The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Biographical Introduction.
• Of Reformation In England, and the Causes That Hitherto Have Hindered It. In Two Books.
• Of Prelatical Episcopacy,
• The Reason of Church-government Urged Against Prelaty. In Two Books.
• Animadversions Upon the Remonstrant’s Defence Against Smectymnuus.
• An Apology For Smectymnuus.
• Of Education.
• Areopagitica: a Speech For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.
• The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce;
• The Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce.
• Tetrachordon. Expositions Upon the Four Chief Passages of Scripture Which Treat of Marriage, Or Nullities In Marriage.
• Colasterion. a Reply to a Nameless Answer Against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.
• The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:
• Observations On the Articles of Peace,
• ἘΙΚΟΝΟΚΛΑΣΤΗΣ. In Answer to a Book Entitled, ΕΙΚΩΝ ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΗ, the Portraiture of His Majesty In His Solitudes and Sufferings.

TETRACHORDON.

EXPOSITIONS UPON THE FOUR CHIEF PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE WHICH TREAT OF MARRIAGE, OR NULLITIES IN MARRIAGE.

• Σϰαιο[Editor: illegible character]σι ϰαινὰ προσϕέρων σοϕὰ
• Δοξεις ὰχρε[Editor: illegible character]ορ, ϰοὐ σοϕὸς πεϕυϰέναι.
• Τῶν δ’ α[Editor: illegible character] δοϰοὺντων εὶδέναι τί ποιϰίλον,
• Κρείσσων νομισθεὶς [Editor: illegible character]ν πὸλει, λνπρὸς ϕανῇ.

—Euripid. Medea.

TO THE PARLIAMENT.

That which I knew to be the part of a good magistrate, aiming at true liberty through the right information of religious and civil life, and that which I saw, and was partaker of, your solemn vows and covenants, parliament of England! your actions also manifestly tending to exalt the truth, and to depress the tyranny of error and ill custom, with more constancy and prowess than ever yet any, since that parliament which put the first sceptre of this kingdom into his hand whom God and extraordinary virtue made their monarch; were the causes that moved me, one else not placing much in the eminence of a dedication, to present your high notice with a discourse, conscious to itself of nothing more than of diligence, and firm affection to the public good. And that ye took it so as wise and impartial men, obtaining so great power and dignity, are wont to accept, in matters both doubtful and important, what they think offered them well meant, and from a rational ability, I had no less than to persuade me. And on that persuasion am returned, as to a famous and free port, myself also bound by more than a maritime law, to expose as freely what fraughtage I conceive to bring of no trifles. For although it be generally known, how and by whom ye have been instigated to a hard censure of that former book, entitled, “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” an opinion held by some of the best among reformed writers without scandal or confutement, though now thought new and dangerous by some of our severe Gnostics, whose little reading and less meditating, holds ever with hardest obstinacy that which it took up with easiest credulity; I do not find yet that aught, for the furious incitements which have been used, hath issued by your appointment, that might give the least interruption or disrepute either to the author, or to the book. Which he who will be better advised than to call your neglect or connivance at a thing imagined so perilous, can attribute it to nothing more justly, than to the deep and quiet stream of your direct and calm deliberations, that gave not way either to the fervent rashness or the immaterial gravity of those who ceased not to exasperate without cause. For which uprightness and incorrupt refusal of what ye were incensed to, lords and commons! (though it were done to justice, not to me, and was a peculiar demonstration how far your ways are different from the rash vulgar,) besides those allegiances of oath and duty, which are my public debt to your public labours, I have yet a store of gratitude laid up, which cannot be exhausted; and such thanks perhaps they may live to be, as shall more than whisper to the next ages. Yet that the author may be known to ground himself upon his own innocence, and the merit of his cause, not upon the favour of a diversion, or a delay to any just censure, but wishes rather he might see those his detractors at any fair meeting, as learned debatements are privileged with a due freedom under equal moderators; I shall here briefly single one of them, (because he hath obliged me to it,) who, I persuade me, having scarce read the book, nor knowing him who writ it, or at least feigning the latter, hath not forborn to scandalize him, unconferred with, unadmonished, undealt with by any pastorly or brotherly convincement, in the most open and invective manner, and at the most bitter opportunity that drift or set design could have invented. And this, when as the canon law, though commonly most favouring the boldness of their priests, punishes the naming or traducing of any person in the pulpit, was by him made no scruple. If I shall therefore take license by the right of nature, and that liberty wherein I was born, to defend myself publicly against a printed calumny, and do willingly appeal to those judges to whom I am accused, it can be no immoderate or unallowable course of seeking so just and needful reparations. Which I had done long since, had not those employments, which are now visible, deferred me. It was preached before ye, lords and commons! in August last, upon a special day of humiliation, that “there was a wicked book abroad,” and ye were taxed of sin that it was yet “uncensured, the book deserving to be burnt;” and “impudence” also was charged upon the author, who durst “set his name to it, and dedicate it to yourselves!” First, lords and commons! I pray to that God, before whom ye then were prostrate, so to forgive ye those omissions and trespasses, which ye desire most should find forgiveness, as I shall soon show to the world how easily ye absolve yourselves of that which this man calls your sin, and is indeed your wisdom, and your nobleness, whereof to this day ye have done well not to repent. He terms it “a wicked book,” and why but “for allowing other causes of divorce, than Christ and his apostles mention?” and with the same censure condemns of wickedness not only Martin Bucer, that elect instrument of reformation, highly honoured, and had in reverence by Edward the Sixth, and his whole parliament, whom also I had published in English by a good providence, about a week before this calumnious digression was preached; so that if he knew not Bucer then, as he ought to have known, he might at least have known him some months after, ere the sermon came in print; wherein notwithstanding he persists in his former sentence, and condemns again of wickedness, either ignorantly or wilfully, not only Martin Bucer, and all the choicest and holiest of our reformers, but the whole parliament and church of England in those best and purest times of Edward the Sixth. All which I shall prove with good evidence, at the end of these explanations. And then let it be judged and seriously considered with what hope the affairs of our religion are committed to one among others, who hath now only left him which of the twain he will choose, whether this shall be his palpable ignorance, or the same wickedness of his own book, which he so lavishly imputes to the writings of other men: and whether this of his, that thus peremptorily defames and attaints of wickedness unspotted churches, unblemished parliaments, and the most eminent restorers of Christian doctrine, deserve not to be burnt first. And if his heat had burst out only against the opinion, his wonted passion had no doubt been silently borne with wonted patience. But since, against the charity of that solemn place and meeting, it served him further to inveigh opprobriously against the person, branding him with no less than impudence, only for setting his name to what he had written; I must be excused not to be so wanting to the defence of an honest name, or to the reputation of those good men who afford me their society, but to be sensible of such a foul endeavoured disgrace: not knowing aught either in mine own deserts, or the laws of this land, why I should be subject, in such a notorious and illegal manner, to the intemperances of this man’s preaching choler. And indeed to be so prompt and ready in the midst of his humbleness, to toss reproaches of this bulk and size, argues as if they were the weapons of his exercise, I am sure not of his ministry, or of that day’s work. Certainly to subscribe my name at what I was to own, was what the state had ordered and requires. And he who lists not to be malicious, would call it ingenuity, clear conscience, willingness to avouch what might be questioned, or to be better instructed. And if God were so displeased with those, Isa. lviii. who “on the solemn fast were wont to smite with the fist of wickedness,” it could be no sign of his own humiliation accepted, which disposed him to smite so keenly with a reviling tongue. But if only to have writ my name must be counted “impudence,” how doth this but justify another, who might affirm with as good warrant, that the late discourse of “Scripture and Reason,” which is certain to be chiefly his own draught, was published without a name, out of base fear, and the sly avoidance of what might follow to his detriment, if the party at court should hap to reach him? And I, to have set my name, where he accuses me to have set it, am so far from recanting, that I offer my hand also if need be, to make good the same opinion which I there maintain, by inevitable consequences drawn parallel from his own principal arguments in that of “Scripture and Reason:” which I shall pardon him if he can deny, without shaking his own composition to pieces. The “impudence” therefore, since he weighed so little what a gross revile that was to give his equal, I send him back again for a phylactery to stitch upon his arrogance, that censures not only before conviction, so bitterly without so much as one reason given, but censures the congregation of his governors to their faces, for not being so hasty as himself to censure.

