the first man and the lives of virginity which have been led, is interrupted. It could not be indeed that death should cease working as long as the human race by marriage was working too; he walked the path of life with all preceding generations; he started with every new-born child and accompanied it to the end: but he found in virginity a barrier, to pass which was an impossible feat. Just as, in the age of Mary the mother of God, he who had reigned from Adam to her time found, when he came to her and dashed his forces against the fruit of her virginity as against a rock, that he was shattered to pieces upon her, so in every soul which passes through this life in the flesh under the protection of virginity, the strength of death is in a manner broken and annulled, for he does not find the places upon which he may fix his sting. If you do not throw into the fire wood, or straw, or grass, or something that it can consume, it has not the force to last by itself; so the power of death cannot go on working, if marriage does not supply it with material and prepare victims for this executioner. If you have any doubts left, consider the actual names of those afflictions which death brings upon mankind, and which were detailed in the first part of this discourse. Whence do they get their meaning? “Widowhood,” “orphanhood,” “loss of children,” could they be a subject for grief, if marriage did not precede? Nay, all the dearly-prized blisses, and transports, and comforts of marriage end in these agonies of grief. The hilt of a sword is smooth and handy, and polished and glittering outside; it seems to grow to the outline of the hand!**4; but the other part is steel and the instrument of death, formidable to look at, more formidable still to come across. Such a thing is marriage. It offers for the grasp of the senses a smooth surface of delights, like a hilt of rare polish and beautiful workmanship; but when a man has taken it up and has got it into his hands, he finds the pain that has been wedded to it is in his hands as well; and it becomes to him the worker of mourning and of loss. It is marriage that has the heartrending spectacles to show of children left desolate in the tenderness of their years, a mere prey to the powerful, yet smiling often at their misfortune from ignorance of coming woes. What is the cause of widowhood but marriage? And retire- ment from this would bring with it an immunity from the whole burden of these sad taxes on our hearts. Can we expect it otherwise? When the verdict that was pronounced on the delinquents in the beginning is annulled, then too the mothers’ “sorrows!**” are no longer “multiplied,” nor does “sorrow” herald the births of men; then all calamity has been removed from life and “tears wiped from off all faces‘**°;” conception is no more an iniquity, nor child-bearing a sin; and births shall be no more “of bloods,” or “of the will of man,” or “of 1433 dia uéoov ov yéyovev. So Codd. Reg. Vat.; but the ov is manifestly a corruption arising from pgéoov. 1434 Euquoyuévn; cf. the Homeric év Sepa o1 gd xerpi, K. T. A Chapter XIII the will of the flesh'**””, but of God alone. This is always happening whenever any one in a lively heart conceives all the integrity of the Spirit, and brings forth wisdom and righteous- ness, and sanctification and redemption too. It is possible for any one to be the mother of such a son; as our Lord says, “He that doeth my will is my brother, my sister, and my mother!*8.” What room is there for death in such parturitions? Indeed in them death is swallowed up by life. In fact, the Life of Virginity seems to be an actual representation of the blessedness in the world to come, showing as it does in itself so many signs of the presence of those expected blessings which are reserved for us there. That the truth of this statement may be perceived, we will verify it thus. It is so, first, because a man who has thus died once for all to sin lives for the future to God; he brings forth no more fruit unto death; and having qi439 so far as in him lies made an en of this life within him according to the flesh, he awaits thenceforth the expected blessing of the manifestation 4” of the great God, refraining from putting any distance between himself and this coming of God by an intervening posterity: secondly, because he enjoys even in this present life a certain exquisite glory of all the blessed results of our resurrection. For our Lord has announced that the life after our resurrection shall be as that of the angels. Now the peculiarity of the angelic nature is that they are strangers to marriage; therefore the blessing of this promise has been already received by him who has not only mingled his own glory with the halo of the Saints, but also by the stainlessness of his life has so imitated the purity of these incorporeal beings. If virginity then can win us favours such as these, what words are fit to express the admiration of so great a grace? What other gift of the soul can be found so great and precious as not to suffer by comparison with this perfection?
1439 ovvtéAeav. Cf. S. Matt. xiii. 39; and Heb. ix. 15.
1440 Emipaveray; Tit. ii. 13.
Chapter XIV Chapter XIV.
