To Florus 5.16

But let us proceed to what remains. After avoiding Abraham’s example, which I had put forward, he tried to maintain the following about Abimelech. Abimelech is reported to have been healed with his women when Abraham prayed, so that he could return to the work of generation from which a plague had suspended him (Genesis 20:17–18). Augustine says the closing of the women’s wombs may be understood as some pain, rather than removal of sexual desire (Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.15.30). As though we were urgently insisting that their natural appetite must appear restored! In those testimonies I was content to prove only this: intercourse, which could not occur without sexual desire, was prevented through God’s anger and restored through God’s mercy, whether by obstacles being removed or by the usual stimuli being restored. It is therefore not shown diabolical, but by this very fact belongs to God’s activity. Among the body’s functions it is an ordinary but innocent instrument, wrong not in its kind or proper measure, but only in excess.