And whereas my other crime is, that I addressed the dedication of what I had studied to the parliament; how could I better declare the loyalty which I owe to that supreme and majestic tribunal, and the opinion which I have of the high entrusted judgment, and personal worth assembled in that place? With the same affections therefore, and the same addicted fidelity, parliament of England! I here again have brought to your perusal on the same argument these following expositions of Scripture. The former book, as pleased some to think, who were thought judicious, had of reason in it to a sufficiency; what they required was, that the Scriptures there alleged might be discussed more fully. To their desires thus much further hath been laboured in the Scriptures. Another sort also, who wanted more authorities and citations, have not been here unthought of. If all this attain not to satisfy them, as I am confident that none of those our great controversies at this day hath had a more demonstrative explaining, I must confess to admire what it is: for doubtless it is not reason now-a-days that satisfies or suborns the common credence of men, to yield so easily, and grow so vehement in matters much more disputable, and far less conducing to the daily good and peace of life.

Some whose necessary shifts have long enured them to cloak the defects of their unstudied years, and hatred now to learn, under the appearance of a grave solidity, (which estimation they have gained among weak perceivers,) find the ease of slighting what they cannot refute, and are determined, as I hear, to hold it not worth the answering. In which number I must be forced to reckon that doctor, who in a late equivocating treatise plausibly set afloat against the Dippers, diving the while himself with a more deep prelatical malignance against the present state and church-government, mentions with ignominy “the Tractate of Divorce;” yet answers nothing, but instead thereof (for which I do not commend his marshalling) sets Moses also among the crew of his Anabaptists; as one who to a holy nation, the commonwealth of Israel, gave laws “breaking the bonds of marriage to inordinate lust.” These are no mean surges of blasphemy, not only dipping Moses the divine lawgiver, but dashing with a high hand against the justice and purity of God himself: as these ensuing scriptures plainly and freely handled shall verify, to the lanching of that old apostemated error. Him therefore I leave now to his repentance.

Others, which is their courtesy, confess that wit and parts may do much to make that seem true which is not; as was objected to Socrates by them who could not resist his efficacy, that he ever made the worst cause seem the better; and thus thinking themselves discharged of the difficulty, love not to wade further into the fear of a convincement. These will be their excuses to decline the full examining of this serious point. So much the more I press it and repeat it, lords and commons! that ye beware while time is, ere this grand secret, and only art of ignorance affecting tyranny, grow powerful, and rule among us. For if sound argument and reason shall be thus put off, either by an undervaluing silence, or the masterly censure of a railing word or two in the pulpit, or by rejecting the force of truth, as the mere cunning of eloquence and sophistry; what can be the end of this, but that all good learning and knowledge will suddenly decay? Ignorance, and illiterate presumption, which is yet but our disease, will turn at length into our very constitution, and prove the hectic evil of this age: worse to be feared, if it get once to reign over us, than any fifth monarchy. If this shall be the course, that what was wont to be a chief commendation, and the ground of other men’s confidence in an author, his diligence, his learning, his elocution, whether by right or by ill meaning granted him, shall be turned now to a disadvantage and suspicion against him, that what he writes, though unconfuted, must therefore be mistrusted, therefore not received for the industry, the exactness, the labour in it, confessed to be more than ordinary; as if wisdom had now forsaken the thirsty and laborious inquirer, to dwell against her nature with the arrogant and shallow babbler; to what purpose all those pains and that continual searching required of us by Solomon to the attainment of understanding? Why are men bred up with such care and expense to a life of perpetual studies? Why do yourselves with such endeavour seek to wipe off the imputation to discourage the progress and advance of learning? He therefore, whose heart can bear him to the high pitch of your noble enterprises, may easily assure himself, that the prudence and far-judging circumspectness of so grave a magistracy sitting in parliament, who have before them the prepared and purposed act of their most religious predecessors to imitate in this question, cannot reject the clearness of these reasons, and these allegations both here and formerly offered them; nor can overlook the necessity of ordaining more wholesomely and more humanely in the casualties of divorce, than our laws have yet established, if the most urgent and excessive grievances happening in domestic life be worth the laying to heart: which, unless charity be far from us, cannot be neglected. And that these things, both in the right constitution, and in the right reformation of a commonwealth, call for speediest redress, and ought to be the first considered, enough was urged in what was prefaced to that monument of Bucer, which I brought to your remembrance, and the other time before. Henceforth, except new cause be given, I shall say less and less. For if the law make not timely provision, let the law, as reason is, bear the censure of those consequences, which her own default now more evidently produces. And if men want manliness to expostulate the right of their due ransom, and to second their own occasions, they may sit hereafter and bemoan themselves to have neglected through faintness the only remedy of their sufferings, which a seasonable and well-grounded speaking might have purchased them. And perhaps in time to come, others will know how to esteem what is not every day put into their hands, when they have marked events, and better weighed how hurtful and unwise it is, to hide a secret and pernicious rupture under the ill counsel of a bashful silence. But who would distrust aught, or not be ample in his hopes of your wise and Christian determinations? who have the prudence to consider, and should have the goodness, like gods, as ye are called, to find out readily, and by just law to administer those redresses, which have of old, not without God ordaining, been granted to the adversities of mankind, ere they who needed were put to ask. Certainly, if any other have enlarged his thoughts to expect from this government, so justly undertaken, and by frequent assistances from Heaven so apparently upheld, glorious changes and renovations both in church and state, he among the foremost might be named, who prays that the fate of England may tarry for no other deliverers.

John Milton.

Genesis i. 27.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them,

28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, &c.

Genesis ii. 18.

And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone, I will make him a help meet for him.

23. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of a man.

24. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis i. 27.