But if we apprehend at last the perfection of this grace, we must understand as well what necessarily follows from it; namely that it is not a single achievement, ending in the subjug- ation of the body, but that in intention it reaches to and pervades everything that is, or is considered, a right condition of the soul. That soul indeed which in virginity cleaves to the true Bridegroom will not remove herself merely from all bodily defilement; she will make that abstension only the beginning of her purity, and will carry this security from failure equally into everything else upon her path. Fearing lest, from a too partial heart, she should by contact with evil in any one direction give occasion for the least weakness of unfaithfulness (to suppose such a case: but I will begin again what I was going to say), that soul which cleaves to her Master so as to become with Him one spirit, and by the compact of a wedded life has staked the love of all her heart and all her strength on Him alone—that soul will no more commit any other of the offences contrary to salvation, than imperil her union with Him by cleaving to fornication; she knows that between all sins there is a single kinship of impurity, and that if she were to defile herself with but one!**!
, she could no longer retain her spotlessness. An illustration will show what we mean. Suppose all the water in a pool remaining smooth and motionless, while no disturbance of any kind comes to mar the peacefulness of the spot; and then a stone thrown into the pool; the movement in that one part ~~ will extend to the whole, and while the stone’s weight is carrying it to the bottom, the waves that are set in motion round it pass in circles!4# into others, and so through all the intervening commotion are pushed on to the very edge of the water, and the whole surface is ruffled with these circles, feeling the movement of the depths. So is the broad serenity and calm of the soul troubled by one invading passion, and affected by the injury of a single part. They tell us too, those who have investigated the subject, that the virtues are not disunited from each other, and that to grasp the principle of any one virtue will be impossible to one who has not seized that which underlies the rest, and that the man who shows one virtue in his character will necessarily show them all. Therefore, by contraries, the depravation of anything in our moral nature will extend to the whole virtuous life; and in very truth, as the Apostle tells us, the whole is affected by the parts, and “if one member44 > Cs suffer, all the members suffer with it,” “if one be honoured, all rejoice.”
1441 The text is here due to the Vatican Codex: kai ei 5VEvdc Tivos HoAUVOEtN, kK. T. A.
1442 1 péper. This is the reading of Cod. Morell. and of the fragment used by Livineius; preferable to 1 HEPIKG ocAw ovyKuuatovpEVoV, as in Cod. Reg.
1443 xuKAotepdc, Plutarch, ii. 892, F.
1444 péAog (not as Galesinius, pépos), 1 Cor. xii. 26.
XV Chapter XV.
But the ways in our life which turn aside towards sin are innumerable; and their number is told by Scripture in divers manners. “Many are they that trouble me and persecute,” and “Many are they that fight against me from on high!** i ; and many other texts like that. We may affirm, indeed, absolutely, that many are they who plot in the adulterer’s fashion to destroy this truly honourable marriage, and to defile this inviolate bed; and if we must name them one by one, we charge with this adulterous spirit anger, avarice, envy, revenge, enmity, malice, hatred, and whatever the Apostle puts in the class of those things which are contrary to sound doctrine. Now let us suppose a lady, prepossessing and lovely above her peers, and on that account wedded to a king, but besieged because of her beauty by profligate lovers. As long as she remains indignant at these would-be seducers and complains of them to her lawful husband, she keeps her chastity and has no one before her eyes but her bridegroom; the profligates find no vantage ground for their attack upon her. But if she were to listen to a single one of them, her chastity with regard to the rest would not exempt her from the retribution; it would be sufficient to condemn her, that she had allowed that one to defile the marriage bed. So the soul whose life is in God will find her pleasure** in no single one of those things which make a beauteous show to deceive her. If she were, in some fit of weakness, to admit the defilement to her heart, she would herself have broken the covenant of her spiritual marriage; and, as the Scripture tells us, “into the malicious soul Wisdom cannot come!4”.” It may, in a word, be truly said that the Good Husband cannot come to dwell with the soul that is irascible, or malice-bearing, or harbours any other disposition which jars with that concord. No way has been discovered of harmonizing things whose nature is antagonistic and which have nothing in common. The Apostle tells us there is “no communion of light with darkness!**8,” or of righteousness with iniquity, or, in a word, of all the qualities which we perceive and name as the essence of God’s nature, with all the opposite which are perceived in evil. Seeing, then, the impossibility of any union between mutual repellents, we understand that the vicious soul is estranged from entertaining the company of the Good. What then is the practical lesson from this? The chaste and thoughtful virgin must sever herself from any affection which can in any way impart conta- 1445 Ps. Ivi. 3 (from LXX. according to many mss.: others join a0 bpous nuepas ob PobrnOroopan, ab alti- tudine diei non timebo). But Aquila has byote, agreeing with the Hebrew; so also Jerome. 1446 = oVdevi dpeoOroeton. The Vatican Cod. has épaOrjoeto1, which would require the genitive.
