Sunday, September 08, 2013

Home as a Better School for Character than a Monastery

After [Luther's] marriage his tone shifted and his concern was much less to establish the necessity of marriage [in light of the otherwise "uncontrollable" sexual impulse] than to portray the home as a school for character.  In this sense it was for him a substitute for the monastery.  All the vexations of domesticity, the tension of the sexes, bawling babies, and of disobedient children led him to say there is no need to go hunting for crosses.  At the same time he was often lyrical over the consolations of the married state.

-Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, pages 256 - 258.

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