erotic life, especially in women, sexual love tends to grow into
parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and
dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of
that closest of bonds, the mutual cooeperation of two persons in
producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its
full development is a trinity.

Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as
unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly
subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves
heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients,
Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated
the elimination of the erotic element from marriage, and its
confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men
were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no
provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has
admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic
interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever
may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity,
for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race
beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in
this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the
extravagances of amorous license" (_Essais_, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk.
iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the
early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its
reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside
marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said
Clement of Alexandria (_Paedagogus_, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do
injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true
of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not
true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed,
and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest
part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally.
For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the
conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence.
It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of
procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an
insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual