Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/137

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CHAP. V.

Of Marrying, and then publickly professing to desire they may have no Children, and of using Means physical or diabolical, to prevent Conception.

HAT Matrimony was instituted for the regular Propagation of Kind, I have noted already, and need repeat no Part of it; I only add, that the present vitiated Humour of the Times has brought up our modern Wits to cavil at the Words regular Propagation. They will allow it to be proper for the Regularity; but not essential to the Propagation, and so they would have Matrimony be only taken for civil Regulation of Government, appointed meerly by humane Polity, and the Contrivance of Statesmen, to keep the People in a kind of formal Subjection to Constitutions and Government, and to make the Lawyers Work, to order Inheritances and Successions, as they think fit.

For, say they, in the Beginning it was not so; and then they bring us the Story of Abraham and his Maid Hagar, Jacob marrying two Sisters, and then lying with both their Maids, and the like. These Examples, they say, prove thatPro-