A contemporary writer has wittily remarked that “perhaps the most ardent admirer of hymeneal rites would cheerfully admit that he could not conceive St. Paul or St. John starting on a nuptial tour, accompanied by the latest fashions from Athens or Ephesus, and the graceful brides whom they were destined to adorn. They would feel that Christianity itself could not survive such a vision as that. Nor could the imagination, in its wildest moods, picture the majestic adversary of the Arian Emperor attended in his flight up the Nile by Mistress Athanasius, nor St. John Chrysostom escorted in his wanderings through Phrygia by the wife of his bosom arrayed in a wreath of orange-blossoms. Would Ethelbert have become a Christian if St. Augustine had introduced to him his lady and her bridesmaids?”(532) We frequently hear of unmarried Bishops and Priests laying down their lives for the faith in China and Corea and imprisoned in Germany. Heroic sacrifices such as these are, however, too much to be expected from men enjoying the domestic luxury and engrossed by the responsibility of a wife and children. But does not St. Paul authorize the marriage of the clergy when he says: “Have we not power to carry about a woman, a sister, as well as the rest of the Apostles?”(533) The Protestant text mis-translates this passage by substituting the word _wife_ for _woman_. It is evident that St. Paul does not speak here of his wife, since he had none; but he alludes to those pious women who voluntarily waited on the Apostles, and ministered to them in their missionary journeys. It is also objected that the Apostle seems to require that a Bishop be “the husband of one wife.”(534) The context certainly cannot mean that a Bishop must be a married man, for the reason already given, that St. Paul himself was never married. The sense of the text, as all tradition testifies, is that no candidate should be elected to the office of Bishop who had been married more than once. It was not possible in those days always to select single men for the Episcopal office. Hence the Church was often compelled to choose married persons, but always with this restriction, that they had never contracted nuptials a second time. They were obliged, moreover, if not widowers, to live separated from their wives. Others adduce against clerical celibacy these words of St. Paul: “In the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, ... forbidding to marry.”(535) This passage, however, alludes to the Ebionites, Gnostics and Manicheans, who positively taught that marriage is sinful. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, holds that matrimony is not only a lawful state, for those who are called to embrace it, but that it is also a Sacrament, and that the highest degree of holiness is attainable in conjugal life.