men of the world were the champions of the religion of
Jesus. But truly judging from its moral effect on the age, the Church
"knew not the day of her visitation." However much honor we may owe them
for settling the faith of Christianity, it must be acknowledged that the
Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers spent their strength in advocating and
glorifying an unnatural virginity--a pitiable substitute for a higher
social morality and purer morals for the ordinary individual. Without a
first-hand acquaintance with those ancient writers, it is impossible to
conceive to what a degree the idea of celibacy was exalted in their
teachings. It overshadowed everything else. It overturned every
establishment of reason. It vitiated all the pure springs of life. It
proceeded on the assumption that everything that is natural is
monstrously evil. Gibbon is too indulgent when, as it were with a smile
of careless contempt, he thus characterizes this maudlin asceticism:
"The chaste severity of the Fathers, in whatever related to the commerce
of the two sexes, flowed from the same principle: their abhorrence of
every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual, and degrade the
spiritual nature of man. It was their favorite opinion, that if Adam had
preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived forever in a
state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might
have peopled Paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings. The
use of marriage was permitted only to his fallen posterity, as a
necessary expedient to continue the human species, and as a restraint,
however imperfect, on the natural licentiousness of desire. The
hesitation of the orthodox casuists on this interesting subject betrays
the perplexity of men unwilling to approve an institution which they
were compelled to tolerate."

If it did not inspire sadness to discover that human minds, of
intelligence above the average, can be capable of such fatuity, it would
provoke one to laughter to read the Fathers as they gravely asseverate
that they do not consider marriage as being necessarily
sinful--providing that it were not committed more than once. Jerome, who
was the great advocate of monasticism in the early Church, says that
virginity is to marriage what the fruit is to the tree, or what the
grain is to the chaff. Seizing upon Christ's parable of the sower, he
asserts that the thirty-fold increase refers to marriage; the sixty-fold
applies to widows,