Sanchez

Sanchez, THOMAS, a Jesuit moralist and casuist, was born at Cordova in 1550, and became director of the school at Granada, where he died 19th May 1610. His best-known work, in virtue of which he ranks as an Auctor Classicus, is the treatise De Sacramento Matrimonii (3 vols. Genoa, 1592). In this notorious work, parts of which Pascal and Voltaire treated with scathing sarcasm, the legal, moral, and religious questions that arise out of the sacrament of marriage, and the relations, regular and irregular, of the sexes, are treated in portentous detail. Yet the author was throughout his life esteemed a devout, pure-minded, and holy man.