"'I have here attempted to lay before you a picture of this vice, the
horror of which no colours of mine can exaggerate. But what pencil can
delineate the horrors of that punishment which the Scripture denounces
against it?

"'And for what will you subject yourself to this punishment? or for
what reward will you inflict all this misery on another? I will add,
on your friend? for the possession of a woman; for the pleasure of a
moment? But, if neither virtue nor religion can restrain your
inordinate appetites, are there not many women as handsome as your
friend's wife, whom, though not with innocence, you may possess with a
much less degree of guilt? What motive then can thus hurry you on to
the destruction of yourself and your friend? doth the peculiar
rankness of the guilt add any zest to the sin? doth it enhance the
pleasure as much as we may be assured it will the punishment?

"'But if you can be so lost to all sense of fear, and of shame, and of
goodness, as not to be debarred by the evil which you are to bring on
yourself, by the extreme baseness of the action, nor by the ruin in
which you are to involve others, let me still urge the difficulty, I
may say, the impossibility of the success. You are attacking a
fortress on a rock; a chastity so strongly defended, as well by a
happy natural disposition of mind as by the strongest principles of
religion and virtue, implanted by education and nourished and improved
by habit, that the woman must be invincible even without that firm and
constant affection of her husband which would guard a much looser and
worse-disposed heart. What therefore are you attempting but to
introduce distrust, and perhaps disunion, between an innocent and a
happy couple, in which too you cannot succeed without bringing, I am