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De Virginitate B. Mariae
8.
Hieronymus.—Si tam contentiosus es, jam nunc tua mente superaberis. Nolo mihi aliquod inter partum et coitum tempus interseras. Nolo dicas: Mulier quaecumque concepit et peperit masculum, immunda erit septem diebus, secundum dies secessionis et purgationis suae immundata erit: et octavo die circumcidet carnem praeputii ejus, et triginta tribus diebus sedebit in sanguine puro, et omne sanctum non tanget, et reliqua (Levit. XII, 2, 3). Statim eam invadat Joseph: statim audiat per Jeremiam: Equi insanientes in feminas facti sunt mihi, unusquisque ad uxorem proximi sui hinniebat (Jerem. V, 8). Alioqui quomodo stare poterit, Non cognovit eam, donec peperit filium: si post purgationis tempus exspectat: si quadraginta rursum diebus tanto tempore dilata libido differtur? Polluatur cruore puerpera: obstetrices suscipiant parvulum vagientem: maritus lassam teneat uxorem. Sic incipiant nuptiae, ne Evangelista mentitus sit. Sed absit, ut hoc de matre Salvatoris et viro justo sit aestimandum. Nulla ibi obstetrix: nulla muliercularum sedulitas intercessit. Ipsa pannis involvit infantem, ipsa et mater et obstetrix fuit. Et collocavit eum, inquit, in praesepio, quia non erat ei locus in diversorio (Luc. II, 7). Quae sententia et apocryphorum deliramenta convincit, dum Maria ipsa pannis involvit infantem; et Helvidii expleri non patitur voluptatem, dum in diversorio locus non fuit nuptiarum.
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The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary
10.
If you are so contentious, your own thoughts shall now prove your master. You must not allow any time to intervene between delivery and intercourse. You must not say, 1“If a woman conceive seed and bear a man child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of the separation of her sickness shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days. She shall touch no hallowed thing,” and so forth. On your showing, Joseph must at once approach, her, and be subject to Jeremiah’s 2 reproof, “They were as mad horses in respect of women: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife.” Otherwise, how can the words stand good, “he knew her not, till she had brought forth a son,” if he waits after the time of another purifying has expired, if his lust must brook another long delay of forty days? The mother must go unpurged from her child-bed taint, and the wailing infant be attended to by the midwives, while the husband clasps his exhausted wife. Thus for P. 339 sooth must their married life begin so that the Evangelist may not be convicted of falsehood. But God forbid that we should think thus of the Saviour’s mother and of a just man. No midwife assisted at His birth; no women’s officiousness intervened. With her own hands she wrapped Him in the swaddling clothes, herself both mother and midwife, 3“and laid Him,” we are told, “in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn”; a statement which, on the one hand, refutes the ravings of the apocryphal accounts, for Mary herself wrapped Him in the swaddling clothes, and on the other makes the voluptuous notion of Helvidius impossible, since there was no place suitable for married intercourse in the inn.