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Updated: May 28, 2025
An admirable spectacle, and one which the history of mankind presents to us too rarely, is that of a degraded population elevating itself more and more, and placing itself on a level with those who before despised it. Concubinage, so general in times of servitude as to give rise to the famous axiom, "Negroes abhor marriage," is now replaced by regular unions.
Consider for example, that the Pope, in his decree Ne Temere, has declared that all persons who have been married by civil authorities or by Protestant clergymen are living in "filthy concubinage"! Consider, in the same way, the problems of education, burial, prison discipline, blasphemy, poor relief, incorporation, mortmain, religious endowments, vows of celibacy.
These Chinese gentlemen say that the children are well cared for. If girls eligible for marriage or concubinage, they are sold for that, and form a profitable investment to a Chinese gentleman. If not so eligible, they are sold for any, even the worst purpose, brothels, according to my experience in the Criminal Courts of Hong Kong.
The reason why the above concubinage is only a clothing of conjugial love encompassing it, is, because the love of concubinage is natural, and the love of marriage spiritual; and natural love is a veil or covering to spiritual, when the latter is interrupted: that this is the case, is unknown to the lover; because spiritual love is not made sensible of itself, but by natural love, and it is made sensible as delight, in which there is blessedness from heaven: but natural love by itself is made sensible only as delight. 4.
The Lei-ki allows an Emperor to have in addition to the Empress three consorts, nine maids of high rank, and twenty-seven maids of lower rank, all of whom rank as wives, and, beside these, eighty-one other females called concubines. Concubinage and polygamy, being thus sanctioned by the classics, became an established custom in Japan.
Not long since a bride, on the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice. What a sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has attained even her fifteenth year!
It is proved by the codes of that time, by several chronicles, and a variety of other documents worthy of credit, that the greater number of the clergy were living openly in a state of concubinage.
In the preceding chapter, in treating on fornication, we treated also on keeping a mistress; by which was understood the connection of an unmarried man with a woman under stipulated conditions: but by concubinage we here mean the connection of a married man with a woman in like manner under stipulated conditions.
But it was also the era of a wide-spread demoralization of the clergy, among whom simony and concubinage were the order of the day; and, consequently, every other disorder which naturally follows in the wake of those two capital vices.
XI. Those who from causes legitimate, just, and really excusatory, are engaged in this concubinage, may at the same time be principled in conjugial love. XII. While this concubinage continues, actual connection with a wife is not allowable. We proceed to an explanation of each article.
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