“So God created man in his own image.”] To be informed aright in the whole history of marriage, that we may know for certain, not by a forced yoke, but by an impartial definition, what marriage is, and what is not marriage: it will undoubtedly be safest, fairest, and most with our obedience, to inquire, as our Saviour’s direction is, how it was in the beginning. And that we begin so high as man created after God’s own image, there want not earnest causes. For nothing now-a-days is more degenerately forgotten, than the true dignity of man, almost in every respect, but especially in this prime institution of matrimony, wherein his native pre-eminence ought most to shine. Although if we consider that just and natural privileges men neither can rightly seek, nor dare fully claim, unless they be allied to inward goodness and stedfast knowledge, and that the want of this quells them to a servile sense of their own conscious unworthiness, it may save the wondering why in this age many are so opposite both to human and to Christian liberty, either while they understand not, or envy others that do; contenting, or rather priding themselves in a specious humility and strictness bred out of low ignorance, that never yet conceived the freedom of the gospel; and is therefore by the apostle to the Colossians ranked with no better company than will worship and the mere show of wisdom. And how injurious herein they are, if not to themselves, yet to their neighbours, and not to them only, but to the all-wise and bounteous grace offered us in our redemption, will orderly appear.

“In the image of God created he him.”] It is enough determined, that this image of God, wherein man was created, is meant wisdom, purity, justice, and rule over all creatures. All which, being lost in Adam, was recovered with gain by the merits of Christ. For albeit our first parent had lordship over sea, and land, and air, yet there was a law without him, as a guard set over him. But Christ having cancelled the handwriting of ordinances which was against us, Col. ii. 14, and interpreted the fulfilling of all through charity, hath in that respect set us over law, in the free custody of his love, and left us victorious under the guidance of his living spirit, not under the dead letter; to follow that which most edifics, most aids and furthers a religious life, makes us holiest and likest to his immortal image; not that which makes us most conformable and captive to civil and subordinate precepts: whereof the strictest observance may ofttimes prove the destruction not only of many innocent persons and families, but of whole nations. Although indeed no ordinance human or from heaven can bind against the good of man; so that to keep them strictly against that end, is all one with to break them. Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law; and wisest magistrates have permitted and dispensed it; while they looked not peevishly at the letter, but with a greater spirit at the good of mankind, if always not written in the characters of law, yet engraven in the heart of man by a divine impression. This heathens could see, as the well-read in story can recount of Solon and Epaminondas, whom Cicero in his first book of “Invention” nobly defends. “All law,” saith he, “we ought to refer to the common good, and interpret by that, not by the scroll of letters. No man observes law for law’s sake, but for the good of them for whom it was made.” The rest might serve well to lecture these times, deluded through belly doctrines into a devout slavery. The Scripture also affords David in the showbread, Hezekiah in the passover, sound and safe transgressors of the literal command, which also dispensed not seldom with itself; and taught us on what just occasions to do so: until our Saviour, for whom that great and godlike work was reserved, redeemed us to a state above prescriptions, by dissolving the whole law into charity. And have we not the soul to understand this, and must we, against this glory of God’s transcendant love towards us, be still the servants of a literal indictment?

“Created he him.”] It might be doubted why he saith, “In the image of God created he him,” not them, as well as “male and female” them; especially since that image might be common to them both, but male and female could not, however the Jews fable and please themselves with the accidental concurrence of Plato’s wit, as if man at first had been created hermaphrodite: but then it must have been male and female created he him. So had the image of God been equally common to them both, it had no doubt been said, in the image of God created he them. But St. Paul ends the controversy, by explaining, that the woman is not primarily and immediately the image of God, but in reference to the man, “The head of the woman,” saith he, 1 Cor. xi. “is the man;” “he the image and glory of God, she the glory of the man;” he not for her, but she for him. Therefore his precept is, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as is fit in the Lord,” Col. iii. 18; “in every thing,” Eph. v. 24. Nevertheless man is not to hold her as a servant, but receives her into a part of that empire, which God proclaims him to, though not equally, yet largely, as his own image and glory: for it is no small glory to him, that a creature so like him should be made subject to him. Not but that particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield: for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female. But that which far more easily and obediently follows from this verse is, that, seeing woman was purposely made for man, and he her head, it cannot stand before the breath of this divine utterance, that man the portraiture of God, joining to himself for his intended good and solace an inferior sex, should so become her thrall, whose wilfulness or inability to be a wife frustrates the occasional end of her creation; but that he may acquit himself to freedom by his natural birthright, and that indelible character of priority, which God crowned him with. If it be urged, that sin hath lost him this, the answer is not far to seek, that from her the sin first proceeded, which keeps her justly in the same proportion still beneath. She is not to gain by being first in the transgression, that man should further lose to her, because already he hath lost by her means. Oft it happens, that in this matter he is without fault; so that his punishment herein is causeless: and God hath the praise in our speeches of him, to sort his punishment in the same kind with the offence. Suppose he erred; it is not the intent of God or man, to hunt an error so to the death with a revenge beyond all measure and proportion. But if we argue thus, this affliction is befallen him for his sin, therefore he must bear it without seeking the only remedy; first, it will be false, that all affliction comes for sin, as in the case of Job, and of the man born blind, John ix. 3, was evident; next, by that reason, all miseries coming for sin, we must let them all lie upon us like the vermin of an Indian Catharist, which his fond religion forbids him to molest. Were it a particular punishment inflicted through the anger of God upon a person, or upon a land, no law hinders us in that regard, no law but bids us remove it if we can; much more if it be a dangerous temptation withal; much more yet, if it be certainly a temptation, and not certainly a punishment though a pain. As for what they say we must bear with patience; to bear with patience, and to seek effectual remedies, implies no contradiction. It may no less be for our disobedience, our unfaithfulness, and other sins against God, that wives become adulterous to the bed; and questionless we ought to take the affliction as patiently as Christian prudence would wish: yet hereby is not lost the right of divorcing for adultery. No, you say, because our Saviour excepted that only. But why, if he were so bent to punish our sins, and try our patience in binding on us a disastrous marriage, why did he except adultery? Certainly to have been bound from divorce in that case also had been as plentiful a punishment to our sins, and not too little work for the patientest. Nay, perhaps they will say it was too great a sufferance; and with as slight a reason, for no wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness, than to lead a wearisome life of unloving and unquiet conversation with one who neither affects nor is affected, much less with one who exercises all bitterness, and would commit adultery too, but for envy lest the persecuted condition should thereby get the benefit of his freedom. It is plain therefore, that God enjoins not this supposed strictness of not divorcing either to punish us, or to try our patience.

