singular bad faith proposes to exact another ten years’ service; but this time the future son-in-law rebels, and has the misfortune accidentally to kill his prospective father-in-law, and this brings him before the courts. The father’s egotism was only equalled by that of the bridegroom elect. The man who thought of marrying, that is to say, of taking a wife, was a man of some thirty years (Plato proposed thirty, Aristotle thirty-five); he had enjoyed his youth, and was now shutting the door upon it. Why? Often he was not very clear himself: because the time had come, he supposed, for doing what everybody did. Celibacy was not the vogue: “We are no longer in the age of the vestals,” as Egnatius[29] excellently said. And we discover from various sources that the religious vocation was not very well understood, even among girls. Luckless preachers had to toil and sweat to prove that virginity was no crime, and that a woman might quite fittingly prefer the ideal of a mystic marriage to the prospect of bearing a man’s yoke and measuring out the domestic oil. Erasmus writing to nuns is too courteous not to speak of angels or lilies of the valley, but in his heart of hearts he thinks it all terribly old-fashioned, and has not the slightest belief in the virginal theories of St. Jerome. With still greater reason, celibacy was not countenanced beyond a certain age. Luther very honestly regarded it as an intolerable burden, contrary to nature and the custom of the early church. “It is as impossible to do without women as without meat and drink.” And so a man took a wife because he thus fulfilled part of his duty as a healthy animal; he married because at thirty years the time had come for making a home and begetting a family. In reality a man married, in a manner, impersonally, rather for his family than for himself; and all that he desired was to complicate his life as little as possible in marrying, to be able to preserve his tastes, habits, hobbies, without the incubus of a partner.