Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 442

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442. (16) The delights of licentious love are pleasures of insanity, whereas the delights of conjugial love are delights of wisdom. The delights of licentious love are pleasures of insanity because only natural people are caught up in that love, and a natural person is insane in spiritual matters; for he stands in opposition to them, and that is why he embraces only natural, sensual and bodily delights. We categorize them as natural, sensual and bodily delights, because the natural mind is distinguishable into three degrees. In the highest degree are natural people who, from a rational sight of them, see the insanities, and yet are carried away by their delights, like small boats in the current of a river. In the degree below that are natural people who see and judge only on the basis of the physical senses, spurning rational considerations contrary to their impressions and misconceptions and rejecting them as of no account. In the lowest degree are natural people who without considering are carried away by the beguiling fires of their body. The last are people whom we call the carnally natural; the ones before that, the sensually natural; and the first, merely natural. Licentious love and its insanities and pleasures are, in these people, of like degrees.


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