Moreover, if man be the image of God, which consists in holiness, and woman ought in the same respect to be the image and companion of man, in such wise to be loved as the church is beloved of Christ; and if, as God is the head of Christ, and Christ the head of man, so man is the head of woman; I cannot see by this golden dependence of headship and subjection, but that piety and religion is the main tie of Christian matrimony: so as if there be found between the pair a notorious disparity either of wickedness or heresy, the husband by all manner of right is disengaged from a creature, not made and inflicted on him to the vexation of his righteousness: the wife also, as her subjection is terminated in the Lord, being herself the redeemed of Christ, is not still bound to be the vassal of him, who is the bondslave of Satan: she being now neither the image nor the glory of such a person, nor made for him, nor left in bondage to him; but hath recourse to the wing of charity, and protection of the church, unless there be a hope on either side: yet such a hope must be meant, as may be a rational hope, and not an endless servitude. Of which hereafter.

But usually it is objected, that if it be thus, then there can be no true marriage between misbelievers and irreligious persons. I might answer, let them see to that who are such; the church hath no commission to judge those without: 1 Cor. v. But this they will say perhaps, is but penuriously to resolve a doubt. I answer therefore, that where they are both irreligious, the marriage may be yet true enough to them in a civil relation. For there are left some remains of God’s image in man, as he is merely man; which reason God gives against the shedding of man’s blood, Gen. ix. as being made in God’s image, without expressing whether he were a good man or a bad, to exempt the slayer from punishment. So that in those marriages where the parties are alike void of religion, the wife owes a civil homage and subjection, the husband owes a civil loyalty. But where the yoke is misyoked, heretic with faithful, godly with ungodly, to the grievance and manifest endangering of a brother or sister, reasons of a higher strain than matrimonial bear sway; unless the gospel, instead of freeing us, debase itself to make us bond-men, and suffer evil to control good.

“Male and female created he them.”] This contains another end of matching man and woman, being the right and lawfulness of the marriage-bed; though much inferior to the former end of her being his image and help in religious society. And who of weakest insight may not see, that this creating of them male and female cannot in any order of reason, or Christianity, be of such moment against the better and higher purposes of their creation, as to enthral husband or wife to duties or to sufferings, unworthy and unbeseeming the image of God in them? Now whenas not only men, but good men, do stand upon their right, their estimation, their dignity, in all other actions and deportments, with warrant enough and good conscience, as having the image of God in them, it will not be difficult to determine what is unworthy and unseemly for a man to do or suffer in wedlock: and the like proportionally may be found for woman, if we love not to stand disputing below the principles of humanity. He that said, “Male and female created he them,” immediately before that said also in the same verse, “in the image of God created he him,” and redoubled it, that our thoughts might not be so full of dregs as to urge this poor consideration of male and female, without remembering the nobleness of that former repetition; lest when God sends a wise eye to examine our trivial glosses, they be found extremely to creep upon the ground: especially since they confess, that what here concerns marriage is but a brief touch, only preparative to the institution which follows more expressly in the next chapter: and that Christ so took it, as desiring to be briefest with them who came to tempt him, account shall be given in due place.

Ver. 28. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth,” &c.

This declares another end of matrimony, the propagation of mankind; and is again repeated to Noah and his sons. Many things might be noted on this place not ordinary, nor unworth the noting; but I undertook not a general comment. Hence therefore we see the desire of children is honest and pious; if we be not less zealous in our Christianity than Plato was in his heathenism; who in the sixth of his laws, counts offspring therefore desirable, that we may leave in our stead sons of our sons, continual servants of God: a religious and prudent desire, if people knew as well what were required to breeding as to begetting; which desire perhaps was a cause, why the Jews hardly could endure a barren wedlock: and Philo, in his book of special laws, esteems him only worth pardon, that sends not barrenness away. Carvilius, the first recorded in Rome to have sought divorce, had it granted him for the barrenness of his wife, upon his oath that he married to the end he might have children; as Dionysius and Gellius are authors. But to dismiss a wife only for barrenness, is hard: and yet in some the desire of children is so great, and so just, yea sometimes so necessary, that to condemn such a one to a childless age, the fault apparently not being in him, might seem perhaps more strict than needed. Sometimes inheritances, crowns, and dignities are so interested and annexed in their common peace and good to such or such lineal descent, that it may prove of great moment both in the affairs of men and of religion, to consider thoroughly what might be done herein, notwithstanding the waywardness of our school doctors.

Genesis ii. 18.

“And the Lord said, It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.”

Ver. 23. “And Adam said,” &c. Ver. 24. “Therefore shall a man leave.” &c.

This second chapter is granted to be a commentary on the first, and these verses granted to be an exposition of that former verse, “Male and female created he them:” and yet when this male and female is by the explicit words of God himself here declared to be not meant other than a fit help, and meet society; some, who would engross to themselves the whole trade of interpreting, will not suffer the clear text of God to do the office of explaining itself.

“And the Lord God said, It is not good.”] A man would think, that the consideration of who spake should raise up the intention of our minds to inquire better, and obey the purpose of so great a speaker: for as we order the business of marriage, that which he here speaks is all made vain; and in the decision of matrimony, or not matrimony, nothing at all regarded. Our presumption hath utterly changed the state and condition of this ordinance: God ordained it in love and helpfulness to be indissoluble, and we in outward act and formality to be a forced bondage; so that being subject to a thousand errors in the best men, if it prove a blessing to any, it is of mere accident, as man’s law hath handled it, and not of institution.

“It is not good for man to be alone.”] Hitherto all things, that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing, which God’s eye named not good: whether it be a thing, or the want of something, I labour not; let it be their tendance, who have the art to be industriously idle. And here “alone” is meant alone without woman; otherwise Adam had the company of God himself, and angels to converse with; all creatures to delight him seriously, or to make him sport. God could have created him out of the same mould a thousand friends and brother Adams to have been his consorts; yet for all this, till Eve was given him, God reckoned him to be alone.

“It is not good.”] God here presents himself like to a man deliberating; both to show us that the matter is of high consequence, and that he intended to found it according to natural reason, not impulsive command; but that the duty should arise from the reason of it, not the reason be swallowed up in a reasonless duty. “Not good,” was as much to Adam before his fall as not pleasing, not expedient; but since the coming of sin into the world, to him who hath not received the continence, it is not only not expedient to be alone, but plainly sinful. And therefore he who wilfully abstains from marriage, not being supernaturally gifted, and he who by making the yoke of marriage unjust and intolerable, causes men to abhor it, are both in a diabolical sin, equal to that of Antichrist, who forbids to marry. For what difference at all whether he abstain men from marrying, or restrain them in a marriage happening totally discommodious, distasteful, dishonest, and pernicious to him, without the appearance of his fault? For God does not here precisely say, I make a female to this male, as he did before; but expounding himself here on purpose, he saith, because it is not good for man to be alone, I make him therefore a meet help. God supplies the privation of not good, with the perfect gift of a real and positive good: it is man’s perverse cooking, who hath turned this bounty of God into a scorpion, either by weak and shallow constructions, or by proud arrogance and cruelty to them who neither in their purposes nor in their actions have offended against the due honour of wedlock.

Now whereas the apostle’s speaking in the spirit, 1 Cor. vii. pronounces quite contrary to this word of God, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” and God cannot contradict himself; it instructs us, that his commands and words, especially such as bear the manifest title of some good to man, are not to be so strictly wrung, as to command without regard to the most natural and miserable necessities of mankind. Therefore the apostle adds a limitation in the 26th verse of that chapter, for the present necessity it is good; which he gives us doubtless as a pattern how to reconcile other places by the general rule of charity.

