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| The Objection from the Polygamy of the Patriarchs Answered.
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Chapter VI.—The
Objection from the Polygamy of the Patriarchs Answered.
“But withal the blessed patriarchs,”
you say, “made mingled alliances not only with more wives (than
one), but with concubines likewise.” Shall that, then, make
it lawful for us also to marry without limit? I grant that it
will, if there still remain types—sacraments of something
future—for your nuptials to figure; or if even now there is room
for that command, “Grow and multiply;”533
that is, if no other command has yet supervened: “The time
is already wound up; it remains that both they who have wives act as if
they had not:” for, of course, by enjoining continence, and
restraining concubitance, the seminary of our race, (this latter
command) has abolished that “Grow and multiply.” As I
think, moreover, each pronouncement and arrangement is (the act) of one
and the same God; who did then indeed, in the beginning, send forth a
sowing of the race by an indulgent laxity granted to the reins of
connubial alliances, until the world should be replenished, until the
material of the new discipline should attain to forwardness: now,
however, at the extreme boundaries of the times, has checked (the
command) which He had sent out, and recalled the indulgence which He
had granted; not without a reasonable ground for the extension (of that indulgence) in
the beginning, and the limitation534
| 534 Repastinationis.
Comp. de Cult. Fem., l. ii. c. ix.,
repastinantes. | of it in the
end. Laxity is always allowed to the beginning (of things).
The reason why any one plants a wood and lets it grow, is that at his
own time he may cut it. The wood was the old order, which is
being pruned down by the new Gospel, in which withal “the axe has
been laid at the roots.”535
So, too,
“Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth,”536
| 536 Ex. xxi. 24; Lev. xxiv. 20; Deut. xix. 21;
Matt. v. 38. | has
now grown old, ever since “Let none render evil for
evil”537
| 537 See Rom. xii. 17; Matt. v. 39; 1 Thess. v.
16. | grew young. I
think, moreover, that even with a view to human institutions and
decrees, things later prevail over things primitive.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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