3598. It hence appears that what is called the Christian world is almost of the character of the antediluvian, deceitful, acting invisibly and, covertly, and indeed from a similar persuasion wherefore their life is similar, viz., the life of winter. Indeed the world called Christian is in this respect worse than the antediluvian, that it accounts adulteries as nothing; and when adulteries are accounted as nothing, it follows that they have nothing which savors of love, and they wish to destroy societies because they are contrary to them; hence too they become cruel, which is inseparable from adulteries; for the result of a single adulterous act is a proneness to cruelty. Thus in Italy, where the monks [licentiously] insinuate themselves among married women, nothing is more obvious than that they become vindictively cruel.