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Updated: June 4, 2025
I am also much gratified at having brought about more than eighty marriages within the church, for I suspect that the alliances formed by those people are not marriages, but rather the taking of concubines, considering the readiness with which they divorce and marry again, according to the custom of the country.
If you read the verses before you will find he was careless, and satisfying his lusts in drinking and playing the wanton with his concubines.
Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein.
In 1208 an order was issued prohibiting mothers or other female relatives residing with priests, on account of the frequent scandals arising. Offences became so numerous and so open that it was with relief that laymen saw priests openly select concubines. That at least gave a promise of some protection to domestic life.
Pope Gregory VII. tried again to do something for the cause of public morality, in 1074, when he issued edicts against both concubinage and simony or the then prevalent custom of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment; but the edict was too harsh and unreasonable with regard to the first, inasmuch as it provided that no priest should marry in the future, and that those who already possessed wives or concubines were to give them up or relinquish their sacred offices.
A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions.
Neither does this take account of the great number of concubines that may be found in the homes of the higher classes. A concubine often makes formal divorce quite superfluous. I by no means contend that the women of Old Japan were all and always miserable.
It was no small part of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal man that children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-long subjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age. The daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, and prepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmented further by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle.
Carnal relations attributed Christian's alarm to 'some frenzy distemper got into his head, and Southey, following their example, ascribes Bunyan's hallowed feelings to his want of 'sober judgment, 'his brutality and extreme ignorance, a 'stage of burning enthusiasm, and to 'an age in which hypocrisy was regnant, and fanaticism rampant throughout the land. What a display of reigning hypocrisy and rampant fanaticism was it to see the game at cat openly played by men on Sunday, the church bells calling them to their sport!!! Had Southey been poet-laureate to Charles II, he might with equal truth have concealed the sensuality, open profaneness, and debauchery of that profligate monarch and his court of concubines, and have praised him as 'the Lord's anointed. Bunyan was an eye-witness of the state of the times in which he lived, and he associated with numbers of the poor in Bedfordshire and the adjoining counties.
One would expect a father who really loved his children to desire and plan for their legitimacy; but the children by his concubines are not "ipso facto" recognized as legal. One more evidence in this direction is the frequency of adoption and of separation.
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