mented devotion. "Fast," said
Tertullian. "Fasting prepares for martyrdom. But do not marry, do not bear
children. You would only leave them to the executioner. Garment yourselves
simply, the robes the angels bring are robes of death."

The robes did not always come, the executioner did not, either. The
Kingdom of God delayed. The world persisted. So also did asceticism.
Clement and Hermas unite in testifying that the immaculacy of the single
never varied during an epoch when even that of the vestals did, and that
the love of the married was the more tender because of the immaterial
relations observed.[30] Gregoire de Tours cited subsequently an instance
in which a bride stipulated for a union of this kind. Her husband agreed.
Many years later she died. Her husband, while preparing her for the grave,
openly and solemnly declared that he restored her to God as immaculate as
she came. "At which," the historian added, "the dead woman smiled and
said, 'Why do you tell what no one asked you.'"

The subtlety of the question pleased the Church. The Church liked to
compare the Christian to an athlete struggling in silence with the world,
the flesh, and the devil. It liked to regard him as one whose life was a
continual exercise in purification. It liked to represent his celibacy as
an imitation of the angels. At that period Christianity took things
literally and narrowly. Paul had spoken eloquently on the dignity of
marriage. He authorized and honored it. He permitted and even counselled
second marriages. But his pre-eminent praise of asceticism was alone
considered. Celibacy became the ideal of the early Christians who
necessarily avoided the Forum and whatever else was usual and Roman. It is
not, therefore, very surprising that they should have been defined as
enemies of gods, emperors, laws, customs, nature itself, or, more briefly,
as barbarians.

Yet there were others. At the north and at the west they prowled,
nourished in hatred of Rome, in wonder, too, of the effeminate and
splendid city with its litters of gold, its baths of perfume, its
inhabitants dressed in gauze, and its sway from the Indus to Britannia.
From the day when a mass of them stumbled on Marius to the hour when
Alaric laughed from beneath the walls his derision at imperial might,
always they had wondered and hated.

In the slaking of the hate Christianity perhaps unintentionally assisted.
The Master had said, "All they that take the sword shall perish