The other current of thought which I mentioned ran against marriage, and it was of an ascetic nature. The seeds of it occur in the ‘Republic’ of Plato, and it attached itself to the Pauline conception of flesh. I can explain it best by a reference to food. We take food in order to sustain the body. But various kinds of dainties please the palate, and we may take the food not merely for health, but for the pleasure that it gives. In the first instance we are acting rightly and under an irresistible necessity. In the second instance we are sinning, for we are yielding to a base appetite, the outcome of the flesh. The flesh, its appetites and passions, are the sources of human corruption, and gratification of the flesh is a sin. In like manner the sole object of marriage is that children may be born, and if any other object is sought, it is a gratification of lust; and, therefore, while marriage is allowable, man may be nearly as licentious in marriage as out of it. These inferences are drawn with the utmost precision by Christian writers of the second and third centuries, and the opinions I have mentioned will be found expressed in numerous passages. But it is easy to see that the mind could not halt in this position. Marriage, even for the sake of children, was a carnal indulgence, and such thinkers could not help feeling that the arrangement of the Creator was not altogether satisfactory. They did not venture on saying this. They did not dare to condemn marriage. But they held that it was much better not to marry at all, that the man or woman who had never married was a nobler and more exalted being than the man or woman who had married. Of course these ideas did not spring into vogue at once, but gradually forced their way. They were aided by the increasing rigour in the distinction between clerical and lay. The clerical man must possess a peculiar sanctity. A man who aspired to a clerical office in the church must, above all, show control over the lusts and passions of earth, and so refrain from marriage. The lay brother might be unable to free himself from the trammels of earth; the cleric could rise to the throne of heaven only on the wings of virginity. There thus arose a gradation of merit which had its counterpart in the evolution of the world’s history. “For the world,” says Methodius,[141] “while still unfilled with men, was like a child, and it was necessary that it should first be filled with these, and so grow to manhood. But when hereafter it was colonized from end to end, the race of man spreading to a boundless extent, God no longer allowed man to remain in the same ways, considering how they might now proceed from one point to another and advance nearer to heaven until, having attained to the very greatest and most exalted lesson of virginity, they should reach to perfection, that first they should abandon the intermarriage of brothers and sisters and marry wives from other families, and then that they no