Marriage and Virginity
46. There are, therefore, many gifts, and some are more splendid and more perfect than others; each person has his own gifts. Sometimes one person receives fewer gifts but greater ones, and another receives lesser gifts but more of them. Given that there is a great number of those different gifts, and the advantages of the better ones are not for this life but for eternity, who among us would dare to decide among them as to their equality or the extent of their inequality? In my opinion, however, the Lord chose to mention three different degrees of fruitfulness,†62 and leave the rest for us to work out. In fact one of the other evangelists mentions only the hundredfold fruitfulness.†63 Are we to take this to mean that he did not accept the other two or did not know about them, rather than that he left them for us to take as implied?
47. Whether the hundredfold fruitfulness refers to virginity dedicated to God, or whether those different degrees of fruitfulness are to be understood in some other way, which we may or may not have mentioned, it remains true, as I had begun to say, that no one, it seems to me, would dare to consider virginity superior to martyrdom, and no one would doubt that martyrdom is a gift that remains hidden if it is not put to the test.
Married People May Be Prepared for Martyrdom
47. The virgin, therefore, has enough to think about to help her to stay humble and not offend against love, that love that is the greatest of all gifts, and without which, whatever other gifts she may have, few or many, great or small, she is nothing. She has, I say, enough to think about to keep her from becoming proud†64 or envious. She should hold virginity to be a much greater and better thing than marriage, while still being conscious that she does not know whether any particular married woman is already capable of suffering for Christ, whereas she is not yet capable of that and it is a mercy to her that her weakness is not put to the test. God is faithful, says the apostle, and he does not allow you to be tempted more than you can bear, but along with the temptation provides a way out of it, so that you are able to withstand it (1 Cor 10:13). Perhaps those men and women, therefore, who live a married life admirable in its own way, are already capable of resisting the enemy's efforts to force them to commit acts of wickedness, even with their bodies torn apart and their blood poured out. And perhaps those men and women who have kept