‘It is, however, one thing for married persons only to come together for the sole wish to beget children; this is not sinfull: it is another thing for them to aim at carnal pleasure by cohabitation; this, as being attempted only in the marriage state, involves only venial sin. For although propagation of offspring is not the motive of the concumbency, there is still no attempt to prevent such propagation, either by wrong desire or evil appliance. They who resort to these, although called by the name of man and wife, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honourable designation as a cloak for their criminal conduct. Having also proceeded so far, they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will. They have an abhorrence of nourishing and retaining those whom they begat with dislike., This infliction of cruelty on their offspring, so reluctantly begotten, unmasks the sin which they had practised in darkness, and drags it clearly into the light of day. The open cruelty reproves the concealed sin. Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or, if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be even deprived of it before it was born. Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together so much by holy wedlock as by abominable debauchery. But if the two are not identical in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is, so to say, the husband’s harlot; or the man, the wife’s adulterer.’