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| Chapter XXXIII.—Chastity of the Christians with Respect to Marriage.
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Chapter XXXIII.—Chastity of the Christians with Respect to Marriage.
Therefore, having the hope of eternal life, we despise
the things of this life, even to the pleasures of the soul, each of us
reckoning her his wife whom he has married according to the laws laid
down by us, and that only for the purpose of having children. For as
the husbandman throwing the seed into the ground awaits the harvest,
not sowing more upon it, so to us the procreation of children is the
measure of our indulgence in appetite. Nay, you would find many among
us, both men and women, growing old unmarried, in hope of living in
closer communion with God.825
But if the remaining in virginity and in
the state of an eunuch brings nearer to God, while the indulgence of
carnal thought and desire leads away from Him, in those cases in which
we shun the thoughts, much more do we reject the deeds. For we bestow our
attention, not on the study of words, but on the exhibition and teaching
of actions,—that a person should either remain as he was born, or
be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is only a specious
adultery.826
| 826 [There is perhaps a
touch of the rising Phrygian influence in this passage; yet the language
of St. Paul (1 Tim. v. 9) favoured this view, no doubt, in primitive
opinion. See Speaker’s Comm. on 1 Tim. iii. 2. Ed.
Scribners, New York.] | “For whosoever puts away his
wife,” says He, “and
marries another, commits
adultery;”827
not permitting a man to send her away whose
virginity he has brought to an end, nor to marry again. For he who
deprives himself of his first wife, even though she be dead, is a cloaked
adulterer,828
| 828 [But Callistus,
heretical Bishop of Rome (a.d.
218.), authorized even third marriages in the clergy. Hippolytus,
vol. vi. p. 343, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Edinburgh Series.] |
resisting the hand of God, because in the beginning God made one man
and one woman, and dissolving the strictest union of flesh with flesh,
formed for the intercourse of the race.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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