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 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 Manichaean 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 Oecolampadius 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.^604
On a superficial view one might wish that the Reformers had remained true to their solemn
promise, like the Jansenist bishops in the seventeenth century, and the clerical leaders of the Old
Catholic secession in the nineteenth.^605 But it was their mission to introduce by example as well as
by precept, a new type of Christian morality, to restore and re-create clerical family life, and to
secure the purity, peace, and happiness of innumerable homes.
(^604) 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 dénouement 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. XLVI., "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 coarsest hypocrites" and "slaves of the most vulgar superstition " (p. 246,
Philad. ed. 1833). The same poet gives us the startling piece of information (p. 248) that the Protestants were subdivided on the eucharistic
question alone into countless factions such as "Panarii, Accidentarii, Corporarii, Arrabonarii, Tropistae, Metamorphistae, Iscariotistae,
Schwenkenfeldians, etc., etc., etc.," and that "an author of Bellarmine’s time counted no less than two hundred different opinions on the
words, ’This Is my body’ "! Moore was evidently better at home in the history of Lord Byron than in the history of the church.
(^605) The Old Catholic Bishop Reinkens and Bishop Herzog, Drs. Döllinger, Friederich, Reusch, and Langen, remained single after their
excommunication in 1870. But Père Loyson-Hyacinthe, who occupies a similar position of Tridentine or rather Gallican Romanism versus
Vatican Romanism, followed the example of the Reformers, and married an American widow, whom he had converted to the Roman
Church by his eloquent sermons in Notre Dame, before she converted him to herself. They were joined together by Dean Stanley in
Westminster Abbey. It is reported that Pope Pius IX., on being informed of the fact, and asked to excommunicate the ex-monk, wittily
replied, "It is not necessary, since he has taken the punishment into his own arms." A Pope’s view of the blessed estate of matrimony!