Littell's Living Age Volume 184 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 Excerpt: ...have been. Athenagoras quotes a saying which he attributes to our Lord, and which evidently deals with an abuse of this practice. It is to this effect: "Whoever kisses a second time, because he has found pleasure in it, commits a sin." And Clement of Alexandria thus speaks of the matter: "Love is not tested by a kiss, but by kindly feeling. But there are those that do nothing but make the churches resound with a kiss. For this very thing, the shameless use of the kiss, which ought to be mystic, occasions foul suspicions and evil reports." These customs prove that considerable freedom prevailed among the earliest Christians, and doubtless sometimes this freedom was abused. In the very first epoch some of the Corinthian Christians sided with a man who committed inces' and persisted in it after rebuke, and the apostle had to exert himself to the utmost to repress the sympathy and the sin. But the accusations, speaking generally, were hideously false and unfounded. They are of some consequence for our purpose, for they must have acted powerfully on the minds of Christians in inducing them to avoid everything that might furnish even the semblance of justification for them. From a very early date two currents can be traced in the Church--one in the direction of upholding marriage, another in that of despising and rejecting it. No one with the New Testament as his guide could venture to assert that marriage was wrong, and the tradition remained firm in the Church during the Ante-Nicene period that it was unlawful and heretical to forbid marriage. The apostolic fathers offer exhortations to wives to love their own husbands truly, and to love all others with no partiality for any one and in all chastity, and to train up their children in the know...