Conjugial Love (Acton) n. 105

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105. The angel then put his hand into the urn a SECOND. time and took from it a paper, from which he read as follows: "We compatriots in our compartment have agreed that the origin of conjugial love is the same as the origin of marriages. These have been sanctioned by laws for the restraining of the innate desire of men for adulteries, which ruin the soul, debase the reason of the mind, defile the morals, and consume the body with wasting disease; for adulteries are not human but bestial, not rational but brutish, thus in no way Christian but barbarian. It is for the condemnation of such practices that marriages arose and, at the same time, conjugial love. It is the same with the virtue or potency of that love, because this virtue depends upon chastity, and chastity is abstinence from roving whoredoms. The reason is, because with him who loves his partner alone, virtue or potency is reserved for one and so is gathered and concentrated, as it were. It then becomes like a noble quintessence purged of defilements, which otherwise would be dissipated and scattered in every direction. One of us five, who is a priest, adds also predestination as a cause of that virtue or potency, saying, "Are not marriages predestined? and granting this, are not the resultant prolifications and the efficacies thereto also predestined?" He insists on this as a cause because he has sworn to it" To this was subscribed the letter B. Hearing this, some one said in a mocking tone, "Predestination! Oh, what a fine apology for defect or impotence!"


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