“For man to be alone.”] Some would have the sense hereof to be in respect of procreation only: and Austin contest that manly friendship in all other regard had been a more becoming solace for Adam, than to spend so many secret years in an empty world with one woman. But our writers deservedly reject this crabbed opinion; and defend that there is a peculiar comfort in the married state beside the genial bed, which no other society affords. No mortal nature can endure either in the actions of religion, or study of wisdom, without sometime slackening the cords of intense thought and labour: which lest we should think faulty, God himself conceals us not his own recreations before the world was built; “I was,” saith the eternal wisdom, “daily his delight, playing always before him.” And to him indeed wisdom is as a high tower of pleasure, but to us a steep hill, and we toiling ever about the bottom: he executes with ease the exploits of his omnipotence, as easy as with us it is to will: but no worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities. We cannot therefore always be contemplative, or pragmatical abroad, but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off a while her severe schooling; and, like a glad youth in wandering vacancy, may keep her holidays to joy and harmless pastime: which as she cannot well do without company, so in no company so well as where the different sex in most resembling unlikeness, and most unlike resemblance, cannot but please best, and be pleased in the aptitude of that variety. Whereof lest we should be too timorous, in the awe that our flat sages would form us and dress us, wisest Solomon among his gravest Proverbs countenances a kind of ravishment and erring fondness in the entertainment of wedded leisures; and in the Song of Songs, which is generally believed, even in the jolliest expressions, to figure the spousals of the church with Christ, sings of a thousand raptures between those two lovely ones far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment. By these instances, and more which might be brought, we may imagine how indulgently God provided against man’s loneliness; that he approved it not, as by himself declared not good; that he approved the remedy thereof, as of his own ordaining, consequently good: and as he ordained it, so doubtless proportionably to our fallen estate he gives it; else were his ordinance at least in vain, and we for all his gifts still empty handed. Nay, such an unbounteous giver we should make him, as in the fables Jupiter was to Ixion, giving him a cloud instead of Juno, giving him a monstrous issue by her, the breed of Centaurs, a neglected and unloved race, the fruits of a delusive marriage; and lastly, giving him her with a damnation to that wheel in hell, from a life thrown into the midst of temptations and disorders. But God is no deceitful giver, to bestow that on us for a remedy of loneliness, which if it bring not a sociable mind as well as a conjunctive body, leaves us no less alone than before; and if it bring a mind perpetually averse and disagreeable, betrays us to a worse condition than the most deserted loneliness. God cannot in the justice of his own promise and institution so unexpectedly mock us, by forcing that upon us as the remedy of solitude, which wraps us in a misery worse than any wilderness, as the Spirit of God himself judges, Prov. xix., especially knowing that the best and wisest men amidst the sincere and most cordial designs of their heart, do daily err in choosing. We may conclude therefore, seeing orthodoxal expositors confess to our hands, that by loneliness is not only meant the want of copulation, and that man is not less alone by turning in a body to him, unless there be within it a mind answerable; that it is a work more worthy the care and consultation of God to provide for the worthiest part of man, which is his mind, and not unnaturally to set it beneath the formalities and respects of the body, to make it a servant of its own vassal: I say, we may conclude that such a marriage, wherein the mind is so disgraced and vilified below the body’s interest, and can have no just or tolerable contentment, is not of God’s institution, and therefore no marriage. Nay, in concluding this, I say we conclude no more than what the common expositors themselves give us, both in that which I have recited, and much more hereafter. But the truth is, they give us in such a manner, as they who leave their own mature positions like the eggs of an ostrich in the dust; I do but lay them in the sun; their own pregnancies hatch the truth; and I am taxed of novelties and strange producements, while they, like that inconsiderate bird, know not that these are their own natural breed.

“I will make him a help meet for him.”] Here the heavenly institutor, as if he laboured not to be mistaken by the supercilious hypocrisy of those that love to master their brethren, and to make us sure that he gave us not now a servile yoke, but an amiable knot, contents not himself to say, I will make him a wife; but resolving to give us first the meaning before the name of a wife, saith graciously, “I will make him a help meet for him.” And here again, as before, I do not require more full and fair deductions than the whole consent of our divines usually raise from this text, that in matrimony there must be first a mutual help to piety, next to civil fellowship of love and amity, then to generation, so to household affairs, lastly the remedy of incontinence. And commonly they reckon them in such order, as leaves generation and incontinence to be last considered. This I amaze me at, that though all the superior and nobler ends both of marriage and of the married persons be absolutely frustrate, the matrimony stirs not, loses no hold, remains as rooted as the centre: but if the body bring but in a complaint of frigidity, by that cold application only this adamantine Alp of wedlock has leave to dissolve; which else all the machinations of religious or civil reason at the suit of a distressed mind, either for divine worship or human conversation violated, cannot unfasten. What courts of concupiscence are these, wherein fleshly appetite is heard before right reason, lust before love or devotion? They may be pious Christians together, they may be loving and friendly, they may be helpful to each other in the family, but they cannot couple; that shall divorce them, though either party would not. They can neither serve God together, nor one be at peace with the other, nor be good in the family one to other, but live as they were dead, or live as they were deadly enemies in a cage together; it is all one, they can couple, they shall not divorce till death, not though this sentence be their death. What is this besides tyranny, but to turn nature upside down, to make both religion and the mind of man wait upon the slavish errands of the body, and not the body to follow either the sanctity or the sovereignty of the mind, unspeakably wronged, and with all equity complaining? what is this but to abuse the sacred and mysterious bed of marriage to be the compulsive style of an ingrateful and malignant lust, stirred up only from a carnal acrimony, without either love or peace, or regard to any other thing holy or human? This I admire, how possibly it should inhabit thus long in the sense of so many disputing theologians, unless it be the lowest lees of a canonical infection liver-grown to their sides; which perhaps will never uncling, without the strong abstersive of some heroic magistrate, whose mind, equal to his high office, dares lead him both to know and to do without their frivolous case-putting. For certain he shall have God and this institution plainly on his side. And if it be true both in divinity and law, that consent alone, though copulation never follow, makes a marriage; how can they dissolve it for the want of that which made it not, and not dissolve it for that not continuing which made it and should preserve it in love and reason, and difference it from a brute conjugality?

