own country, and brought back thence my
mistress, that I might make her my wife. She, however, most
violently disapproved of this, and for two chief reasons: the
danger thereof, and the disgrace which it would bring upon me. She
swore that her uncle would never be appeased by such satisfaction
as this, as, indeed, afterwards proved only too true. She asked how
she could ever glory in me if she should make me thus inglorious,
and should shame herself along with me. What penalties, she said,
would the world rightly demand of her if she should rob it of so
shining a light! What curses would follow such a loss to the
Church, what tears among the philosophers would result from such a
marriage! How unfitting, how lamentable it would be for me, whom
nature had made for the whole world, to devote myself to one woman
solely, and to subject myself to such humiliation! She vehemently
rejected this marriage, which she felt would be in every way
ignominious and burdensome to me.

Besides dwelling thus on the disgrace to me, she reminded me of the
hardships of married life, to the avoidance of which the Apostle
exhorts us, saying: "Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife.
But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry,
she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the
flesh: but I spare you" (I Cor. vii, 27). And again: "But I would
have you to be free from cares" (I Cor. vii, 32). But if I would
heed neither the counsel of the Apostle nor the exhortations of the
saints regarding this heavy yoke of matrimony, she bade me at least
consider the advice of the philosophers, and weigh carefully what
had been written on this subject either by them or concerning their
lives. Even the saints themselves have often and earnestly spoken
on this subject for the purpose of warning us. Thus St. Jerome,
in his first book against Jovinianus, makes Theophrastus set forth
in great detail the intolerable annoyances and the endless
disturbances of married life, demonstrating with the most
convincing arguments that no wise man should ever have a wife, and
concluding his reasons for this philosophic exhortation with these
words: "Who among Christians would not be overwhelmed by such
arguments as these advanced by Theophrastus?"

Again, in the same work, St. Jerome tells how Cicero, asked by
Hircius after his divorce of Terentia whether he would marry the
sister of Hircius, replied that he would do no such thing,