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In "The Puritans and Sex" Edmund S. Morgan claims that the Puritans were not simply a strong religious group of fanatics who prohibited all earthly pleasures, but were actually influenced by human desires and weaknesses to partaking in "pleasures of the flesh." Sexual intercourse was a human exigency and according to the Puritans religion, marriage was the only proper supply for it. They passed laws to punish adultery with death, and people with unmarried sexual relations were whipped however Morgan said that extra-marital sexual intercourse was fairly common and that it was so numerous during that era that the Puritans could not enforce the severe penalties for which their laws provided. Even though adultery cases