Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves heard from time to time at various periods.  Even the ancients, Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated the elimination of the erotic element from marriage, and its confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no provision to make.  Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic interest from marriage:  “One does not marry for oneself, whatever may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity, for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race beyond ourselves....  Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the extravagances of amorous license” (Essais, Bk. i, Ch.  XXIX; Bk. iii, Ch.  V).  This point of view easily commended itself to the early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside marriage.  “To have intercourse except for procreation,” said Clement of Alexandria (Paedagogus, Bk. ii, Ch.  X), “is to do injury to Nature.”  While, however, that statement is quite true of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed, and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally.  For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence.  It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual development.  The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with admiration a continence in marriage which excluded sexual relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St. Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin.  Here, however, the Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition that “the conjugal act, practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin.”

Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers.  John a Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England during Edward VI’s reign, was following many mediaeval theologians when he recognized the sacramentum solationis, in addition to proles, as an element of marriage.  Cranmer,