Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/273

 After that we should never again exhort the ministers and moralists to inveigh against love of women for women; never was the interest of men found to be so fully in accord with the precepts of divine law.

Here I should like to speak of the brides of the Lord; but I remember “The Nun” of Diderot, and my pen falls from my hand. Oh, who would dare to touch a subject handled by Diderot?

 

All people have regarded virginity as something sacred, and God has so honored it that he willed that his son be born of a virgin, fecundated, however, by the Holy Ghost. Still, it appears problematical whether the Virgin Mary, complete virgin that she was, did not have the same pleasure as those who are not virgins, when she received the divine annunciation. Father Sanchez has discussed the question very fully “whether the Virgin Mary ‘spent’ in copulation with the Holy Ghost,” unhappily, he decided in the negative, and I have too much veneration for Father Sanchez not to submit to his decision; but because of Rh