XV gion to her soul; she must keep herself pure for the Husband who has married her, “not having spot or blemish or any such thing“?
1449 Eph. v. 27.—Origen (c. Cels. vii. 48, 49), comparing Pagan and Christian virginity, says, “The Athenian hierophant, distrusting his power of self-control for the period of his regular religious duties, uses hemlock, and passes as pure. But you may see among the Christians men who need no hemlock. The Faith drives evil from their minds, and ever fits them to perform the service of prayer. Belonging to some of the gods now in vogue there are certainly virgins here and there—watched or not I care not now to inquire—who seem not to break down in the course of chastity which the honour of their god requires. But amongst Christians, for no repute amongst men, for no stipend, for no mere show, they practise an absolute virginity; and as they ‘liked to retain God in their knowledge,’ so God has kept them in that liking mind, and in the performance of fitting works, filling them with righteousness and goodness. I say this without any depreciation of what is beautiful in Greek thought, and of what is wholesome in their teachings. I wish only to show that all they have said, and things more noble, more divine, have been said by those men of God, the prophets and apostles.”
Chapter XVI Chapter XVI.
There is only one right path. It is narrow and contracted. It has no turnings either on the one side or the other. No matter how we leave it, there is the same danger of straying hopelessly away. This being so, the habit which many have got into must be as far as possible corrected; those, I mean, who while they fight strenuously against the baser pleasures, yet still go on hunting for pleasure in the shape of worldly honour and positions which will gratify their love of power. They act like some domestic who longed for liberty, but instead of exerting himself to get away from slavery proceeded only to change his masters, and thought liberty consisted in that change. But all alike are slaves, even though they should not all go on being ruled by the same masters, as long as a dominion of any sort, with power to enforce it, is set over them. There are others again who after a long battle against all the pleasures!*°.
, yield themselves easily on another field, where feelings of an opposite kind come in; and in the intense exactitude of their lives fall a ready prey to melancholy and irrit- ation, and to brooding over injuries, and to everything that is the direct opposite of pleasur- able feelings; from which they are very reluctant to extricate themselves. This is always happening, whenever any emotion, instead of virtuous reason, controls the course of a life. For the commandment of the Lord is exceedingly far-shining, so as to “enlighten the eyes” even of “the simple!°!,” declaring that good cleaveth only unto God. But God is not pain any more than He is pleasure; He is not cowardice any more than boldness; He is not fear, nor anger, nor any other emotion which sways the untutored soul, but, as the Apostle says, He is Very Wisdom and Sanctification, Truth and Joy and Peace, and everything like that. If He is such, how can any one be said to cleave to Him, who is mastered by the very opposite? Is it not want of reason in any one to suppose that when he has striven successfully to escape the dominion of one particular passion, he will find virtue in its opposite? For instance, to suppose that when he has escaped pleasure, he will find virtue in letting pain have possession of him; or when he has by an effort remained proof against anger, in crouching with fear. It matters not whether we miss virtue, or rather God Himself Who is the Sum of virtue, in this way, or in that. Take the case of great bodily prostration; one would say that the sadness of this failure was just the same, whether the cause has been excessive under-feeding, or immoderate eating; both failures to stop in time end in the same result. He therefore who watches over the life and the sanity of the soul will confine himself to the moderation of the truth; he will continue without touching either of those opposite states which run along- side virtue. This teaching is not mine; it comes from the Divine lips. It is clearly contained in that passage where our Lord says to His disciples, that they are as sheep wandering amongst 1450 = tac Ndovac i.e.the whole class.
Chapter XVI wolves’ ““, yet are not to be as doves only, but are to have something of the serpent too in their disposition; and that means that they should neither carry to excess the practice of that which seems praiseworthy in simplicity?
