Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/54

 children, the future servants of God, which proceed from the marriage.

The difference between such a view of marriage and the one which exists inis [sic] very great; people will still continue to marry, parents will still continue to arrange the marriage of their children, but there is a great difference in this when the satisfaction of the body is regarded as permissible, legal, and the greatest happiness in the world, -or when it is regarded as a sin. A man following the Christian Teaching will marry only when he feels he cannot act otherwise; and having married, he will not addict himself to lust, but strive towards its suppression (man as well as woman); parents caring about the spiritual welfare of their children will not regard it as indispensable to marry each one, but will marry them -that is, advise for facilitate their fall -only when the children have not the power to preserve their purity, and only when it is evident that they cannot live otherwise. Those married will not desire, as the case is now, a great number of children, but on the contrary, striving towards purity of life, will be glad they have few children, and that they can devote all their powers to education of the children they already have, and to those strangers' children whom they can help if they desire to serve God by the education of His future servants.

The difference will be that existing between those who use food only because they cannot get on without it, and who try therefore to spend as little time and attention as possible in its preparation and consumption, and those who place the chief interest of their life in the invention, adaptation, increase of appetite, and consumption of food, as developed to the superlative degree by those Romans who took emetics after one dish to enable them to eat another.