afraid to produce witnesses in a court of justice against his wife, to accuse her of adultery, and thereby to make the crime public; for unless eye-witnesses, or evidences to the same amount, wore produced to convict her, he would be secretly reproached in companies of men, and openly in companies of women. 2. He is afraid also lest his adulteress should have the cunning to clear her conduct, and likewise lest the judges should show favor to her, and thus his name suffer in the public esteem. 3. Moreover, there may be domestic reasons, which may make separation from the house unadvisable: as in case there are children, towards whom also the adulteress has natural love; in case they are bound together by mutual services which cannot be put an end to; in case the wife is connected with and dependent upon her relatives, whether on the father’s or mother’s side, and there is a hope of receiving an increase of fortune from them; in case he lived with her in the beginning in habits of agreeable intimacy; and in case she, after she became meretricious, has the skill to soothe the man with engaging pleasantry and pretended civility, to prevent blame being imputed to herself; not to mention other cases, which, as in themselves they are legitimate causes of divorce, are also legitimate causes of concubinage; for the causes of retaining the wife at home do not take away the cause of divorce, supposing her guilty of adultery. Who, but a person of vile character, can fulfil the duties of the conjugial bed, and at the same time have commerce with a strumpet? If instances of this sort are occasionally to be met with, no favorable conclusions are to be drawn from them.
470. VII. The just causes of this concubinage are the just causes of separation from the bed. There are legitimate causes of separation, and there are just causes: legitimate causes are enforced by the decisions of judges, and just causes by the decisions come to by the man alone. The causes both legitimate and just of separation from the bed, and also from the house, were briefly enumerated above, n. 252, 253; among which are vitiated states of the body, including diseases whereby the whole body is so far infected, that the contagion may prove fatal: of this nature are malignant and pestilential fevers, leprosies, the venereal disease, cancers; also diseases whereby the whole body is so far weighed down, as to admit of no sociability, and from which exhale dangerous effluvia and noxious vapors, whether from the surface of the body, or from its inward parts, in particular from the stomach and the lungs: from the surface of the body proceed malignant pocks, warts, pustules, scorbutic pthisis, virulent scab, especially if the face is disfigured by it; from the stomach proceed foul, stinking, and rank eructations; from the lungs, filthy and putrid exhalations arising from imposthumes, ulcers, or abscesses, or from vitiated blood or serum. Besides these there are also other various diseases; as lipothamia, which