, as such a habit would come very near to downright madness, nor on the other hand should deem the cleverness which most admire to be a virtue, while unsoftened by any mixture with its opposite; they were in fact to form another disposition, by a compound of these two seeming opposites, cutting off its silliness from the one, its evil cunning from the other; so that one single beautiful character should be created from the two, a union of simplicity of purpose with shrewdness. “Be ye,” He says, “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
1453 According to the emendation of Livineius: prjte tO Kata trv anAdTHTa SoKOdv EmatvEtov Chapter XVII Chapter XVII.
Let that which was then said by our Lord be the general maxim for every life; especially let it be the maxim for those who are coming nearer God through the gateway of virginity, that they should never in watching for a perfection in one direction present an unguarded side in another and contrary one; but should in all directions realize the good, so that they may guarantee in all things their holy life against failure. A soldier does not arm himself only on some points, leaving the rest of his body to take its chance unprotected. If he were to receive his death-wound upon that, what would have been the advantage of this partial armour? Again, who would call that feature faultless, which from some accident had lost one of those requisites which go to make up the sum of beauty? The disfigurement of the mutilated part mars the grace of the part untouched. The Gospel implies that he who under- takes the building of a tower, but spends all his labour upon the foundations without ever reaching the completion, is worthy of ridicule; and what else do we learn from the Parable of the Tower, but to strive to come to the finish of every lofty purpose, accomplishing the work of God in all the multiform structures of His commandments? One stone, indeed, is no more the whole edifice of the Tower, than one commandment kept will raise the soul’s perfection to the required height. The foundation must by all means first be laid but over it, as the Apostle says’, the edifice of gold and precious gems must be built; for so is the doing of the commandment put by the Prophet who cries, “Ihave loved Thy commandment above gold and many a precious stone!*°>.” Let the virtuous life have for its substructure the love of virginity; but upon this let every result of virtue be reared. If virginity is believed to be a vastly precious thing and to have a divine look (as indeed is the case, as well as men believe of it), yet, ifthe whole life does not harmonize with this perfect note, and it be marred by the succeeding!**® discord of the soul, this thing becomes but “the jewel of gold in the swine’s snout or “the pearl that is trodden under the swine’s feet.” But we have said enough upon this.
1455 Ps. cxix. 127, LXX. (ypvotov Kai tondiov). 1456 tf Aoinov 1457 For the gold, see Prov. xi. 22; for the pearl, S. Matt. vii. 6 Chapter XVIII Chapter XVHUI.
If any one supposes that!4°8 this want of mutual harmony between his life and a single one of its circumstances is quite unimportant, let him be taught the meaning of our maxim by looking at the management of a house. The master of a private dwelling will not allow any untidiness or unseemliness to be seen in the house, such as a couch upset, or the table littered with rubbish, or vessels of price thrown away into dirty corners, while those which serve ignobler uses are thrust forward for entering guests to see. He has everything arranged neatly and in the proper place, where it stands to most advantage; and then he can welcome his guests, without any misgivings that he need be ashamed of opening the interior of his house to receive them. The same duty, I take it, is incumbent on that master of our “taber- nacle,” the mind; it has to arrange everything within us, and to put each particular faculty of the soul, which the Creator has fashioned to be our implement or our vessel, to fitting and noble uses. We will now mention in detail the way in which any one might manage his life, with its present advantages, to his improvement, hoping that no one will accuse us of trifling”, or over-minuteness. We advise, then, that love’s passion be placed in the soul’s purest shrine, as a thing chosen to be the first fruits of all our gifts, and devoted!4©° entirely to God; and when once this has been done, to keep it untouched and unsullied by any secular defilement. Then indignation, and anger, and hatred must be as watch-dogs to be roused only against attacking sins; they must follow their natural impulse only against the thief and the enemy who is creeping in to plunder the divine treasure-chamber, and who comes only for that, that he may steal, and mangle, and destroy. Courage and confidence are to be weapons in our hands to baffle any sudden surprise and attack of the wicked who advance. Hope and patience are to be the staffs to lean upon, whenever we are weary with the trials of the world. As for sorrow, we must have a stock of it ready to apply, ifneed should happen to arise for it, in the hour of repentance for our sins; believing at the same time that it is never useful, except to minister to that. Righteousness will be our rule of straightforwardness, guarding us from stumbling either in word or deed, and guiding us in the disposal of the faculties of our soul, as well as in the due consideration for every one we meet. The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the man who has it; for he will be violent!4°!
where it is right to be violent. Wisdom and prudence will be our advisers as to our best interests; they will order our lives so as never to suffer from any thoughtless folly. But suppose a man does not apply the aforesaid faculties of the soul to their proper use, but reverses their intended purpose; 1458 TO un] ovvnppdoBan tivi d1a THV KaTAAANAWV TOV Biov 1459 ddoAEoxiav Tod Adyov TIs KaTAyIVWoKOL 1460 donep 1 dveéOnpa; so Gregory calls the tongue of S. Meletius the dvd®nua of Truth. 1461 Gregory seems to allude to S. Matt. xi. 12.
