Marriage and Virginity
Christ in the sky (1 Thes 4:17). So our understanding would be that the bodies of the first parents both were mortal in their original state and yet were not going to die unless they committed sin, as God had warned. It would be the same as if an injury was threatened, since the body was susceptible to injury, but this would not happen, unless something was done that God had forbidden. In this way, therefore, even through the sexual union of bodies like that there could be offspring. They would grow to a certain stage, but they would not approach or reach old age, nor death either, until the earth was filled by that multiplying spoken of in the blessing. For, if God maintained the garments of the Israelites in their original condition without any deterioration for forty years,†5 how much more readily would he maintain the bodies of those who obeyed his commands in a very happy and stable state, until they were changed into a better one not by the person's death, whereby the body is separated from the soul, but by a blessed transformation from mortality to immortality, from animal nature to spiritual!
Various Benefits of Marriage
3. To investigate and discuss which of these opinions is the true one, or whether even one or more other opinions can be carved out of those words, would take a long time.
3. We can say now that in that condition of being born and dying with which we are acquainted, and in which we were created, the union of man and woman is something of value. The divine Scripture is so much in favor of this union that it is not lawful for a woman put aside by her husband to marry another as long as the husband lives, nor for a man put aside by his wife to take another, unless the woman who has separated from him has died. As even in the Gospel the Lord confirmed that marriage is something of value, not only because he forbade divorce except for the reason of adultery,†6 but also because he attended a wedding as a guest,†7 so with good reason one asks in what lies its value.†8 It seems to me to be not only because of the procreation of children, but also because of the natural sociability that exists between the different sexes. Otherwise in the elderly it would no longer be called marriage, especially if they had lost their children or had not had any. As it is, however, in a good marriage, even with older people, although the passion of youth between man and woman has waned, the relationship of love between husband and wife continues strong, and the better persons they are, the earlier they begin by mutual consent to