474 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 15380.
right as “other apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas,” though he renounced it for personal reasons. From the pastoral Epistles we may infer that marriage was the rule among the bishops and deacons of the apostolic age. It is therefore plainly a usurpation to deprive the ministers of the gospel of this right of nature and nature’s God.
But from the second century the opinion came to prevail, and still prevails in the papal communion, which is ruled by an unmarried priest, that marriage is inconsistent with the sacerdotal office, and should be forbidden after ordination. This view was based on the distinction between a lower and higher morality with corresponding merit and reward, — the one for the laity or the common people; the other for priests and monks, who form a spiritual nobility. All the church fathers, Greek and Latin, even those who were themselves married (as Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Synesius), are unanimous in praising celibacy above marriage; and the greatest of them are loudest in this praise, especially St. Jerome. And yet the mothers of Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and Augustin, are the brightest examples of Christian women in the ancient Church. Nonna, Anthusa, and Monica were more useful in giving birth to these luminaries of the Church than any nuns.
This ascetic feature marks a decided difference between the Fathers and the Reformers, as it does between the Catholic and Evangelical churches. Anglicanism, with all its respect for the Fathers, differs as widely from them in this respect as | any other Protestant communion.
The Oriental churches, including that of Russia, stopped half way in this ascetic restriction of a divine right. They approve and even enjoin marriage upon the lower clergy (before ordination), but forbid it to bishops, and regard the directions of Paul, 1 Tim. 3:2, 12 (compare 5:9), as a concession to the weakness of the flesh, and as a prohibition of second marriage. The Latin Church, understanding the
§ 79. REFLECTIONS ON CLERICAL FAMILY LIFE. 475
advice of Paul, 1 Cor. 7:7, 32, 33, as “a counsel of perfection,” indicating a better way, imposed, as early as the fourth century, total abstinence from marriage upon all orders of the clergy, and brands the marriage of a priest as sinful concubinage. Pope Siricius, A. D. 385, issued the first prohibition of sacerdotal marriage. His successors followed, but it was not till Gregory VII. that the prohibition was rigidly enforced. It was done in the interest of hierarchical power, and at an enormous sacrifice of clerical purity. The Roman Catholic system makes marriage one of the seven sacraments; but by elevating celibacy above it, and by declaring it to be beneath the dignity of a priest of God, it degrades marriage as if it involved an element of impurity. According to the Gnostic and Manichean theory, condemned by Paul as a doctrine of demons, 1 Tim. 4: 1-3, marriage is a contact with sinful matter, and forbidden altogether.
In view of this state of public opinion and the long tradition of Latin Christendom, we need not wonder that the marriage of the Reformers created the greatest sensation, and gave rise to the slander that sensual passion was one of the strongest motives.of their rebellion against popery. Erasmus struck the keynote to this perversion of history, although he knew well enough that Luther and Gicolampadius were Protestants several years before they thought of marrying. Clerical marriage was a result, not a cause, of the Reformation, as clerical celibacy was neither the first nor the chief objection to the papal system.!
1 Archbishop Spalding, in his History of the Reformation (I. 176), following the example of unscrupulous Romish controversialists, thus echoes the joke of Erasmus: ‘‘ Matrimony was, in almost all cases, the dénowement of the drama which signalized the zeal for reformation.’’ He refers for proof to Moore’s Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion, ch. XLVL., ‘where the great Irish poet enters into the subject at length, giving his authorities as he proceeds, and playing off his caustic wit on the hymeneal propensities of the Reformers.’’ In looking at that chapter (for the first time), I find that it abounds in misstatements and abuse of the Reformers, whom the Irish poet calls not only ‘‘fanatics’”? and “ bigots,’ but ‘‘ the