Although it is the office of parents to settle their daughter in life, they are not permitted to exercise tyrannical power and assign them to whatever husbands they think fit without consulting them. For while all contracts ought to be voluntary, freedom ought to prevail especially in marriage that no one may pledge his faith against his will.
Whatever may be the admiration commonly entertained for celibacy and a philosophical life altogether removed from ordinary custom, yet wise and thoughtful men are convinced by experience, that those who are not ignorant of ordinary life, but are practised in the duties of human intercourse, are better trained and adapted for governing the Church. And, therefore, we ought to observe the reason which is added [in this passage] that he who does not know how to rule his family, will not be qualified for governing the Church. Now, this is the case with very many persons, and indeed with almost all who have been drawn out of an idle and solitary life, as out of dens and caverns; for they are a sort of savage and destitue of humanity.
For women have been allowed for a long time to become increasingly audacious. And besides, speech apart, there are also very provocative clothes, so that it is very hard to discern whether they are men or women. They appear in new dresses and trinkets, so that ever day some new disguise is seen. They are decked in peacock-tail fashion, so that a man cannot pass within three foot of them without feeling, as it were, a windmill sail swirling by him. Ribald songs are also part of their behaviour.
Nothing is more becoming in women than keeping the house; and hence, among the ancients, a tortoise was the image of a good and respectable mother of a family. But there are many who are afflicted with the opposite vice. Nothing delights them more than the liberty of running from one place to another, and especially when, being freed from the burden of a family, they have nothing to do at home.
[Commenting on Ezekiel, 21:22] If the word death only applies to the pregnant woman, it would not have been a capital crime to put an end to the foetus; but this is a great absurdity, for the foetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus in the womb before it has come to light. On these grounds, I am led to conclude, without hesitation, that the words 'if death should follow', must be applied to the foetus as well as to the mother.
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