Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you. Rejoice in the wife of your youth. She is a loving doe, a graceful deer. Let her breasts satisfy you always. May you always be captivated by her love. Proverbs 5:18-19

I chuckle when people lambaste the Puritans for supposedly being sexually inhibited. The so-called puritanical attitude toward sex was actually quite progressive, overturning the more repressive notions that had dominated the church for at least a thousand years. One church leader, Ambrose, argued that "married people ought to blush at the state in which they are living." The church fathers Origen and Chrysostom believed that Adam and Eve could not have had sexual relations before the Fall. Therefore, if sin had not entered the world, the human race would reproduce itself by some means other than through intercourse. Eventually the church prohibited married couples from having sex on about half the days of the year. Some leaders recommended abstinence on five days out of seven ...