Chapter XVIII suppose he wastes his love upon the basest objects, and stores up his hatred only for his own kinsmen; suppose he welcomes iniquity, plays the man only against his parents, is bold only in absurdities, fixes his hopes on emptiness, chases prudence and wisdom from his company, takes gluttony and folly for his mistresses, and uses all his other opportunities in the same fashion, he would indeed be a strange and unnatural character to a degree beyond any one’s power to express. If we could imagine any one putting his armour on all the wrong way, reversing the helmet so as to cover his face while the plume nodded backward, putting his feet into the cuirass, and fitting the greaves on to his breast, changing to the right side all that ought to go on the left and vice versa, and how such a hoplite would be likely to fare in battle, then we should have an idea of the fate in life which is sure to await him whose con- fused judgment makes him reverse the proper uses of his soul’s faculties. We must therefore provide this balance in all feeling; the true sobriety of mind is naturally able to supply it; and if one had to find an exact definition of this sobriety, one might declare absolutely, that it amounts to our ordered control, by dint of wisdom and prudence, over every emotion of the soul. Moreover, such a condition in the soul will be no longer in need of any laborious method to attain to the high and heavenly realities; it will accomplish with the greatest ease that which erewhile seemed so unattainable; it will grasp the object of its search as a natural consequence of rejecting the opposite attractions. A man who comes out of darkness is ne- cessarily in the light; a man who is not dead is necessarily alive. Indeed, if a man is not to have received his soul to no purpose!4, he will certainly be upon the path of truth; the prudence and the science employed to guard against error will be itself a sure guidance along the right road. Slaves who have been freed and cease to serve their former masters, the very moment they become their own masters, direct all their thoughts towards themselves so, I take it, the soul which has been freed from ministering to the body becomes at once cognizant i,in not of its own inherent energy. But this liberty consists, as we learn from the Apostle again being held in the yoke of slavery, and in not being bound again, like a runaway or a criminal, with the fetters of marriage. But I must return here to what I said at first; that the perfection of this liberty does not consist only in that one point of abstaining from marriage. Let no one suppose that the prize of virginity is so insignificant and so easily won as that; as if one little observance of the flesh could settle so vital a matter. But we have seen that every man who doeth a sin is the servant of sin'4™; so that a declension towards vice in any act, or in any practice whatever, makes a slave, and still more, a branded slave, of the man, covering him through sin’s lashes with bruises and seared spots. Therefore it behoves the 1462 Emi patat& 251: AdBo1. Gregory evidently alludes to Ps. xxiv. 4, and agrees with the Vulgate “in vano acceperit.”
Chapter XVIII man who grasps at the transcendent aim of all virginity to be true to himself in every respect, and to manifest his purity equally in every relation of his life. If any of the inspired words are required to aid our pleading, the Truth!4° Itself will be sufficient to corroborate the truth when It inculcates this very kind of teaching in the veiled meaning of a Gospel Parable: the good and eatable fish are separated by the fishers’ skill from the bad and poisonous fish, so that the enjoyment of the good should not be spoilt by any of the bad getting into the “vessels” with them. The work of true sobriety is the same; from all pursuits and habits to choose that which is pure and improving, rejecting in every case that which does not seem likely to be useful, and letting it go back into the universal and secular life, called “the sea!*°°,” in the imagery of the Parable. The Psalmist!”
also, when expounding the doctrine ofa full confession’ ~”, calls this restless suffering tumultuous life, “waters coming in even unto the soul,” “depths of waters,” and a “hurricane”; in which sea indeed every rebellious thought sinks, as the Egyptian did, with a stone’s weight into the deeps!*©?, But all in us that is dear to God, and has a piercing insight into the truth (called “Israel” in the narrative), passes, but that alone, over that sea as if it were dry land, and is never reached by the bitterness and the brine of life’s billows. Thus, typically, under the leadership of the Law (for Moses was a type of the Law that was coming) Israel passes unwetted over that sea, while the Egyptian who crosses in her track is overwhelmed. Each fares according to the disposition which he carries with him; one walks lightly enough, the other is dragged into the deep water. For virtue is a light and buoyant thing, and all who live in her way “fly like clouds!*”°,” as Isaiah says, “and as doves with their young ones”; but sin is a heavy affair, “sitting,” as another of the prophets says, “upon a talent of lea If, however, this reading of the history appears to any forced and inapplicable, and the miracle at the Red Sea does not present itself to him as written for our profit, let him listen to the Apostle: “Now all these things happened unto them for types, and they are written for our admonition!*’*.”
