The civil law which seeks to eliminate the social evil of prostitution by enactment and process, gives rise, by enactment and process, to another evil almost as widespread.  Divorce is a creature of the law, and divorce opens the door to concubinage, legalized if you will, but concubinage just the same.  The marriage tie is intact after as well as before the decree of divorce; no human power can break that bond.  The permission therefore to re-marry is permission to live in adultery, and that permission is, of its very nature, null and void.  They who avail themselves of such a permission and live in sin, may count on the protection of the law, but the law will not protect them against the wrath of the Almighty who condemns their immoral living.

CHAPTER LXXVIII.  WHEREIN NATURE IS OPPOSED.

Certain excesses, such as we have already alluded to, however base and abominable in themselves and their effects, have nevertheless this to their credit that, while violating the positive law of God, they respect at least the fundamental laws of nature, according to which the universe is constructed and ordered.  To satisfy one’s depraved appetites along forbidden but natural lines, is certainly criminal; but an unnatural and beastly instinct is sometimes not-satisfied with such abuse and excess; the passion becomes so blinded as to ignore the difference of sex, runs even lower, to the inferior order of brutes.  This is the very acme of ungodliness.

There are laws on the statute books against abominations of this sort; and be it said to the shame of a Christian community, said laws find an only too frequent application.  Severe as are the penalties, they are less an adequate punishment than a public expression of the common horror inspired by the very mention of crimes they are destined to chastise.  To attain this depth of infamy is at one and the same time to sin and to receive the penalty of sin.  Here culminates repeated violence to the moral law.  When one is sated with ordinary lusts and is bent on sweeping the whole gamut of mundane experiences and excitations, that one invariably descends to the unnatural and extraordinary, and lives a life of protest against nature.

St. Paul confirms this.  According to him, God, in punishment for sin delivers over people to shameful affections, to a reprobate sense; he suffers them to be a hell unto themselves.  And nature seldom fails to avenge herself for the outrages suffered.  She uses the flail of disease and remorse, of misery and disgust, and she scourges the culprit to the verge of the grave, often to the yawning pit of hell.