Letters

¹² The creation of the first man should teach us to reject more marriages than one. There was but one Adam and but one Eve; in fact the woman was fashioned from a rib of Adam. Thus divided they were subsequently joined together in marriage; in the words of scripture “the two shall be one flesh,” not two or three. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” Certainly it is not said “to his wives.” Paul in explaining the passage refers it to Christ and the church; making the first Adam a monogamist in the flesh and the second a monogamist in the spirit.

As there is one Eve who is “the mother of all living,” so is there one church which is the parent of all Christians. And as the accursed Lamech made of the first Eve two separate wives, so also the heretics sever the second into several churches which, according to the apocalypse of John, ought rather to be called synagogues of the devil than congregations of Christ. In the Book of Songs we read as follows:— “there are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number.

My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her.” It is to this choice one that the same John addresses an epistle in these words, “the elder unto the elect lady and her children.” So too in the case of the ark which the apostle Peter interprets as a type of the church, Noah brings in for his three sons one wife apiece and not two. Likewise of the unclean animals pairs only are taken, male and female, to show that digamy has no place even among brutes, creeping things, crocodiles and lizards.

And if of the clean animals there are seven taken of each kind, that is, an uneven number; this points to the palm which awaits virginal chastity. For on leaving the ark Noah sacrificed victims to God not of course of the animals taken by twos for these were kept to multiply their species, but of those taken by sevens some of which had been set apart for sacrifice.