FORNICATION (Fornicatio, from the fornices in
Rome, where the lewd women prostituted themselves
for money), is whoredom, or the act of incontinency,
between single persons; for if either of the parties is
married, it is adultery. Formerly court leets had power
to inquire of and punish fornication and adultery; in
which courts the king had a fine assessed on the offend-
ers, as appears by the book of Domesday.
In the year 1650, when the ruling powers found it
for their interest to put on the semblance of a very ex-
traordinary strictness and purity of morals, not only
incest and wilful adultery were made capital crimes,
but also the repeated act of keeping a brothel, or com-
mitting fornication, was, upon a second conviction,
made felony without benefit of clergy. But, at the
Restoration, when men, from an abhorrence of the
hypocrisy of the late times, fell into a contrary extreme
of licentiousness, it was not thought proper to renew
a law of such unfashionable rigour. And these offen-
ces have been ever since left to the feeble coercion
of the spiritual court, according to the rules of the canon
law; a law which has treated the offence of inconti-
nence, nay, even adultery itself, with a great degree of
tenderness and lenity; owing perhaps to the constrained
celibacy of its first compilers. The temporal courts
therefore take no cognizance even of the crime of adul-
tery otherwise than as a private injury. See ADUL-
TERY.
The evils of fornication, which too many wish to
consider as no sin, may be judged of from the following
particulars.
1. The malignity and moral quality of each crime is
not to be estimated by the particular effect of one of-
fence, or of one person's offending, but by the general
tendency and consequence of crimes of the same nature.
In the present case, let the libertine consider and say,
what would be the consequence, if the same licentious-
ness in which he indulges were universal; or what
should hinder its becoming universal, if it be innocent
or allowable in him?
2. Fornication supposes prostitution; and by pro-
stitution the victims of it are brought to almost cer-
tain misery. It is no small quantity of misery in the
aggregate, which, between want, disease, and insult,
is suffered by those outcasts of human society who in-
fest populous cities; the whole of which is a general
consequence of fornication, and to the increase and
continuance of which every act and instance of forni-
cation contributes.
3. Fornication produces habits of ungovernable lewd-
ness, which introduce the more aggravated crimes of
seduction, adultery, violation, &c. The criminal in-
dulgences between the sexes prepare an easy admission
for every sin that seeks it: they are, in low life, usual-
ly the first stage in men's progress to the most desperate
villanies; and in high life, to that lamented dissoluteness
of principle, which manifests itself in a profligacy
of public conduct, and a contempt of the obligations of
religion and moral probity.
4. Fornication perpetuates a disease, which may be
accounted one of the sorest maladies of human nature,
and the effects of which are said to visit the constitution
of even distant generations.
The passion being natural, proves that it was in-
tended to be gratified; but under what restrictions, or
whether without any, must be collected from different
considerations.
In the Scriptures, fornication is absolutely and pe-
remptorily condemned. 'Out of the heart proceed
evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, thefts,
false witness, blasphemies; these are the things which
defile a man.' These are Christ's own words; and one
word from him upon the subject is final. The apostles
are more full upon this topic. One well-known pas-
sage in the Epistle to the Hebrews may stand in the
place of all others; because, admitting the authority
by which the apostles of Christ spake and wrote, it is
decisive. 'Marriage and the bed undefiled is honour-
able amongst all men, but whoremongers and adulter-
ers God will judge;' which was a great deal to say, at
a time when it was not agreed even amongst philoso-
phers that fornication was a crime.
Upon this subject Mr Paley adds the following ob-
servations*.
"The Scriptures give no sanction to those austerities
which have been since imposed upon the world under
the name of Christ's religion, as the celibacy of the
clergy, the praise of perpetual virginity, the prohibito
con cubitus cum grava uxore; but with a just knowl-
edge of, and regard to the condition and interest of the
human species, have provided in the marriage of one
man with one woman an adequate gratification for the
propensities of their nature, and have restrained them
to that gratification.
"The avowed toleration, and in some countries the
licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has
appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication,
and has contributed, with other causes, so far to vitiate
the public opinion, that there is no practice of which
the immorality is so little thought of or acknowledged,
although there are few in which it can more plainly
be made out. The legislators who have patronized
receptacles of prostitution ought to have foreseen this
effect, as well as considered, that whatever facilitates
fornication, diminishes marriages. And as to the usual
apology for this relaxed discipline, the danger of great-
er enormities if access to prostitutes were too strictly
watched and prohibited; it will be time enough to look
to that, after the laws and the magistrates have done
their utmost. The greatest vigilance of both will do
no more, than oppose some bounds and some difficul-
ties to this intercourse. And after all, these pretended
Fornication fears are without foundation in experience. The men are in all respects the most virtuous in countries where the women are most chaste.
"If fornication be criminal, all those incentives which lead to it are accessories to the crime: as lascivious conversation, whether expressed in obscene or disguised under modest phrases; also wanton songs, pictures, books; the writing, publishing, and circulating of which, whether out of frolic or for some pitiful profit, is productive of so extensive a mischief from so mean a temptation, that few crimes within the reach of private wickedness have more to answer for, or less to plead in their excuse.
"Indecent conversation, and by parity of reason all the rest, are forbidden by St Paul, Eph. iv. 29. 'Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth;' and again, Col. iii. 8. 'Put filthy communication out of your mouth.'
"The invitation or involuntary admission of impure thoughts, or the suffering them to get possession of the imagination, falls within the same description, and is condemned by Christ, Matt. v. 28. 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.' Christ, by thus enjoining a regulation of the thought, strikes at the root of the evil."