Teaching Christianity (continued)
to the condition of those times, is not an infamy nor a crime either, even when understood literally and not figuratively, can be transferred also to these times and put into practice in life today. Not unless cupidity or greed is lording it over you, and seeking the support of the very scriptures which are meant to udermine it, will you do such a thing. If you do, you are miserably failing to understand the value of such things being set down there; it is to help persons of good hope to come to the salutary realization both that a custom which they abhor can have a good use, and that one they favor can be condemned, if they look in the first case to the love and in the second to the greed of those who observe it.
27. The fact is, if one person, given the time he lived in, could be chaste in his association with many wives, another can be lustful in his association with one. I have more respect, you see, for the man who makes use of the fertility of many wives for the sake of something else than for the one who finds enjoyment in the flesh of one for its own sake. In the first instance an advantage is being sought suitable to the needs of the times, in the second an appetite wrapped up in passing pleasures is being satisfied. And those men to whom the apostle allows carnal congress, each with his own one wife, by way of concession on account of their lack of self-restraint,[40] were at a lower stage in their progress toward God than those who, though they each had several wives, were only looking in their sexual relations with them to the procreation of children, like the wise man whose only consideration in food and drink is bodily health. And so if they had still been found alive when the Lord came, when it was no longer a time to throw away stones, but a time to gather stones together (Eccl 3:5), they would straightaway have castrated themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven;[41] you only find it difficult, after all, to go without something, when you are greedy to possess it.
Those men of old did indeed know that even within