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| Of the Conjugal Union as It Was Originally Instituted and Blessed by God.
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Chapter 22.—Of the Conjugal Union
as It Was Originally Instituted and Blessed by God.
But we, for our part, have no
manner of doubt that to increase and multiply and replenish the
earth in virtue of the blessing of God, is a gift of marriage as
God instituted it from the beginning before man sinned, when He
created them male and female,—in other words, two sexes
manifestly distinct. And it was this work of God on which His
blessing was pronounced. For no sooner had Scripture said,
“Male and female created He them,”752
than it immediately continues,
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Increase, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it,” etc. And
though all these things may not unsuitably be interpreted in a
spiritual sense, yet “male and female” cannot be understood of
two things in one man, as if there were in him one thing which
rules, another which is ruled; but it is quite clear that they were
created male and female, with bodies of different sexes, for the
very purpose of begetting offspring, and so increasing,
multiplying, and replenishing the earth; and it is great folly to
oppose so plain a fact. It was not of the spirit which commands
and the body which obeys, nor of the rational soul which rules and
the irrational desire which is ruled, nor of the contemplative
virtue which is supreme and the active which is subject, nor of the
understanding of the mind and the sense of the body, but plainly of
the matrimonial union by which the sexes are mutually bound
together, that our Lord, when asked whether
it were
lawful for any cause to put away one’s wife (for on account of
the hardness of the hearts of the Israelites Moses permitted a bill
of divorcement to be given), answered and said, “Have ye not read
that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and
shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh?
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore,
God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”753
It is
certain, then, that from the first men were created, as we see and
know them to be now, of two sexes, male and female, and that they
are called one, either on account of the matrimonial union, or on
account of the origin of the woman, who was created from the side
of the man. And it is by this original example, which God Himself
instituted, that the apostle admonishes all husbands to love their
own wives in particular.754
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