Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/202

200 of morals. The views of St. Paul on marriage are set forth in I Corinthians VII 1-9:
 * 1. Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
 * 2. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
 * 3. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence; and likewise also the wife unto the husband.
 * 4. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
 * 5. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.
 * 6. But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment.
 * 7. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man has his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.
 * 8. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them to abide even as I.
 * 9. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

These precepts furnish an example of the harm that can be done when man follows the absurd and unsocial decrees of an ascetic individual written in a barbaric age and maintained as law in a more advanced period. The enlightened physician holds that it is not good for a man not to touch a woman; and one wonders what would have become of, our race if all women had carried St. Paul's teaching, "It is good for them if they abide even as I," into practice. Bertrand Russell, in his "Marriage and Morals," has gone to the root of the