“Meet for him.”] The original here is more expressive than other languages word for word can render it; but all agree effectual conformity of disposition and affection to be hereby signified; which God as it were, not satisfied with the naming of a help, goes on describing another self, a second self, a very self itself. Yet now there is nothing in the life of man, through our misconstruction, made more uncertain, more hazardous and full of chance, than this divine blessing with such favourable significance here conferred upon us; which if we do but err in our choice, the most unblameable error that can be, err but one minute, one moment after those mighty syllables pronounced, which take upon them to join heaven and hell together unpardonably till death pardon: this divine blessing that looked but now with such a humane smile upon us, and spoke such gentle reason, straight vanishes like a fair sky, and brings on such a scene of cloud and tempest, as turns all to shipwreck without haven or shore, but to a ransomless captivity. And then they tell us it is our sin: but let them be told again, that sin through the mercy of God, hath not made such waste upon us, as to make utterly void to our use any temporal benefit, much less any so much availing to a peaceful and sanctified life, merely for a most incident error, which no wariness can certainly shun. And wherefore serves our happy redemption, and the liberty we have in Christ, but to deliver us from calamitous yokes, not to be lived under without the endangerment of our souls, and to restore us in some competent measure to a right in every good thing both of this life, and the other? Thus we see how treatably and distinctly God hath here taught us what the prime ends of marriage are; mutual solace and help. That we are now, upon the most irreprehensible mistake in choosing, defeated and defrauded of all this original benignity, was begun first through the snare of anti-christian canons long since obtruded upon the church of Rome, and not yet scoured off by reformation, out of a lingering vain-glory that abides among us to make fair shows in formal ordinances, and to enjoin continence and bearing of crosses in such a garb as no scripture binds us, under the thickest arrows of temptation, where we need not stand. Now we shall see with what acknowledgment and assent Adam received this new associate which God brought him.

Ver. 23. “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.”

That there was a nearer alliance between Adam and Eve, than could be ever after between man and wife, is visible to any. For no other woman was ever moulded out of her husband’s rib, but of mere strangers for the most part they come to have that consanguinity, which they have by wedlock. And if we look nearly upon the matter, though marriage be most agreeable to holiness, to purity, and justice, yet is it not a natural, but a civil and ordained relation. For if it were in nature, no law or crime could disannul it, to make a wife, or husband, otherwise than still a wife or husband, but only death; as nothing but that can make a father no father, or a son no son. But divorce for adultery or desertion, as all our churches agree but England, not only separates, but nullifies, and extinguishes the relation itself of matrimony, so that they are no more man and wife; otherwise the innocent party could not marry elsewhere, without the guilt of adultery. Next, were it merely natural, why was it here ordained more than the rest of moral law to man in his original rectitude, in whose breast all that was natural or moral was engraven without external constitutions and edicts? Adam therefore in these words does not establish an indissoluble bond of marriage in the carnal ligaments of flesh and bones; for if he did, it would belong only to himself in the literal sense, every one of us being nearer in flesh of flesh, and bone of bones, to our parents than to a wife; they therefore were not to be left for her in that respect. But Adam, who had the wisdom given him to know all creatures, and to name them according to their properties, no doubt but had the gift to discern perfectly that which concerned him much more; and to apprehend at first sight the true fitness of that consort which God provided him. And therefore spake in reference to those words which God pronounced before; as if he had said, This is she by whose meet help and society I shall no more be alone; this is she who was made my image, even as I the image of God; not so much in body as in unity of mind and heart. And he might as easily know what were the words of God, as he knew so readily what had been done with his rib, while he slept so soundly. He might well know, if God took a rib out of his inside to form of it a double good to him, he would far sooner disjoin it from his outside, to prevent a treble mischief to him; and far sooner cut it quite off from all relation for his undoubted ease, than nail it into his body again, to stick for ever there a thorn in his heart. Whenas nature teaches us to divide any limb from the body to the saving of its fellows, though it be the maiming and deformity of the whole; how much more is it her doctrine to sever by incision, not a true limb so much, though that be lawful, but an adherent, a sore, the gangrene of a limb, to the recovery of a whole man! But if in these words we shall make Adam to erect a new establishment of marriage in the mere flesh, which God so lately had instituted, and founded in the sweet and mild familiarity of love and solace, and mutual fitness; what do we but use the mouth of our general parent, the first time it opens, to an arrogant opposition and correcting of God’s wiser ordinance? These words therefore cannot import any thing new in marriage, but either that which belongs to Adam only, or to us in reference only to the instituting words of God, which made a meet help against loneliness. Adam spake like Adam the words of flesh and bones, the shell and rind of matrimony; but God spake like God, of love, and solace, and meet help, the soul both of Adam’s words and of matrimony.

Ver. 24. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”

This verse, as our common herd expounds it, is the great knot-tier, which hath undone by tying, and by tangling, millions of guiltless consciences: this is that grisly porter, who having drawn men and wisest men by subtle allurement within the train of an unhappy matrimony, claps the dungeon-gate upon them, as irrecoverable as the grave. But if we view him well, and hear him with not too hasty and prejudicant ears, we shall find no such terror in him. For first, it is not here said absolutely without all reason he shall cleave to his wife, be it to his weal or to his destruction as it happens; but he shall do this upon the premises and considerations of that meet help and society before mentioned. “Therefore he shall cleave to his wife,” no otherwise a wife than a fit help. He is not bid to leave the dear cohabitation of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, to link himself inseparably with the mere carcass of a marriage, perhaps an enemy. This joining particle “Therefore” is in all equity, nay in all necessity of construction, to comprehend first and most principally what God spake concerning the inward essence of marriage in his institution, that we may learn how far to attend what Adam spake of the outward materials thereof in his approbation. For if we shall bind these words of Adam only to a corporal meaning, and that the force of this injunction upon all us his sons, to live individually with any woman which hath befallen us in the most mistaken wedlock, shall consist not in those moral and relative causes of Eve’s creation, but in the mere anatomy of a rib, and that Adam’s insight concerning wedlock reached no further, we shall make him as very an idiot as the Socinians make him; which would not be reverently done of us. Let us be content to allow our great forefather so much wisdom, as to take the instituting words of God along with him into this sentence, which if they be well minded, will assure us that flesh and ribs are but of a weak and dead efficacy to keep marriage united where there is no other fitness. The rib of marriage, to all since Adam, is a relation much rather than a bone; the nerves and sinews thereof are love and meet help, they knit not every couple that marries, and where they knit they seldom break; but where they break, which for the most part is where they were never truly joined, to such at the same instant both flesh and rib cease to be in common: so that here they argue nothing to the continuance of a false or violated marriage, but must be led back again to receive their meaning from those institutive words of God, which give them all the life and vigour they have.

“Therefore shall a man leave his father,” &c.] What to a man’s thinking more plain by this appointment, that the fatherly power should give place to conjugal prerogative? Yet it is generally held by reformed writers against the papist, that though in persons at discretion the marriage in itself be never so fit, though it be fully accomplished with benediction, board, and bed, yet the father not consenting, his main will without dispute shall dissolve all. And this they affirm only from collective reason, not any direct law; for that in Exod. xxii. 17, which is most particular, speaks that a father may refuse to marry his daughter to one who hath defloured her, not that he may take her away from one who hath soberly married her. Yet because the general honour due to parents is great, they hold he may, and perhaps hold not amiss. But again when the question is of harsh and rugged parents, who defer to bestow their children seasonably, they agree jointly, that the church or magistrate may bestow them, though without the father’s consent; and for this they have no express authority in Scripture. So that they may see by their own handling of this very place, that it is not the stubborn letter must govern us, but the divine and softening breath of charity, which turns and winds the dictate of every positive command, and shapes it to the good of mankind. Shall the outward accessory of a father’s will wanting rend the fittest and most affectionate marriage in twain, after all nuptial consummations; and shall not the want of love, and the privation of all civil and religious concord, which is the inward essence of wedlock, do as much to part those who were never truly wedded? Shall a father have this power to vindicate his own wilful honour and authority to the utter breach of a most dearly united marriage, and shall not a man in his own power have the permission to free his soul, his life, and all his comfort of life from the disaster of a no-marriage? Shall fatherhood, which is but man, for his own pleasure dissolve matrimony; and shall not matrimony, which is God’s ordinance, for its own honour and better conservation dissolve itself, when it is wrong and not fitted to any of the chief ends which it owes us?

