503.  II.  VIRGINITY IS THE CROWN OF CHASTITY AND THE CERTIFICATE OF CONJUGIAL LOVE.  Virginity is called the crown of chastity, because it crowns the chastity of marriage:  it is also the badge of chastity; wherefore the bride at the nuptials wears a crown on her head:  it is also a badge of the sanctity of marriage; for the bride, after the maiden flower, gives and devotes herself wholly to the bridegroom, at that time the husband, and the husband in his turn gives and devotes himself wholly to the bride, at that time the wife.  Virginity is also called the certificate of conjugial love, because a certificate has relation to a covenant; and the covenant is, that love may unite them into one man, or into one flesh.  The men themselves also before marriage regard the virginity of the bride as a crown of her chastity, and as a certificate of conjugial love, and as the very dainty from which the delights of that love are about to commence and to be perpetuated.  From these and the foregoing considerations, it is manifest, that after the zone is taken away, and the virginity is sipped, a maiden becomes a wife, and if not a wife, she becomes a harlot; for the new state into which she is then introduced, is a state of love for her husband, and if not for her husband, it is a state of lust.

504.  III.  DEFLORATION, WITHOUT A VIEW TO MARRIAGE AS AN END, IS THE VILLANY OF A ROBBER.  Some adulterers are impelled by the cupidity of deflowering maidens, and thence also of deflowering young girls in their state of innocence:  the enticements offered are either persuasions suggested by pimps, or presents made by the men, or promises of marriage; and those men after defloration leave them, and continually seek for others:  moreover, they are not delighted with the objects they have left, but with a continual supply of new ones; and this lust increases even till it becomes the chief of the delights of their flesh.  They add also to the above this abominable deed, that by various cunning artifices they entice maidens about to be married or immediately after marriage, to offer them the first-fruits of marriage, which also they thus filthily defile.  I have heard also, that when that heat with its potency has failed, they glory in the number of virginities, as in so many golden fleeces of Jason.  This villany, which is that of committing a rape, since it was begun in an age of strength, and afterwards confirmed by boastings, remains rooted in, and thereby infixed after death.  What the quality of this villany is, appears from what was said above, that virginity is the crown of chastity, the certificate of future conjugial love, and that a maiden devotes her soul and life to him to whom she devotes it; conjugial friendship and the confidence thereof are also founded upon it.  A woman likewise, deflowered by a man of the above description, after this door of conjugial love is broken through, loses all shame, and becomes a harlot, which is likewise to be imputed to the robber as the cause.  Such