[1071] See the judgment delivered in 1409 in the case brought to the Bishop of Amiens against the Mayor, etc., of Abbeville to establish his right to receive such fees, which were “sometimes ten, sometimes twelve, sometimes twenty Parisian sous.”
[1072] See Martine, de Antiq. Eccles. Ritibus, I. ix. 4.
[1073] J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1862), tom. I., p. 859, par. 463.
[1074] Lord Hailes, op. cit., iii. 15.
[1075] Tobit, viii. 4 and 5 (Douai version). The fatuity of his reasoning, although with seven predecessors slain by the demon much must be pardoned to Tobias, is obvious, when we discover that the practice of deferring the consummation of marriage for a certain time is older than Tobit and Christianity, and has been observed by heathen tribes, not on any ascetic principle, in many parts of the world. Hence, “we may reasonably infer that far from instituting the rule and imposing it on the pagans, the Church, on the contrary, borrowed it (like much else) from the heathen, and sought to give it a scriptural sanction by appealing to the authority of the angel Raphael.” Frazer, op. cit., I. 505.
[1076] The whole question is fully treated by J. G. Frazer, op. cit., vol. I., pp. 485-530, and Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, 3rd ed., vol. I., pp. 57-60. Some writers hold that the period of continence originated at an ancient time when it was deemed advisable that the deflowering should be effected by a god or his representatives—In Israel the Sacred Men—so that the woman should receive strength to bear children to her husband. For the practice they rely on Hosea iv. 14, and for the deferment to the seventh night on Gen. xxix. 27, and in the correction of the reading in Judges, xiv. 18, from “before the sun went down” to “before he went into her chamber.” The evidence to my mind is far from convincing.
[1077] Babylonian Magic (London, 1914), pp. 223-224, and Le Poème Sumérien, already cited, p. 72, note 3.
[1078] Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 634, 776.
[1079] It would seem that the Babylonians intelligently, if unconsciously, anticipated our law of germs, for “the doctrine of disease was that the swarming demons could enter a man’s body and cause sickness.” On a fragment of a tablet, Budge has found six evil spirits mentioned by name, each of which specialised in attack, the first going for the head, and so on. See Encyc. Bibl., 1073.
[1080] Robinson, op. cit., p. 40. In S. Bochart’s Hierozoicon (Leipzig, 1796), p. 869, Abuhamed Hispanus gives quite a different account.