“And they shall be one flesh.”] These words also infer, that there ought to be an individuality in marriage; but without all question presuppose the joining causes. Not a rule yet that we have met with, so universal in this whole institution, but hath admitted limitations and conditions according to human necessity. The very foundation of matrimony, though God laid it deliberately, “that it is not good for man to be alone,” holds not always, if the apostle can secure us. Soon after we are bid leave father and mother, and cleave to a wife, but must understand the father’s consent withal, else not. “Cleave to a wife,” but let her be a wife, let her be a meet help, a solace, not a nothing, not an adversary, not a desertrice: can any law or command be so unreasonable, as to make men cleave to calamity, to ruin, to perdition? In like manner here “they shall be one flesh;” but let the causes hold, and be made really good which only have the possibility to make them one flesh. We know that flesh can neither join nor keep together two bodies of itself; what is it then must make them one flesh, but likeness, but fitness of mind and disposition, which may breed the spirit of concord and union between them? If that be not in the nature of either, and that there has been a remediless mistake, as vain we go about to compel them into one flesh, as if we undertook to weave a garment of dry sand. It were more easy to compel the vegetable and nutritive power of nature to assimilations and mixtures, which are not alterable each by other; or force the concoctive stomach to turn that into flesh, which is so totally unlike that substance, as not to be wrought on. For as the unity of mind is nearer and greater than the union of bodies, so doubtless is the dissimilitude greater and more dividual, as that which makes between bodies all difference and distinction. Especially whenas besides the singular and substantial differences of every soul, there is an intimate quality of good or evil, through the whole progeny of Adam, which like a radical heat, or mortal chillness, joins them, or disjoins them irresistibly. In whom therefore either the will or the faculty, is found to have never joined, or now not to continue so, it is not to say, they shall be one flesh, for they cannot be one flesh. God commands not impossibilities; and all the ecclesiastical glue, that liturgy or laymen can compound, is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage. Why did Moses then set down their uniting into one flesh? And I again ask why the gospel so oft repeats the eating of our Saviour’s flesh, the drinking of his blood? “That we are one body with him, the members of his body, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone,” Ephes. v. Yet lest we should be Capernaitans, as we are told there, that the flesh profiteth nothing; so we are told here, if we be not as deaf as adders, that this union of the flesh proceeds from the union of a fit help and solace. We know, that there was never a more spiritual mystery than this gospel taught us under the terms of body and flesh; yet nothing less intended than that we should stick there. What a stupidness then is it, that in marriage, which is the nearest resemblance of our union with Christ, we should deject ourselves to such a sluggish and underfoot philosophy, as to esteem the validity of marriage merely by the flesh, though never so broken and disjointed from love and peace, which only can give a human qualification to that act of the flesh, and distinguish it from bestial! The text therefore uses this phrase, that “they shall be one flesh,” to justify and make legitimate the rites of marriage bed; which was not unneedful, if for all this warrant they were suspected of pollution by some sects of philosophy, and religions of old, and latelier among the papists, and other heretics elder than they. Some think there is a high mystery in those words, from that which Paul saith of them, Ephes. v. “This is a great mystery, but I speak of Christ and the church: and thence they would conclude marriage to be inseparable.

For me, I dispute not now whether matrimony be a mystery or no; if it be of Christ and his church, certainly it is not meant of every ungodly and miswedded marriage, but then only mysterious, when it is a holy, happy, and peaceful match. But when a saint is joined with a reprobate, or both alike wicked with wicked, fool with fool, a he-drunkard with a she; when the bed hath been nothing else for twenty years or more, but an old haunt of lust and malice mixed together, no love, no goodness, no loyalty, but counterplotting, and secret wishing one another’s dissolution; this is to me the greatest mystery in the world, if such a marriage as this can be the mystery of aught, unless it be the mystery of iniquity: according to that which Paræus cites out of Chrysostom, that a bad wife is a help for the devil, and the like may be said of a bad husband. Since therefore none but a fit and pious matrimony can signify the union of Christ and his church, there cannot hence be any hinderance of divorce to that wedlock wherein there can be no good mystery. Rather it might to a Christian conscience be matter of finding itself so much less satisfied than before, in the continuance of an unhappy yoke, wherein there can be no representation either of Christ, or of his church.

Thus having inquired the institution how it was in the beginning, both from the 1st chap. of Gen. where it was only mentioned in part, and from the second, where it was plainly and evidently instituted; and having attended each clause and word necessary with a diligence not drowsy, we shall now fix with some advantage, and by a short view backward gather up the ground we have gone, and sum up the strength we have, into one argumentative head, with that organic force that logic proffers us. All arts acknowledge, that then only we know certainly, when we can define; for definition is that which refines the pure essence of things from the circumstance. If therefore we can attain in this our controversy to define exactly what marriage is, we shall soon learn when there is a nullity thereof, and when a divorce.

The part therefore of this chapter, which hath been here treated, doth orderly and readily resolve itself into a definition of marriage, and a consectary from thence. To the definition these words chiefly contribute; “It is not good,” &c. “I will make,” &c. Where the consectary begins this connection, “Therefore” informs us, “Therefore shall a man,” &c. Definition is decreed by logicians to consist only of causes constituting the essence of a thing. What is not therefore among the causes constituting marriage, must not stay in the definition. Those causes are concluded to be matter, and, as the artist calls it, Form. But inasmuch as the same thing may be a cause more ways than one, and that in relations and institutions which have no corporal subsistence, but only a respective being, the Form, by which the thing is what it is, is oft so slender and undistinguishable, that it would soon confuse, were it not sustained by the efficient and final causes, which concur to make up the Form, invalid otherwise of itself, it will be needful to take in all the four causes into the definition. First therefore, the material cause of matrimony is man and woman; the author and efficient, God and their consent; the internal Form and soul of this relation, is conjugal love arising from a mutual fitness to the final causes of wedlock, help and society in religious, civil, and domestic conversation, which includes as an inferior end the fulfilling of natural desire, and specifical increase; these are the final causes both moving the Efficient, and perfecting the Form. And although copulation be considered among the ends of marriage, yet the act thereof in a right esteem can no longer be matrimonial, than it is an effect of conjugal love. When love finds itself utterly unmatched, and justly vanishes, nay rather cannot but vanish, the fleshly act indeed may continue, but not holy, not pure, not beseeming the sacred bond of marriage; being at best but an animal excretion, but more truely worse and more ignoble than that mute kindliness among the herds and flocks; in that proceeding as it ought from intellective principles, it participates of nothing rational, but that which the field and the fold equals. For in human actions the soul is the agent, the body in a manner passive. If then the body do out of sensitive force, what the soul complies not with how can man, and not rather something beneath man, be thought the doer?

