Conjugial Love (Rogers) n. 375

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375. There are, in addition, regional ethnic groups which suffer a jealous morbidity more than others. They imprison their wives, despotically keeping them from any converse with men, closing them off from the sight of men through the windows by covering these with hanging lattices, and terrifying them with threats of death if they should detect a reason for the suspicion they harbor. Likewise other hard things, which the wives there endure at the hands of their jealous husbands. [2] The reasons for this kind of jealousness, however, are of two types. One is an imprisonment and suffocation of their thoughts in regard to spiritual matters connected with the church. The other is an inbred lust for exercising vengeance. As regards the first reason, namely, an imprisonment and suffocation of their thoughts in regard to spiritual matters connected with the church, what effect this has may be concluded from what we have shown previously, that everyone's conjugial love depends on the state of the church in him (no. 130), and because the church comes from the Lord, that that love comes solely from the Lord (no. 131). Consequently, when, instead of the Lord, people turn to men living and dead and call on them, it follows that their state is not a state of the church with which conjugial love can be allied; and still less so when their minds are terrorized into that worship by threats of a horrible incarceration. So it is that their thoughts are forcibly imprisoned and suffocated, and at the same time their speech; and when these are suffocated, ideas flow in that are either contrary to the church or imaginary substitutes for the church. These in turn give rise to nothing else but a state of heat for loose women and icy coldness towards having a partner. And when these two exist in the same person, from them flows such an ungoverned fire of jealousness as described. [3] As regards the second reason, namely, an inbred lust for exercising vengeance, this completely halts any influx of conjugial love, absorbs it and swallows it up, and turns its delight, which is a heavenly delight, into a delight in vengeance, which is hellish, and which is directed first of all at the wife. From the appearance, it seems as well that the unwholesomeness of the atmosphere there, which is permeated by the poisonous exhalations of the surrounding area, may be a subsidiary cause.


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