Now, admitting this distinction to exist in men's minds, there is one large class of crimes and vices which is put in one category by most Anglo-Saxons and which was put in the other by the French Philosophers. These are the breaches of the sexual laws. It is one of the greatest services of the church to Christendom that she has always laid particular emphasis on the duty of chastity. It is one of her greatest errors, that she has exalted the practice of celibacy over that of conjugal fidelity. The Philosophers, as was their custom, looked abroad on the practice of various nations. They found that some of the ancients granted divorce freely at the request of either party. They learned that Orientals generally allowed polygamy. They saw in their own country a low state of sexual morals among the highest classes, partly due perhaps to the example of a depraved court. Observation and desire concurred with hatred of the clergy to warp their judgments. They forgot, at least in part, that chastity is the foundation of the family and the civilized state; that divorce and polygamy, although of momentous importance, are but secondary questions; that on sexual self-restraint civilization rests, as much as on respect for life and property. On the false theory that unchastity is but an artificial crime, the delusive invention of an ascetic church, will, I think, be found to depend much that has been worst in the practice of Frenchmen, much that is most disgusting in their literature.[Footnote: The commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is equally applicable to polygamists and monogamists. It was originally promulgated to the former, and to a nation in which a man could put away his wife.]
This theory is seldom held unreservedly. In the "Persian Letters" it goes no farther than an elaborate apology for divorce, a scathing denunciation of celibacy, and a general licentiousness of tone. The later writings of Montesquieu are free from indecency. But it is noticeable of him, perhaps the most high-minded of the Philosophers, and of the rest of them, that while they constantly insist on the importance of virtue, they hardly rank chastity among the virtues.[Footnote: See the story of a Guebir who marries his sister, Montesq., i. 226, Letter lxvii. The point appears to be that the laws forbidding marriage in cases of consanguinity are arbitrary.]