4628. CONCERNING THE LOVE OF THE MARRIED PARTNER AND OF INFANTS. The men of the Most Ancient Church loved their wives better than their children. Their posterity loved their children in preference to their wives. Conjugial love is heavenly; wherefore, love begins from thence, because it is innocence. But even the worst are able to love children, and not wives; because they behold images of their own glory in the children, and not in the wife. They are able to be averse to their wives and love their children, and to be with a wife and not to love her at all, which is a perversion; this ability exists for the sake of the education of infants, and because of domestic arrangements, and for other reasons. It is then the love of lasciviousness which rules; which ceasing, love becomes nothing; and, if there are no children, they reject it from the heart. Every moment [when the partners love each other] there appears something like when they were first married, or conjoined in marriage. They are then like infants, and sport almost similarly. But this love recedes, if there is not conjugial love.