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| Of the Love of Offspring as a Plea for Marriage.
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Chapter V.—Of the Love of Offspring as a Plea for
Marriage.
Further reasons for marriage which men allege for
themselves arise from anxiety for posterity, and the bitter, bitter
pleasure of children. To us this is idle. For why
should we be eager to bear children, whom, when we have them, we desire
to send before us (to glory)388
| 388 Comp. c. iv. above
“præmissis maritis;” “when their husbands have
preceded them (to glory).” | (in respect, I mean,
of the distresses that are now imminent); desirous as we are ourselves,
too, to be taken out of this most wicked world,389
and
received into the Lord’s presence, which was the desire even of
an apostle?390
To the servant
of God, forsooth, offspring is necessary! For of our own
salvation we are secure enough, so that we have leisure for
children! Burdens must be sought by us for ourselves which are
avoided even by the majority of the Gentiles, who are compelled by
laws,391
who are decimated392
by abortions;393
| 393
“Parricidiis.” So Oehler seems to understand it. | burdens which, finally, are to us most
of all unsuitable, as being perilous to faith! For why did the
Lord foretell a “woe to them that are with child, and them that
give suck,”394
except because He
testifies that in that day of disencumbrance the encumbrances of
children will be an inconvenience? It is to marriage, of course,
that those encumbrances appertain; but that (“woe”) will
not pertain to widows. (They) at the first trump of the
angel will spring forth disencumbered—will freely bear to the end
whatsoever pressure and persecution, with no burdensome fruit of
marriage heaving in the womb, none in the bosom.
Therefore, whether it be for the sake of the
flesh, or of the world,395
or of posterity, that
marriage is undertaken, nothing of all these “necessities”
affects the servants of God, so as to prevent my deeming it enough to
have once for all yielded to some one of them, and by one marriage
appeased396
| 396
“Expiasse”—a rare but Ciceronian use of the word. | all concupiscence of
this kind. Let us marry daily, and in the midst of our marrying
let us be overtaken, like Sodom and Gomorrah, by that day of
fear!397
For there it was not only, of
course, that they were dealing in marriage and merchandise; but when He
says, “They were marrying and buying,” He sets a
brand398
upon the very leading vices of the flesh and
of the world,399
which call men off
the most from divine disciplines—the one through the pleasure of
rioting, the other though the greed of acquiring. And yet that
“blindness” then was felt long before “the
ends of the world.”400
What, then,
will the case be if God now keep us from the vices which of
old were detestable before Him? “The time,” says
(the apostle), “is compressed.401
| 401 Or, “short”
(Eng. ver.); 1 Cor. vii.
29. ὁ καιρὸς
συνεσταλμενος,
“in collecto.” | It
remaineth that they who have wives402
| 402
“Matrimonia,” neut. pl. again for the fem., the abstract
for the concrete. See c. ii., “to multiply wives,”
and the note there. In the Greek (1 Cor. vii. 29) it is γυναῖκας:
but the ensuing chapter shows that Tertullian refers the passage to
women as well. | act as if they
had them not.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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