents be all, then a man that can moderately use fornication, so as shall avoid these evils, sinneth not?

A. Sin is the breach of God's law; these mischiefs that would follow lawless lust show you that God made this law for the welfare of mankind. But God's own wisdom and will is the original reason of his law, and must satisfy all the world. But were there none but this fore-mentioned, to avoid the world's confusion and ruin, it was needful that God set a law to lust; and when this is done for the common good, it is not left to man to break God's law, whenever he thinks he can avoid the consequents, and secure the end of the law. For if men be left to such liberty, as to judge when they may keep God's law, and when they may break it, lust will always find a reason to excuse it, and the law will be in vain. The world needed a regulating law, and God's law must not be broken.

Q. 6. Which are the most heinous sorts of filthiness.?

A. Some of them are scarce to be named among Christians. 1. Sodomy. 2. Copulation with brutes. 3. Incest; sinning

Acts xv. 20, 29; Rom. i. 29, 30; 1 Cor. v. 11; Gal. v. 19; Eph. v. 3, 4; Col. iii. 5; 1 Thes. iv. 3; 19; Heb. xii. 16.

vi. 13, 18; vii. 2, and x. 8; Rev. ii. 14, 20; Matt. xv.

thus with near kindred. 4. Rapes, or forcing women. But the commonest sorts, are adultery, fornication, self-pollution, and the filthiness of the thoughts and affections, and the words and actions which partake of the pollution.

Q. 7. Why is adultery so great a sin?

A. Besides the aforesaid evils that are common to it and fornication, it is a perfidious violation of the marriage covenant, and destroys the conjugal love of husband and wife, and confoundeth progeny, and, as is aforesaid, corrupteth family order and human education."

Q. 8. Why may not a man have many wives now, as the Jews had?

A. As Christ saith of putting away, from the beginning it was not so, but it was permitted for the hardness of their hearts; that their seed might be multiplied, in which they placed their chief prosperity. And (that we may not think worse of them than they were) as God hath taught the very brutes to use copulation no oftener than is necessary to generation, so it is probable, by many passages of Scripture, that it was so ordinarily then with men; and, consequently, that they that had many wives, used them not so often as now too many do one; and did not multiply wives so much for lust as for progeny."

Q. 9. But is no oftener use of husband and wife lawful than for generation?

A. Yes, in case of necessitating lust; but such a measure of lust is to be accounted inordinate, either as sin, or a disease; and not to be causelessly indulged, though this remedy be allowed it.t

Q. 10. But why may not many wives be permitted now, as well as then?

A. 1. No man can either dispense with God's laws, or forgive sin against them, but God himself. If he forbear men in sin, that doth not justify it. 2. If a few men and many women were cast upon a wilderness, or sent to plant it by procreation, the case were liker the Israelites, where the men were ofter killed by wars and God's judgments than the women: but with us there is no pretence for the like polygamy, but it would confound and disquiet families.

Gen. xviii.; 1 Cor. v.; Lev. xviii.

Matt. v. 32, and xix. 6; Mal. ii. 13.

Gen. xxix. 39, 34, and xxx. 15, 18, 20; Deut. xxv. 6, 7.

1 Cor. vii. 9.

If one should make a difficult case of it, whether a prince that hath a barren wife may not take another for the safety of a kingdom, when it is in notorious danger of falling into the hands of a destroyer (as Adam's own sons and daughters lawfully married each other, because there were no others in the world) this would be no excuse, where no such public notorious necessity can be pleaded.

Q. 11. Why must marriage be a public act?

A. Because else adultery and unlawful separations cannot be known nor punished, but confusion will come in.

Q. 12. But is it not adultery that is committed against secret marriage, which was never published or legally solemnized ?

A. Yes: secret consent makes a marriage before God, though not before the world: and the violation of it is adultery before God.

Q. 13. May not a man put away his wife, or depart from her if she seek his death, or if she prove utterly intolerable?

A. While he is governor, he hath divers other remedies first to be tried a Bedlam must be used as a Bedlam: and, no doubt, but if he have a just cause to fear poisoning or other sort of murder, he may secure his life against a wife as well as against an enemy. Christ excepted not that case, because nature supposeth such exceptions.

Q. 14. But if utter unsuitableness make their cohabitation an insuperable temptation, or intolerable misery, may they not part by consent for their own good; seeing it is their mutual good, which is the end of marriage?

A. 1. The public good is a higher end of all men's worldly interests and actions than their own: and when the example would encourage unlawful separaters, they must not seek their. own ease to the public detriment. 2. And if it be their own sinful distempers which maketh them unsuitable, God bindeth them to amend, and not to part: and if they neglect not his grace, he will help them to do what he commandeth and it is in his way, and not their own, by the cure of their sin, and not by indulging it, that they must be healed: but as the apostle saith, in another case, if the faulty person depart, and the other cannot help it, a brother or sister is not left in bondage, but may stay till the allay of the distemper incline them to return."

Q. 15. What is inward heart-fornication, or uncleanness? A. 1. Inordinate filthy thoughts are some degree. 2. Inordi"Matt. v. 32, and xix. 6.