CHAPTER TWO
[1] It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian fathers that concupiscence or the sensual passion was the original sin of human nature. Lecky—Hist. European Morals. The tendency of the church towards the enforcement of celibacy was early seen. At the four Synods which assembled to establish the true faith in respect to the Holy nature of Christ’s Humanity, the first one at Nice, 318, the second at Constantinople with forty bishops present; the third at Ephesus with two hundred bishops present; the fourth at Chaledonia with many bishops together, they forever forbade all marriage to the minister at the altar. Monumenta Ecclesiastica, p. 347. To no minister at the altar is it allowed to marry, but it is forbidden to every one. Ibid.
[2] According to Christianity woman is the unclean one, the seducer who brought sin into the world and caused the fall of man. Consequently all apostles and fathers of the church have regarded marriage as an inevitable evil just as prostitution is regarded today. August Bebel.—Woman in the Past, Present and Future.
[3] Spirit in the Hebrew, as shown in the first chapter, answers to all genders; in the Greek to the feminine alone. With Kabbalists the “Divine Spirit” was conceded to be the feminine Jehovah, that is, the feminine principle of the Godhead.
[4] From Marcellina, in the second century, a body of the church took its name. Her life was pure, and her memory has descended to us free from calumny and reproach.
[5] Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called by Kabbalists the “elementary.”... The second class is composed of the invisible antitypes of the men to be born. Isis Unveiled, I, 310.
[6] Who maintained that Adam did not think of celebrating his nuptials till he went out of Paradise.
[7] It was the effect of God’s goodness to man that suffered him to sleep when Eve was formed, as Adam being endowed with a spirit of prophecy might foresee the evils which the production of Eve would cause to all mankind, so that God perhaps cast him into that sleep lest he should oppose the creation of his wife. Life of Adam by Loredano. Pub. at Amsterdam, 1696. See Bayle.
[8] Lecky.—Hist. European Morals.
[9] That marriage was evil was taught by Jerome.