“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather…”

I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell.

Jerome · Letters · NPNF2 VI, Letters, Letter XXII, 20

From the long letter to Eustochium on keeping virginity — the most notorious thing he wrote, and the sentence in which he answers the charge that he despised marriage. The answer did not satisfy Rome, which he left the next year.