Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 474

Previous Number Next Number Next Translation See Latin 

474. (10) But weighty reasons that are not real are ones which are not founded on justice, even though on an appearance of justice. Such reasons are recognized in the light of the real weighty reasons listed above - reasons which, if they are not properly examined, may appear to be just, and yet be unjust. As for example: The requirement of periods of abstinence following childbirth. The transitory illnesses of wives. The expenditures of seminal fluid resulting from these and other causes. The polygamous marriages permitted to the Israelites. And other like considerations, which have no validity in the light of justice. They are reasons invented by men after contracting states of coldness, when unchaste lusts have deprived them of their conjugial love and infatuated them with the idea of that love's being akin to licentious love. When men like that go to take a mistress, they make such spurious and fallacious reasons to be germane and genuine, usually intermixing in with them, too, lies about the wife, which are also accepted and repeated by friends and acquaintances in the measure of their favorable disposition toward these men.


This page is part of the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg

© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church