1 Corinthians

and saying, "Do not look with desire upon another's wife," it plainly calls sin alien and contrary to the nature of the temple of God.

For if the first man Adam too was flesh, not soul — who was at last made into a living soul — and the last Adam, Christ, is therefore Adam because man, therefore man because flesh, not because soul — and so he subjoins, "Not first that which is spiritual, but that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual," according to either Adam.

rather, in the case of women we find much strictness, the Apostle saying, "He that is joined to a harlot is one body," and Jeremiah, "If a wife belong to another man, she shall not return to her husband, but being defiled she shall be defiled," and again, "He that keeps an adulteress is foolish and impious.

"For I delivered to you first of all," he says, "that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day.

for one may with impunity neglect what is advised rather than what is commanded, because the one comes from counsel and is set before the will, while the other descends from authority and is bound to necessity:

For even when he defined concerning widows and the unmarried, that they should marry, if they cannot contain, because it is better to marry than to burn, turning to the other kind, But to the married, he says, I give charge — not indeed I, but the Lord.

Hence too the Apostle judges, and that in a case of fornication, that such a man should be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh — rebuking also that the brethren were not being judged before the saints.

And besides these things the Lord himself became the first-fruits of the perfect resurrection that no longer falls under death, having tasted of death in the flesh, but having risen on the third day and become the first-born of the dead.

Yet according to the Apostle, who admonishes us to use this world "as though we abused it not.

And therefore it remains "that even those who have wives should be as though they had none," all the more that those who have none ought not to have them.

For the rest, he could here too have established a difference between virgin and woman, as elsewhere he says, "The woman and the virgin are divided.

how much more, then, the perpetual intellectual pleasure that Būlus the Apostle described in his words:

Then you shall behold my God, and be initiated into those holy mysteries, and enjoy the things hidden in the heavens, reserved for me, "which neither ear has heard nor has entered into the heart of any.

"For who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit which is in him?

‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘they would be born unclean’ — wishing the children of the faithful to be understood as designated nevertheless for sanctity, and through this for salvation too, that by the pledge of this hope he might patronize the marriages which he had judged worthy of being retained.

For "the weak things of the world has God chosen, that the strong may be confounded;

where the disputer of this age?

" Likewise it is written to the Corinthians that they were still carnal, who were nourished with milk, not yet fit for solid food;

"Not that an idol is anything," as the apostle says, "but because what they do, they do to demons," settled, namely, in the consecrations of idols, whether of the dead or, as they think, of gods.

Paul, the Christian writer, holds this view very strongly.