Jeremiah 16:2

Thou shalt not take thee a wife... — The words came to an Israelite and to a priest with a force which we can hardly understand. With them marriage, and the hopes which it involved, was not only a happiness but a duty, and to be cut off from it was to renounce both, because the evil that was coming on the nation was such as to turn both into a curse. We may compare cur Lord’s words in Matthew 24:19 and those spoken to the daughters of Jerusalem (Luke 23:29), and what, in part at least, entered into St. Paul’s motives for a like abstinence on account of “the present distress” (1 Corinthians 7:26).