The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK NINE Te
tity had brought forth children, could they not have yielded place to their successors not by dying but by being transported to another life? Enoch and Elijah, both dead in Adam and bearing in their flesh the seeds of death, will return to this life, as it is believed, to pay this debt, and after so long a delay will die.*! But now they are in another life, where, before the resurrection of the body, and before the natural body is changed to a spiritual one, they are not wasted by disease or old age.
If this is so, then, with how much more justice and good reason would it be granted to the first human beings, who were living without any sin of their own or of their parents, to be brought to some better life, yielding place to their children, and hence at the end of the world, with all the saints descended from them, to be changed into a more blessed form like the angels', not by the death of the body but by the power of God?
CHAPTER 7
The good of marriage.
12. I do not see, therefore, in what other way the woman was made to be the helper of the man if procreation is eliminated, and I do not understand why it should be eliminated. How explain the great merit and high honor that faithful and holy virginityhas in God's eyes except that in this time to refrain from embracing,** when there is a vast crowd from all nations to fill up the number of the saints, the urge to experience base pleasure of the flesh does not demand what is not required for the provision of offspring??? Finally, the weakness of both sexes, with its inclination to depravity and ruin, is wisely saved by honorable marriage, so that what could have been a duty for men in a healthy state is a healing remedy for those who are sick. For from the fact that incontinence is an evil it does not follow that marriage is not good, even when by it an incontinent couple are united in the flesh. As a matter of fact, the good of marriage is not blameworthy because of the evil of inconti-