113. Behind a long partition placed in front of the doors in the palace there stood some strangers from Africa, who cried out to the Europeans: 'Allow one of us too to offer his opinion on the source of conjugial love, and of its strength or potency.' At all the tables hands were raised to give permission.
Then one of them came right in and stood by the table on which the headdress was placed. 'You Christians,' he said, 'trace the source of conjugial love to the love itself; but we Africans trace it to the God of heaven and earth. Is not conjugial love a chaste, pure and holy love? Do not the angels in heaven possess it? Is not the whole human race, and so the whole heaven of angels, the seed of that love? Surely something of such surpassing excellence cannot come into being from any source other than God Himself, the Creator and Upholder of the universe. You Christians trace the strength or potency of marriage to various rational and natural causes; but we Africans trace it to the way human beings are linked with the God of the universe. We call this the state of religion, but you the state of the church. For when love comes from this source, and it is firm and perpetual, it cannot help making its strength which resembles it also firm and perpetual. Truly conjugial love is unknown except to those few who are close to God. So no more is the potency of that love known to others; but this potency together with that love is described by angels in the heavens as the delight of a perpetual springtime.'
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