5. Hereby all natural affection would be diminished or extinguished: as the love of husband and wife, so the love between fathers and children would be diminished.
6. And consequently the due education of children would be hindered, or utterly overthrown. The mothers that should first take care of them, would be disabled and turned away, that fresh harlots might be received, who would hate the offspring of the former. So that by this means the world and all societies, and civility, would be ruined, and men would be made worse than brutes, whom nature hath either better taught, or else made for them some other supply. Learning, religion, and civility would be all in a manner extinct, as we see they are among those few savage cannibals that are under no restraint. For how much all these depend upon education, experience telleth us. In a word, this confusion in procreation, would introduce such confusion in men's hearts, and families, and all societies, by corrupting and destroying necessary affection and education, that it would be the greatest plague imaginable to mankind, and make the world so base and beastly, that to destroy mankind from off the earth would seem much more desirable. Judge then whether God should have left men's lusts unrestrained.
Object. But (you will say) there might have been some moderate restraint to a certain number, as it is with the Mahometans, without so much strictness as Christ doth use.
Answ. That this strictness is necessary, and is an excellency in God's law, appeareth thus. 1. By the greatness of the mischief which else would follow: to be remiss in preventing such a confusion in the world, would be an enmity to the world. 2. In that man's nature is so violently inclined to break over, that if the hedge were not close, there were no sufficient restraining them; they would quickly run out at a little gap. 3. The wiser and the better any nation or persons are, even among the heathens, the more fully do they consent to the strictness of God's laws. 4. The cleanest sort of brutes themselves are taught by nature to be as strict in their copulations: though it be otherwise with the mere terrestrial beasts and birds, yet the aerial go by couples: those that are called the fowls of the heavens, that fly in the air, are commonly taught this chastity by nature; as if God would not have lust come near to heaven. 5. The families of the Mahometans that have more wives than one, do show the mischief of it in the effects, in the hatred and disagreement of their wives, and the great slavery that women are kept in; making them like slaves that they may keep them quiet. And when women are thus enslaved, who have so great a part in the education of children, by which all virtue and civility are maintained in the world, it must needs tend to the debasing and brutifying of mankind.
7. Children being the preciousest of all our treasure, it is necessary that the strictest laws be made for the securing of their good education and their welfare. If it shall be treason to debase or counterfeit the king's coin, and if men must be hanged for robbing you of your goods or money, and the laws are not thought too strict that are made to secure your estates; how much more is it necessary that the laws be strict against the vitiating of mankind, and against the debasement of your image on your children, and against that which tendeth to the extirpation of all virtue, and the ruin of all societies and souls!
8. God will have a holy seed in the world, that shall bear his image of holiness, and therefore he will have all means fitted thereunto. Brutish, promiscuous generation tendeth to the production of a brutish seed. And though the word preached is the means of sanctifying those that remain unsanctified from their youth; yet a holy marriage, and holy dedication of children to God, and holy education of them, are the former means, which God would not have neglected or corrupted, and to which he promiseth his blessing: as you may see, 1 Cor. vii. 14; Mal. ii. 15, "Did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth: for the Lord hateth putting away."
9. Yea, lust corrupteth the mind of the person himself, if it be not very much restrained and moderated. It turneth it from the only excellent pleasure, by the force of that brutish kind of pleasure.[450] It carrieth away the thoughts, and distempereth the passions, and corrupteth the fantasy, and thereby doth easily corrupt the intellect and heart. Pleasure is so much of the end of man, which his nature leadeth him to desire, that the chief thing in the world to make a man good and happy, is to engage his heart to those pleasures which are good, and make men happy. And the chief thing to make him bad and miserable, is to engage him in the pleasures which make men bad and end in misery. And the principal thing by which you may know yourselves or others, what you are, is to know what your pleasures are; or at least, what you choose and desire for your pleasure. If the body rule the soul, you are brutish, and shall be destroyed: if the soul rule the body, you live according to true human nature and the ends of your creation. If the pleasures of the body are the predominant pleasures which you are most addicted to, then the body ruleth the soul, and you shall perish as traitors to God, that debase his image, and turn man into beast, Rom. viii. 13: if the pleasures of the soul be your most predominant pleasures, which you are most addicted to, (though you attain as yet but little of it,) then the soul doth rule the body, and you live like men: and this cannot well be, till faith show the soul those higher pleasures in God and everlasting glory, which may carry it above all fleshly pleasures. By all this set together you may easily perceive that the way of the devil to corrupt and damn men, is to keep them from faith, that they may have no heavenly, spiritual pleasure, and to strengthen sensuality, and give them their fill of fleshly pleasures, to imprison their minds that they may ascend no higher: and that the way to sanctify and save men, is to help them by faith to heavenly pleasure, and to abate and keep under that fleshly pleasure that would draw down their minds. And by this you may see how to understand the doctrine of mortification, and taming the body, and abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh: and you may now understand what personal mischief lust doth to the soul.
10. Your own experience and consciences will tell you, that if it be not exceedingly moderated, it unfitteth you for every holy duty. You are unfit to meditate on God, or to pray to him, or to receive his word or sacrament: and therefore nature teacheth those that meddle with holy things to be more continent than others; which Scripture also secondeth, 1 Sam. xxi. 4, 5. Such sensual things and sacred things do not well agree too near.[451]
11. And as by all this you see sufficient cause why God should make stricter laws for the bridling of lust, than fleshly, lustful persons like; so when his laws are broken by the unclean, it is a sin that conscience (till it be quite debauched) doth deeply accuse the guilty for, and beareth a very clear testimony against. Oh the unquietness! the horror! the despair that I have known many persons in, even for the sin of self-pollution, that never proceeded to fornication! And how many adulterers and fornicators have we known that have lived and died in despair, and some of them hanged themselves! Conscience will condemn this sin with a heavy condemnation, till custom or infidelity have utterly seared it.[452]
12. And it is also very observable, that when men have once mastered conscience in this point, and reconciled it to this sin of fornication, it is a hundred to one that they are utterly hardened in all abomination, and scarce make conscience of any other villany whatsoever![453] If once fornication go for nothing, or a small matter with them, usually all other sin is with them of the same account: if they have but an equal temptation to it, lying, and swearing, and perjury, and theft, yea, and murder and treason, would seem small too: I never knew any one of these but he was reconcilable and prepared for any villany that the devil set him upon: and if I know such a man, I would no more trust him than I would trust a man that wants nothing but interest and opportunity to commit any heinous sin that you can name. Though I confess I have known divers of the former sort, that have committed this sin under horror and despair, that have retained some good in other points, and have been recovered; yet of this latter sort, that have reconciled their consciences to fornication, I never knew one that was recovered, or that retained any thing of conscience or honesty, but so much of the show of it as their pride and worldly interest commanded them: and they were malignant enemies of goodness in others, and lived according to the unclean spirit which possessed them.[454] They are terrible words, Prov. ii. 18, 19, "For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead: none that go unto her return again, neither take they hold on the paths of life." Age keepeth them from actual filthiness and lust (and so may hell, for there is no fornication); but they retain their debauched, seared consciences.