God himself institutes marriage before the fall ; to Matt. xix. 5, where Christ sanctions it ; to the patri- archs before and after the flood ; to Moses and the prophets, Zacharias and Elizabeth, and the apostles, particularly Peter, who lived in wedlock ; also to Paul, who himself exliorted to marriage,* required the bishop or the deacon to be the husband of one wife,° and advised young widows to marry and bear children.^ He declared the prohibition of marriage and of divinely provided food a Manichsean error. To answer these arguments, Jerome indulges in utterly unwarranted inferences, and speaks of marriage in a tone of contempt, which -gave offence even to his friends.* Augustine was moved by it to present the advantages of the married life in a special work, De hono conjugally though without yielding the ascetic esti- mate of celibacy.^ Jovinian's second point has an apparent afiinity with the * 1 Cor. vii. 36, 39. - 1 Tim. iii. 2, 12. * 1 Tim. V. 14; comp. 1 Tim. ii. 15 ; Heb. xiii. 4. * From 1 Cor. vii. 1, for example (" It is good for a man not to toucli a woman "), he argues, without qualification, 1. i. c. T (Opera, ii. 246) : " Si bonum est mulierem non tangere, malum est ergo tangere, nihil enim bono contrarium est, nisi malum ; si autem malum est, et ignoscitur, ideo conceditur, ne malo quid deterius fiat. . . . Tolle fornicationem, et non dicet [apostolus], unusqnisque uxorem suam habeat." Immedi- ately after this (ii. 247) he argues, from the exhortation of Paul to pray without ceas- ing, 1 Thess. V. \1 : "Si semper orandum est, nunquam ergo conjugio serviendum, quoniam quotiescunque uxori debitum reddo, orare non possum." Such sophistries and misinterpretations evidently proceed upon the lowest sensual idea of marriage, and called forth some opposition even at that age. He himself afterward felt that he had gone too far, and in his Ep. 48 (ed. Vallars. or Ep. 30, ed. Bened.) ad Pani- machium, endeavored to save himself by distinguishing between the gymnastic (polemically rhetorical) and the dogmatic mode of writing. * De bono conj. c. 8 : " Duo bona sunt connubium et continentia, quorum alte- rum est melius." 230 THIED PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the jperseverantia sanc- torum. It is not referred by him, however, to the eternal and unchangeable counsel of God, but simply based on 1 Jno. iii. 9, and v. 18, and is connected with his abstract conception of the opposite moral states. He limits the impossibility of relapse to the truly regenerate, who " plena fide in baptismate renati sunt," and makes a distinction between the mere bap- tism of water and the baptism of the Spirit, which involves also a distinction between the actual and the ideal church. His third point is aimed against the ascetic exaltation of fasting, with reference to Eom. xiv. 20, and 1 Tim. iv. 3.