(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 offenders, 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 extraordinary 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 committing fornication, were (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 offenses 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 incontinence, nay, even adultery itself, with a great degree of tenderness and lenity; owing perhaps to the confirmed celibacy of its first compilers. The temporal courts therefore take no cognizance even of the crime of adultery otherwise than as a private injury. See ADULTERY.
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 offence, 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 licentiousness 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 prostitution the victims of it are brought to almost certain 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 infest 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 fornication contributes.
3. Fornication produces habits of ungovernable lewdness, which introduce the more aggravated crimes of seduction, adultery, violation, &c. The criminal indulgences between the sexes prepare an easy admission for every sin that seeks it: they are, in low life, usually the first stage in men's progress to the most desperate villainies; and in high life, to that lamented dissoluteness of principles, 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 worst 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 intended to be gratified; but under what restrictions, or whether without any, must be collected from different considerations.
In the Scriptures, fornication is absolutely and perpetually 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 passage 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 honourable amongst all men, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge;' which was a great deal to say, at a time when it was not agreed even amongst philosophers that fornication was a crime.
Upon this subject Mr Paley adds the following observations*.
"The Scriptures give no sanction to those austerities which have been since imposed upon the world Philosophy, under the name of Christ's religion, as the celibacy of the clergy, the praise of perpetual virginity, the pro- bilitio concubitus cum graviida uxore; but with a just knowledge 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 greater 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 difficulties to this intercourse. And after all, these pretended 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 voluntary 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. 'Whoever looks 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."