1465 S. John xiv. 6 1468 didaoKxadtav eEopodoyrjoews UPnyovuEvos 1470 Is. lx. 8. The LXX. has meptotepav ovv veoooois. 1471 Zech. v. 7. “this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah:” Emi u€oov tod pétpov (LXX.). Origen and Jerome as well as Gregory make her sit upon the lead itself. Vatablus explains that the lead was in an amphora.
Chapter XIX Chapter XIX.
But besides other things the action of Miriam the prophetess also gives rise to these surmisings of ours. Directly the sea was crossed she took in her hand a dry and sounding timbrel and conducted the women’s dance!*’, By this timbrel the story may mean to imply virginity, as first perfected by Miriam; whom indeed I would believe to be a type of Mary the mother of God'474 moisture and reduced to the highest degree of dryness, so has virginity a clear and ringing . Just as the timbrel emits a loud sound because it is devoid of all report amongst men because it repels from itself the vital sap of merely physical life. Thus, Miriam’s timbrel being a dead thing, and virginity being a deadening of the bodily passions, 1475 that Miriam was a it is perhaps not very far removed from the bounds of probability virgin. However, we can but guess and surmise, we cannot clearly prove, that this was so, and that Miriam the prophetess led a dance of virgins, even though many of the learned have affirmed distinctly that she was unmarried, from the fact that the history makes no mention either of her marriage or of her being a mother; and surely she would have been named and known, not as “the sister of Aaron!*’®,” but from her husband, if she had had one; since the head of the woman is not the brother but the husband. But if, amongst a people with whom motherhood was sought after and classed as a blessing and regarded as a public duty, the grace of virginity, nevertheless, came to be regarded as a precious thing, how does it behove us to feel towards it, who do not “judge” of the Divine blessings!4”” “according to the flesh”? Indeed it has been revealed in the oracles of God, on what occasion to conceive and to bring forth is a good thing, and what species of fecundity was desired by God’s saints; for both the Prophet Isaiah and the divine Apostle have made this clear and d!478» the other boasts that he is the parent of the largest family of any, bringing to the birth whole cities and nations; certain. The one cries, “From fear of Thee, O Lord, have I conceive not the Corinthians and Galatians only whom by his travailings he moulded for the Lord, but all in the wide circuit from Jerusalem to Illyricum; his children filled the world, “begotten” 1474 81 Ac oipat Kai tHv OcotdKov mpodiatutobaba1t Mapiav. These words are absent from the Munich Cod. i.e. the German; not from Vat. and Reg. Ambrose, Ep. 25, has “Quid de altera Moysi sorore Maria loquar, que foeminei dux agminis pede transmisit pelagi freta,” when speaking “de gloria virginitatis.”
1477 _ S. John viii. 15. “Ye judge after the flesh.” It is Gregory’s manner to make such passing allusions to Scripture, and especially to S. Paul.
1478 Gregory here quotes from LXX. Cf. Is. xxvi. 18, and also below, étéxopev mvebua owtnpias cov, 6 EMOINOAUEV ETL Tis is.
Chapter XIX by him in Christ through the Gospel!4”?. In the same strain the womb of the Holy Virgin, which ministered to an Immaculate Birth, is pronounced blessed in the Gospel!**°, for that birth did not annul the Virginity, nor did the Virginity impede so great a birth. When the “spirit of salvation!“*",” as Isaiah namesit, is being born, the willings of the flesh are useless. There is also a particular teaching of the Apostle, which harmonizes with this; viz. each man of us is a double man’4*?; one the outwardly visible, whose natural fate it is to decay; the other perceptible only in the secret of the heart, yet capable of renovation. If this teaching is true,—and it must be true!4®° because Wisdom is speaking there,—then there is no ab- surdity in supposing a double marriage also which answers in every detail to either man; and, maybe, if one was to assert boldly that the body’s virginity was the co-operator and the agent of the inward marriage, this assertion would not be much beside the probable fact.
1481 Is. xxvi. 18 (LXX.). See above. But R.V. “We have as it were brought forth wind: we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth.”