Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Gradual Development of Custom, and Its Results. Passionate Appeal to Truth.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
III.—Gradual Development of Custom, and Its Results.
Passionate Appeal to Truth.
But not even between customs have those most
chaste287
teachers chosen to examine. Still,
until very recently, among us, either custom was, with
comparative indifference, admitted to communion. The matter had
been left to choice, for each virgin to veil herself or expose herself,
as she might have chosen, just as (she had equal liberty) as to
marrying, which itself withal is neither enforced nor prohibited.
Truth had been content to make an agreement with custom, in order that
under the name of custom it might enjoy itself even partially.
But when the power of discerning began to advance, so that the licence
granted to either fashion was becoming the mean whereby the indication
of the better part emerged; immediately the great adversary of good
things—and much more of good institutions—set to his own
work. The virgins of men go about, in opposition to the virgins
of God, with front quite bare, excited to a rash audacity; and the
semblance of virgins is exhibited by women who have the power of
asking somewhat from husbands,288
not to say such
a request as that (forsooth) their rivals—all the more
“free” in that they are the “hand-maids” of
Christ alone289
—may be
surrendered to them. “We are scandalized,” they say,
“because others walk otherwise (than we do);” and they
prefer being “scandalized” to being provoked (to
modesty). A “scandal,” if I mistake not, is an
example not of a good thing, but of a bad, tending to sinful
edification. Good things scandalize none but an evil mind.
If modesty, if bashfulness, if contempt of glory, anxious to please God
alone, are good things, let women who are
“scandalized” by such good learn to acknowledge their own
evil. For what if the incontinent withal say they are
“scandalized” by the continent? Is continence to be
recalled? And, for fear the multinubists be
“scandalized,” is monogamy to be rejected? Why may
not these latter rather complain that the petulance, the impudence, of
ostentatious virginity is a “scandal” to them?
Are therefore chaste virgins to be, for the sake of these marketable
creatures, dragged into the church, blushing at being recognised in
public, quaking at being unveiled, as if they had been invited as it
were to rape? For they are no less unwilling to suffer even
this. Every public exposure of an honourable virgin is (to her) a
suffering of rape: and yet the suffering of carnal violence is
the less (evil), because it comes of natural office. But when the
very spirit itself is violated in a virgin by the abstraction of her
covering, she has learnt to lose what she used to keep. O
sacrilegious hands, which have had the hardihood to drag off a dress
dedicated to God! What worse could any persecutor have done, if
he had known that this (garb) had been chosen by a virgin? You
have denuded a maiden in regard of her head, and forthwith she wholly
ceases to be a virgin to herself; she has undergone a change!
Arise, therefore, Truth; arise, and as it were burst forth from Thy
patience! No custom do I wish Thee to defend; for by this
time even that custom under which Thou didst enjoy thy own liberty is
being stormed! Demonstrate that it is Thyself who art the coverer
of virgins. Interpret in person Thine own Scriptures, which
Custom understandeth not; for, if she had, she never would have had an
existence.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
