fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Dec., 1908), a married man who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage, has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her husband.  In the first case, the husband, and in the second case, the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author of The Question of English Divorce, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality, because that is the element which has given it a kind of stability and become established in law.  But if we take a wider view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to it.  Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual life.  It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law, but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation towards sexual intercourse per se, although such intercourse is regarded as an essential part of the property-based and religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.

The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the formulation of “fornication” as a deadly sin, and finally as an actual secular “crime.”  It is sometimes stated that it was not until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in the epistles of Paul.  All the theologians agree that fornication is a mortal sin.  Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition.  Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into fornication as a crime.  Fornication was a crime in France even as late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical investigations of criminal procedure in Perigord; adultery was also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, “Archeologie Criminelle en Perigord,” Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle, Nov. 15, 1898).

The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law.  By an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable