PREFACE.

...namely, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Concerning this, many have already gone into the opinion that by this tree nothing else can or should be understood than the use of marriage, which was forbidden for a time to our first parents by God, as if this very use of Marriage contained some evil within itself. Just as formerly Simon Magus, Saturninus, the Hydroparastatæ water-drinkers/sectarians, Tatian, Marcion, the Manichaeans, and Julian, the impious follower of Pelagius, asserted. They not only denied the dignity of a Sacrament to marriage, as Luther did in his book On the Babylonian Captivity, Calvin in his Institutes (Book 4, ch. 19), Chemnitz in the second part of his Examination of the Council of Trent, and other worst of innovators, but they further called it a work of the devil, a business of fornication and impudicity, saying that nuptials were introduced not by God but by the devil. I was, indeed, difficult and slow from the beginning to believe that such a perverse interpretation and new doctrine in the Church could enter and occupy the sincere souls of the faithful. But after I was taught by the serious and frequently repeated attestation of many—whom I could name—that many people, even those of a otherwise tender conscience, persist in such an opinion and sentiment without any suspicion of error or perverse doctrine or anxiety of conscience, my meager intellect was strengthened to briefly treat this matter. I grieve, indeed, and that most greatly, that I am not equipped with all the arms with which one ought to go forth and contend who undertakes to unfold the profound mysteries of Holy Scripture, and to uncover the unshaken truth of the same.