body is the mother of wisdom and deliberation, sober counsels and ingenious actions, open deportment and sweet carriage, sincere principles and unprejudicate understanding, love of God and self-denial, peace and confidence, holy prayers and spiritual comfort, and a pleasure of spirit infinitely greater than the sottish and beastly pleasures of unchastity. For to overcome pleasure is the greatest pleasure, and no victory is greater than that which is gotten over our lusts and filthy inclinations*. .

10. Add to all these, the public dishonesty and disreputation that all the nations of the world have cast upon adulterous and unhallowed embraces. Abimelech to the men of Gerar made it death to meddle with the wife of Isaac: and Judah condemned Thamar to be burnt for her adulterous conception; and God, besides the law made to put the adulterous person to death, did constitute a settled and constant miracle to discover the adultery of a suspected woman, that her bowels should burst with drinking the waters of jealousy. (Num. v. 14.) The Egyptian law was to cut off the nose of the adulteress, and the offending part of the adulterer. The Locrians put out both the adulterers' eyes. The Germans (as Tacitus reports) placed the adulteress amidst her kindred naked, and shaved her head, and caused her husband to beat her with clubs through the city. The Gortynœans crowned the man with wool, to shame him for his effeminacy; and the Cumani caused the woman to ride

* St. Cyprian de bono pudicitæ,

upon an ass naked and hooted at, and for ever after called her by an appellative of scorn, a rider upon an ass. All nations, barbarous and civil, agreeing in their general design of rooting so dishonest and shameful a vice from under heaven.

The * middle ages of the church were not pleased that the adulteress should be put to death; but in the primitive ages the civil laws, by which Christians were then governed, gave leave to the wronged husband to kill his adulteress wife, if he took her in the fact: but because it was a privilege indulged to men, rather than a direct detestation of the crime, a consideration of the injury rather than of the uncleanness, therefore it was soon altered, but yet it hath caused an inquiry, Whether is worse, the adultery of the man or the woman.

The resolution of which case, in order to our present affair, is thus: in respect of the person, the fault is greater in a man than in a woman, who is of a more pliant and easy spirit, and weaker understanding, and hath nothing to supply the unequal strength of men, but the defensative of a passive nature and armour of modesty, which is the natural ornament of that sex. And it is unjust that the man should demand chastity and severity from his wife, which himself will not observe towards her, said the good Emperor Antonius:

* Concil. Tribur. c. 49. Concil. Aurel. 1 sub. Clodoveo. † Cod. de adulteriis ad legem Juliam, 1. 1. et Cod. Theod. de adulteriis, c. placuit.

‡ Apud Aug. de adulter. conjug. Plut, conjug. præcept.

it is as if the man should persuade his wife to fight against those enemies to which he had yielded himself a prisoner. 2. In respect of the effects and evil consequents, the adultery of the woman is worse, as bringing bastardy into a family, and disinherisons, or great injuries to the lawful children, and infinite violations of peace, and murders, and divorces, and all the effects of rage and madness. 3. But in respect of the crime, and as relating to God, they are equal, intolerable, and damnable: and since it is no more permitted to men to have many wives, than to women to have many husbands, and that in this respect their privilege is equal, their sin is so too. And this is the case of the question in Christianity. And the church anciently refused to admit such persons to the holy communion, until they had done seven years penances in fasting, in sackcloth, in severe inflictions and instruments of chastity and sorrow, according to the discipline of those ages.

Acts of Chastity in general.

1. The actions and proper offices of the grace of chastity in general, are these:

1. To resist all unchaste thoughts: at no hand entertaining pleasure in the unfruitful fancies and remembrances of uncleanness, although no definite desire or resolution be entertained.

2. At no hand to entertain any desire, or any phantastic, imaginative loves, though by shame, or disability, or other circumstance, they be restrained from the act.

3. To have a chaste eye and a hand; for it is all one with what part of the body we commit adultery; and if a man lets his eye loose, and enjoys the lust of that, he is an adulterer *. Look not upon a woman to lust after her. And supposing all the other members restrained, yet if the eye be permitted to lust, the man can no otherwise be called chaste, than he can be called severe and mortified, that sits all day long seeing plays and revellings, and out of greediness to fill his eye, neglects his belly. There are some vessels which if you offer to lift by the belly or bottom, you cannot stir them, but are soon removed if them by the ears. It matters not with which of your members you are taken and carried off from your duty and severity.

you take

4. To have a heart and mind chaste and pure; that is, detesting all uncleanness, disliking all its motions, past actions, circumstances, likenesses, discourses: and this ought to be the chastity of virgins and widows, of old persons and eunuchs especially, and generally of all men, according to their several necessities.

5. To discourse chastely and purely; with great care declining all indecencies of language, chastening the tongue, and restraining it with grace as vapours of wine are restrained with a bunch of myrrh.

6. To disapprove by an after act all involuntary and natural pollutions for if a man delights in having suffered any natural pollution, and with pleasure re

* Time videre unde possis cadere, et noli fieri perversâ simplicitate securus. S. Aug.

members it, he chooses that which was in itself involuntary; and that which being natural was innocent, becoming voluntary is made sinful *.

7. They that have performed these duties and parts of chastity, will certainly abstain from all exterior actions of uncleanness, those noon-day and mid-night devils, those lawless and ungodly worshippings of shame and uncleanness, whose birth is in trouble, whose growth is in folly, and whose end is in shame.

But besides these general acts of chastity, which are common to all states of men and women, there are some few things proper to the severals,

Acts of Virginal Chastity.

1. Virgins must remember that the virginity of the body is only excellent in order to the purity of the soul who therefore must consider, that since they are in some measure in a condition like that of angels, it is their duty to spend much of their time in angelical employment: for in the same degree that virgins live more spiritually than other persons, in the same degree is their virginity a more excellent state. But else it is no better than that of involuntary or constrained eunuchs; a misery and a trouble, or else a mere privation as much without excellency as without mixture.

2. Virgins must contend for a singular modesty : whose first part must be an ignorance in the distinc

* Sp. Minutius Pontifex Posthumium monuit, nè verbis vitæ castimoniam non æquantibus uteretur, Plut. de cap. ex inim utilis.