Many laymen still object above all to priests’ marriages—and not only to those of clergymen, but to those of everyone of lower rank and station. They would have no one marry except the rich, who can support wives, because, apparently, their parish would be burdened with orphans and the world filled with beggars.

But these are hard-hearted, unnatural monsters of men, shallow politicians. They do not consider that much of the world is not yet inhabited as it ought to be, or how many colonies could be sent to America, the unknown southern land, and Africa. Let them consult Sir William Alexander’s book on colonies, Orpheus Junior’s Golden Fleece, Captain Whitbourne, Mr Hagthorpe and others, and they will certainly learn otherwise.

Those politically astute Romans thought differently: they believed their city and country could never be too populous. The emperor Hadrian said he would rather have people than money, “that he preferred to enlarge the empire by adding people rather than wealth.” Augustus Caesar delivered a speech at Rome “to the unmarried” to persuade them to marry.

Some countries compelled people to marry in former times, as do the Jews, Turks, Indians and Chinese, among others, in our own day. They are greatly surprised by our practice of allowing so many idle people to live in monasteries, and often wonder how they can live chastely.

On the island of Maranhão, the governor and local king were astonished by the Frenchmen and wondered how so many friars and the rest of their company could live without wives. They thought it impossible and would not believe it.

If these men surveyed our multitude of religious houses and counted our monasteries throughout Europe—eighteen nunneries in Padua, thirty-one monasteries of monks and twenty-eight of nuns in Venice, and so on—“you may know the lion by its claw”; the proportion is the same in all other provinces and cities. What would they think? Do these people live chastely? Let them dissemble as they please: I agree with Tertullian that few can remain continent except under compulsion.

“O chastity,” he says, “you are a rare goddess in the world, not easily attained and seldom lasting. Now and then you may be compelled, either through a deficiency of nature, or if discipline persuades and decrees enforce.”

Or people may abstain for some such secondary motive: sullenness, discontent, having lost their first loves, being unable to have the partner they themselves want, lack of means, rash vows, and so on. But can a man willingly remain continent? I think not.

Therefore, either out of pity for human weakness, as a matter of policy, or to prevent a far worse evil—for some regard sex as necessary as food and drink, and because the vigour of youth and the condition and temperament of most people’s bodies desire it so fiercely—some nations have in the past freely permitted polygamy and brothels.

In great Cairo in Egypt, as Radziwiłł observes, a hundred thousand courtesans are tolerated, besides boys. How many there are in Fez, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and elsewhere! And many other provinces and cities of Europe still do the same, because they think young men—including churchmen and servants—can scarcely live chastely.

Perhaps this consideration led Vibius the Spaniard, when his friend Crassus, that wealthy Roman gentleman, was hiding in the cave, “to provide an abundance of the pleasure that his age desired”: to oblige him still further, he sent two vigorous young women to keep him company throughout his confinement there.

And it led Surena, the Parthian general, when he fought the Romans, to take two hundred concubines about with him, as Swiss soldiers now commonly take their wives.

But since this course is not generally approved, and is rather opposed and abhorred as unlawful, most countries strongly encourage marriage, greatly reward those with many children, and fine those who refuse to marry: “the privilege of three children.” And in Aulus Gellius, book 2, chapter 15, Aelian, book 6, chapter 5, and Valerius, book 1, chapter 9, we read that three children freed their father from burdensome offices, and five from all public contributions.

“A woman shall be saved by bearing children.” Epictetus would have everyone marry; and Plato, in book 6 of the Laws, requires that a man who has not married before the age of thirty-five be compelled and punished, and the money dedicated to Juno’s temple or applied to public purposes.

In some countries they consider a man who dies without a wife unfortunate—a most unhappy man, as Boethius infers; and, if happy at all, still “fortunate in misfortune,” unhappy in his supposed happiness. They commonly deplore his condition and lament him deeply for it: “Oh, my sweet son,” and so on. See Lucian, On Mourning, and Sandys, folio 83, and so forth.

Yet many among us take the opposite side. They are married themselves; as for others, let them burn, blaze and flame—they do not care, so long as they are not troubled by them.

Some are too fastidious, and some too covetous. They have the capacity and means to marry whenever they wish, but are so particular that they demand the choice offered to the emperor Theophilus, whose mother Euphrosyne presented all the rarest beauties of the empire together in the great chamber of his palace and told him to give a golden apple to the woman he liked best. If they could thus pick whomever they pleased from all the beautiful maidens their nation affords, they might perhaps consent to marry; otherwise—and so on.

“Why should a man marry?” asks another Epicurean crowd. “What is matrimony but a matter of money? Why should free nature be encroached upon, confined or bound to this man or that woman with these shackles upon body and property?” And so on.