Ezekiel 16:20

When the soul disregards the higher law by which it is governed and prostitutes itself as though for a price, then it corrupts itself.

By the name of such adulterers we are to understand every kind of carnal and lustful concupiscence. Indeed, since the Scriptures so constantly give to idolatry the name of fornication, and since the apostle Paul calls avarice idolatry, who can doubt that every evil concupiscence may be rightly called fornication?

(Vers. 20 seqq.) And it came to pass, says the Lord God, that you took your sons and your daughters, whom you bore to me, and you sacrificed them to be devoured. Is your fornication of little consequence, sacrificing my sons? And you gave them to consecrate them. And after all your abominations and fornications, you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and full of confusion, trampled in your own blood. LXX: And it came to pass after these things, says the Lord God, that you took your sons and your daughters, whom you have borne, and sacrificed them to be consumed, as though you have acted like a whore in doing so. And you killed your sons and offered them up to them, that is, above all your whorings and abominations, and you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and exposed; you lived in your own blood. That their sons and daughters of Jerusalem, of whom it is written, 'I have begotten and exalted sons,' they themselves have despised me (Isa. I, 2); the holy Scripture recounts that they have sacrificed their sons and daughters to idols (Ps. CV, 37). And again: 'They have shed innocent blood' (Ibid., 38), the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan (Exod. IV, 22). But he calls them according to the Hebrew. For he himself had said of them: My firstborn son Israel. Or according to the Seventy, your offspring which you conceived through fornication. But in that place where we have placed them, and you have given them by consecrating them, for which the Seventy have translated, and you have given them to appease, or to atone, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion have placed, you have translated and led them: because the pagans either cause their children to pass through fire, or compel them to cross over, whether they are infants or adults. When you do these things, she said, you do not remember your infancy, when I carried you covered in blood and washed you, and after many things that prophetic speech narrated, I united myself to you. Also, our Jerusalem, if it is supplanted by heretical deception, takes away her sons, who are stronger in faith, and daughters who do not have such great strength of faith. Or indeed sons, who know mystical things: daughters who follow a simple history; and delivers them to be devoured by demons, and when she kills them, she believes she is giving…