'St Augustine, Some scattered notes. 'Have glanced at his work On Marriage & Concupiscence, part of his attack on the Pelagians. What he thinks is wrong in copulation is not the semen but the pleasure attending its emission, and he thinks the pleasure wrong because people are ashamed to be seen doing it [...] Elsewhere, he says that the time for giving in marriage was B.C., and the time for abstaining from it A.D., but he does not urge the extinction of the human race, and hopes that husbands and wives will continue to go ahead, with as little pleasure as possible, until the establishment of the City of God. I find it difficult to follow, in anyone so intelligent, such opinions, and think they may have been induced by the unintelligent asceticism of his age; by the knowledge that thousands of stupid men were sitting in the desert all along Africa.'