Daily quote by Celibacy

• Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, the Reformer also emphasized Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper who shall be with him.” Setting himself squarely against the Papacy and the Church Councils here, Luther declared: “[w]hoever would be a true Christian must grant that this saying of God is true, and believe God was not drunk when he spoke these words and instituted marriage.” Except among those rare persons ”not more than one in a thousand” Luther said at one point-who received true celibacy as a special gift from God, marriage and procreation were divinely ordained. As he wrote: “For it is not a matter of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”
  The Geneva-based reformer John Calvin put an even greater emphasis on Genesis 1:28. He argued that these words represented the only command of God made before the Fall that was still active after God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. This gave this phrase a unique power and importance. Calvin added that this “pure and lawful method of increase, which God ordained from the beginning, remains firm; this is that law of nature which common sense declares to be inviolable.”
  While occasionally acknowledging in unenthusiastic fashion St. Paul’s defense of the single life, the Reformers were far more comfortable with the social order described in Luther’s Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order. ““We were all created to do as our parents have done, to beget and rear children. This is a duty which God has laid upon us, commanded, and implanted in us, as is proved by our bodily members, our daily emotions, and the example of all mankind.” Marriage with the expectation of children, in this view, represented the natural, normal, and necessary form of worldly existence.
  • Allan Carlson, “Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973”, p.8