Miscellanies 3.11.71

These things having been shown thus, come, let us now set out the Scriptures that oppose these sophists of the heresies, making known the rule of self-control kept according to reason. The one who understands will choose the Scripture that properly opposes each of the heresies and use it at the right time for the destruction of those who teach contrary to the commandments. From the beginning, then, the law, as we said before, “You shall not covet your neighbor's wife,” proclaimed beforehand the Lord's closely related saying in the new covenant, the same voice speaking in person: “You have heard the law commanding, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say, ‘You shall not desire.’” For that the law wished husbands to use their wives with self-restraint and only for the begetting of children is clear from its forbidding an unmarried man to have intercourse at once with a captive woman; but if he once desired her, it permitted her to mourn for thirty days with her hair shorn; and if not even so the desire withered, then to beget children with her, the impulse that had mastered him having been tested by the set time and turned into reasonable appetite.