Concerning the Ten Commandments, which are the Heads of the Law (128-130)

Moreover, the doubt as to the legitimacy of the children is a most terrible evil.

For if the wife be not chaste, it is quite a matter of doubt and uncertainty to what father the children belong. And then, if the matter remain undiscovered, the children of adultery enter unjustly into the classification of legitimate children, and make a race spurious to which they have no pretensions to belong, and receive an inheritance which in appearance indeed is their own patrimony, but which in reality has no connection with them.

And then the adulterer, behaving with insolence and pluming himself upon his iniquity in having propagated an offspring full of reproach, when he has satiated his appetites will depart, leaving the object behind him, and turning into ridicule the ignorance that exists of the unholy wickedness which he has committed, on the part of the man against whom he has sinned.

And the husband, like a blind man, knowing nothing of what has been going on in his own house, will be compelled to nourish and to cherish as his own the offspring sprung from his greatest enemies.

And it is plain that if such a wickedness takes place, the most miserable of all persons must be the wretched children, who have done no wrong themselves, and who cannot be assigned to either family, neither to that of the husband of the adulteress, nor to that of the adulterer.