150. (viii) Chastity cannot be attributed to small children, or to boys and girls, or to young men and women, before they feel sexual love in themselves.
This is because chastity and unchastity can only be attributed to marriages and related matters (see 139 above). Those who know nothing of the tendency towards marriage cannot have chastity attributed to them, since it is as nothing to them; and it is impossible to have affection for nothing, or to think about it. But this nothingness is followed by the beginnings of an interest in marriage, an effect of sexual love. Young women and men are commonly called chaste before they feel any stirring of sexual love in themselves; but this is due to ignorance of what chastity is.
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