justice. These are fabricated by the men after they have become cold, when unchaste lusts have deprived them of conjugial love, and have infatuated them with the idea of its likeness to adulterous love. When such men engage in concubinage, they, in order to prevent defamation, assign such spurious and fallacious causes as real and genuine,—and very frequently also falsely charge them against their wives, their companions often favorably assenting and applauding them.
475. XI. Those who from causes legitimate, just, and really excusatory, are engaged in this concubinage, may at the same time be principled in conjugial love. We say that such may at the same time be principled in conjugial love; and we thereby mean, that they may keep this love stored up in themselves; for this love, in the subject in which it is, does not perish, but is quiescent. The reasons why conjugial love is preserved with those who prefer marriage to concubinage, and enter into the latter from the causes above mentioned, are these; that this concubinage is not repugnant to conjugial love; that it is not a separation from it; that it is only a clothing encompassing it; that this clothing is taken away from them after death. 1. That this concubinage is not repugnant to conjugial love, follows from what was proved above; that such concubinage, when engaged in from causes legitimate, just, and really excusatory, is not unlawful, n. 467–473. 2. That this concubinage is not a separation from conjugial love; for when causes legitimate, or just, or really excusatory, arise, and persuade and compel a man, then, conjugial love with marriage is not separated, but only interrupted; and love interrupted, and not separated, remains in the subject. The case in this respect is like that of a person, who, being engaged in a business which he likes, is detained from it by company, by public sights, or by a journey; still he does not cease to like his business: it is also like that of a person who is fond of generous wine, and who, when he drinks wine of an inferior quality, does not lose his taste and appetite for that which is generous. 3. The reason why the above concubinage is only a clothing of conjugial love encompassing it, is, because the love of concubinage is natural, and the love of marriage spiritual; and natural love is a veil or covering to spiritual, when the latter is interrupted: that this is the case, is unknown to the lover; because spiritual love is not made sensible of itself, but by natural love, and it is made sensible as delight, in which there is blessedness from heaven: but natural love by itself is made sensible only as delight. 4. The reason why this veil is taken away after death, is, because then a man from natural becomes spiritual, and instead of a material body enjoys a substantial one, wherein natural delight grounded in spiritual is made sensible in its perfection. That this is the case, I have heard from communication with some in the spiritual world, even from kings there, who in the
373
