The True Man
The three greatest events in our life are birth, marriage, and death.
We enter physical life alone, and alone we leave it. Two of the three events are related to being single; we have to manage them ourselves, alone, and prepare for them when alone.
Life as a single is essential for our development.
What is it to sacrifice? It is:
“an act of giving up a desirable thing for a higher object or to a more pressing claim,” also “something given up for the sake of another”
That in which men differ from brute beasts is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully. Mencius
I exhort you always, as you are aware, to many things, and to the precepts of the Lord’s admonition-for what else can be desirable or more important to me, than that in all things you should stand perfect in the Lord?-yet I admonish you, that you should before all things maintain the barriers of chastity, as also you do: knowing that you are the temple of the Lord, the members of Christ, the habitation of the Holy Spirit, elected to hope, consecrated to faith, destined to salvation, sons of God, brethren of Christ, associates of the Holy Spirit, owing nothing any longer to the flesh, as born again of water, that the chastity, over and above the will, which we should always desire to be ours, may be afforded to us also, on account of the redemption, that that which has been consecrated by Christ might not be corrupted.