[153] Clavigero, op. cit. i. 274.
[154] Thurston, in the Madras Government Museum’s Bulletin, i. 193.
[155] Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, i. 136, 137, 150 sq.
[156] Leviticus, xxi. 7.
[157] Ibid. xxi. 14.
[158] Ibid. xxi. 9.
Carried further, the idea underlying all these rules and practices led to the notions that celibacy is more pleasing to God than marriage,[159] and that it is a religious duty for those members of the community whose special office is to attend to the sacred cult. For a nation like the Jews, whose ambition was to live and to multiply, celibacy could never become an ideal; whereas the Christians, who professed the most perfect indifference to all earthly matters, found no difficulty in glorifying a state which, however opposed it was to the interests of the race and the nation, made men pre-eminently fit to approach their god. Indeed, far from being a benefit to the kingdom of God by propagating the species, sexual intercourse was on the contrary detrimental to it by being the great transmitter of the sin of our first parents. This argument, however, was of a comparatively late origin. Pelagius himself almost rivalled St. Augustine in his praise of virginity, which he considered the great test of that strength of free-will which he asserted to be at most only weakened by the fall of Adam.[160]
[160] Milman, op. cit. i. 151, 153.
Religious celibacy is, moreover, enjoined or commended as a means of self-mortification supposed to appease an angry god, or with a view to raising the spiritual nature of man by suppressing one of the strongest of all sensual appetites. Thus we find in various religions celibacy side by side with other ascetic observances practised for similar purposes. Among the early Christians those young women who took a vow of chastity “did not look upon virginity as any thing if it were not attended with great mortification, with silence, retirement, poverty, labour, fastings, watchings, and continual praying. They were not esteemed as virgins who would not deny themselves the common diversions of the world, even the most innocent.”[161] Tertullian enumerates virginity, widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the marriage-bed among those fragrant offerings acceptable to God which the flesh performs to its own especial suffering.[162] Finally, it was argued that marriage prevents a person from serving God perfectly, because it induces him to occupy himself too much with worldly things.[163] Though not contrary to the act of charity or the love of God, says Thomas Aquinas, it is nevertheless an obstacle to it.[164] This was one, but certainly not the only, cause of the obligatory celibacy which the Christian Church imposed upon her clergy.