The unworldly, supernatural life is essentially also an unmarried life. The celibate lies already, though not in the form of a law, in the inmost nature of Christianity. This is sufficiently declared in the supernatural origin of the Saviour,--a doctrine in which unspotted virginity is hallowed as the saving principle, as the principle of the new, the Christian world. Let not such passages as, "Be fruitful and multiply," or, "What God has joined together let not man put asunder," be urged as a sanction of marriage. The first passage relates, as Tertullian and Jerome have already observed, only to the unpeopled earth, not to the earth when filled with men, only to the beginning, not to the end of the world, an end which was initiated by the immediate appearance of God upon earth. And the second also refers only to marriage as an institution of the Old Testament. Certain Jews proposed the question whether it were lawful for a man to separate from his wife; and the most appropriate way of dealing with this question was the answer above cited. He who has once concluded a marriage ought to hold it sacred. Marriage is intrinsically an indulgence to the weakness or rather the strength of the flesh, an evil which therefore must be restricted as much as possible. The indissolubleness of marriage is a nimbus, a sacred irradiance, which expresses precisely the opposite of what minds, dazzled and perturbed by its lustre, seek beneath it. Marriage in itself is, in the sense of perfected Christianity, a sin, [132] or rather a weakness which is permitted and forgiven thee only on condition that thou for ever limitest thyself to a single wife. In short, marriage is hallowed only in the Old Testament, but not in the New. The New Testament knows a higher, a supernatural principle, the mystery of unspotted virginity. [133] "He who can receive it let him receive it." "The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection." Thus in heaven there is no marriage; the principle of sexual love is excluded from heaven as an earthly, worldly principle. But the heavenly life is the true, perfected, eternal life of the Christian. Why then should I, who am destined for heaven, form a tie which is unloosed in my true destination? Why should I, who am potentially a heavenly being, not realise this possibility even here? [134] Marriage is already proscribed from my mind, my heart, since it is expelled from heaven, the essential object of my faith, hope, and life. How can an earthly wife have a place in my heaven-filled heart? How can I divide my heart between God and man? [135] The Christian's love to God is not an abstract or general love such as the love of truth, of justice, of