Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 105

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105. After this the angel reached his hand into the urn a second time, and taking out another piece of paper, he read from it the following opinion:

"We fellow countrymen in our group agreed that the origin of conjugial love is the same as the origin of marriage, which has been prescribed by law to restrain the inborn urges in people for adulterous relationships that destroy the soul, pollute the mind's reason, corrupt morals, and waste the body with disease. For adulterous relationships are not human but beastlike, not rational but animal, and thus not at all Christian but barbarian. A condemnation of such things led to the origination of marriage, and at the same time of conjugial love. "It is similar with the vigor or potency of this love. It depends on chastity, which means abstaining from promiscuous and licentious relationships. The reason is that in one who makes love to his partner only, the vigor and potency is preserved for just that one person, and is thus collected and concentrated, so to speak, and then it becomes like a fine quintessence from which the impurities have been removed, a quintessence that would otherwise be dissipated and discharged every which way. "One among the five of us, who is a priest, added also the idea of predestination as a reason for this vigor or potency, saying, 'Are marriages not predestined? And since these are predestined, so, too, are the offspring resulting from them and the varying abilities to beget them.' The man insisted on this as a cause because he had sworn himself to it." This statement was signed below with the letter N. On hearing it, someone said in a mocking tone, "Predestination! Oh, what a beautiful excuse for inability or impotence!"


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