But to proceed in the pursuit of an accurate definition, it will avail us something, and whet our thoughts, to examine what fabric hereof others have already reared. Paræus on Gen. defines marriage to be “an indissoluble conjunction of one man and one woman to an individual and intimate conversation, and mutual benevolence,” &c. Wherein is to be marked his placing of intimate conversation before bodily benevolence; for bodily is meant, though indeed “benevolence” rather sounds will, than body. Why then shall divorce be granted for want of bodily performance, and not for want of fitness to intimate conversation, whenas corporal benevolence cannot in any human fashion be without this? Thus his definition places the ends of marriage in one order, and esteems them in another. His tautology also of indissoluble and individual is not to be imitated; especially since neither indissoluble nor individual hath aught to do in the exact definition, being but a consectary flowing from thence, as appears by plain Scripture, “Therefore shall a man leave,” &c. For marriage is not true marriage by being individual, but therefore individual, if it be true marriage. No argument but causes enter the definition: a consectary is but the effect of those causes. Besides, that marriage is indissoluble, is not catholicly true; we know it dissoluble for adultery and for desertion by the verdict of all reformed churches. Dr. Ames defines it “an individual conjunction of one man and one woman, to communion of body and mutual society of life:” but this perverts the order of God, who in the institution places meet help and society of life before communion of body. And vulgar estimation undervalues beyond comparison all society of life and communion of mind beneath the communion of body; granting no divorce, but to the want, or miscommunicating of that. Hemingius, an approved author, Melancthon’s scholar, and who, next to Bucer and Erasmus, writes of divorce most like a divine, thus comprises, “Marriage is a conjunction of one man and one woman lawfully consenting, into one flesh, for mutual help’s sake, ordained of God.” And in his explanation stands punctually upon the conditions of consent, that it be not in any main matter deluded, as being the life of wedlock, and no true marriage without a true consent. “Into one flesh” he expounds into one mind, as well as one body, and makes it the formal cause; herein only missing, while he puts the effect into his definition instead of the cause which the text affords him. For “one flesh” is not the formal essence of wedlock, but one end, or one effect of “a meet help:” the end ofttimes being the effect and fruit of the form, as logic teaches: else many aged and holy matrimonies, and more eminently that of Joseph and Mary, would be no true marriage. And that maxim generally received, would be false, that “consent alone, though copulation never follow, makes the marriage.” Therefore to consent lawfully into one flesh, is not the formal cause of matrimony, but only one of the effects. The civil lawyers, and first Justinian or Tribonian defines matrimony a “conjunction of man and woman containing individual accustom of life.” Wherein first, individual is not so bad as indissoluble put in by others: and although much cavil might be made in the distinguishing between indivisible and individual, yet the one taken for possible, the other for actual, neither the one nor the other can belong to the essence of marriage; especially when a civilian defines, by which law marriage is actually divorced for many causes, and with good leave, by mutual consent. Therefore where “conjunction” is said, they who comment the Institutes agree, that conjunction of mind is by the law meant, not necessarily conjunction of body. That law then had good reason attending to its own definition, that divorce should be granted for the breaking of that conjunction which it holds necessary, sooner than for the want of that conjunction which it holds not necessary. And whereas Tuningus a famous lawyer, excuses individual as the purpose of marriage, not always the success, it suffices not. Purpose is not able to constitute the essence of a thing. Nature herself, the universal mother, intends nothing but her own perfection and preservation; yet is not the more indissoluble for that. The Pandects out of Modestinus, though not define, yet well describe marriage “the conjunction of male and female, the society of all life, the communion of divine and human right:” which Bucer also imitates on the fifth to the Ephesians. But it seems rather to comprehend the several ends of marriage than to contain the more constituting cause that makes it what it is.

That I therefore among others (for who sings not Hylas?) may give as well as take matter to be judged on, it will be looked I should produce another definition than these which have not stood the trial. Thus then I suppose that marriage by the natural and plain order of God’s institution in the text may be more demonstratively and essentially defined. “Marriage is a divine institution, joining man and woman in a love fitly disposed to the helps and comforts of domestic life.” “A divine institution.” This contains the prime efficient cause of marriage: as for consent of parents and guardians, it seems rather a concurrence than a cause; for as many that marry are in their own power as not; and where they are not their own, yet are they not subjected beyond reason. Now though efficient causes are not requisite in a definition, yet divine institution hath such influence upon the Form, and is so a conserving cause of it, that without it the Form is not sufficient to distinguish matrimony from other conjunctions of male and female, which are not to be counted marriage. “Joining man and woman in a love,” &c. This brings in the parties’ consent; until which be, the marriage hath no true being. When I say “consent,” I mean not error, for error is not properly consent: and why should not consent be here understood with equity and good to either part, as in all other friendly covenants, and not be strained and cruelly urged to the mischief and destruction of both? Neither do I mean that singular act of consent which made the contract; for that may remain, and yet the marriage not true nor lawful; and that may cease, and yet the marriage both true and lawful, to their sin that break it. So that either as no efficient at all, or but a transitory, it comes not into the definition. That consent I mean, which is a love fitly disposed to mutual help and comfort of life: this is that happy Form of Marriage naturally arising from the very heart of divine institution in the text, in all the former definitions either obscurely, and under mistaken terms expressed, or not at all. This gives marriage all her due, all her benefits, all her being, all her distinct and proper being. This makes a marriage not a bondage, a blessing not a curse, a gift of God not a snare. Unless there be a love, and that love born of fitness, how can it last? unless it last, how can the best and sweetest purposes of marriage be attained? And they not attained, which are the chief ends, and with a lawful love constitute the formal cause itself of marriage, how can the essence thereof subsist? How can it be indeed what it goes for? Conclude therefore by all the power of reason, that where this essence of marriage is not, there can be no true marriage; and the parties, either one of them or both, are free, and without fault, rather by a nullity than by a divorce, may betake them to a second choice, if their present condition be not tolerable to them. If any shall ask, why “domestic” in the definition? I answer, that because both in the Scriptures, and in the gravest poets and philosophers, I find the properties and excellencies of a wife set out only from domestic virtues; if they extend further, it diffuses them into the notion of some more common duty than matrimonial.

Thus far of the definition; the consectary which flows from thence, altogether depends thereon, is manifestly brought in by this connective particle “therefore;” and branches itself into a double consequence; First, individual society, “therefore shall a man leave father and mother:” Secondly, conjugal benevolence, “and they shall be one flesh.” Which, as was shown, is not without cause here mentioned, to prevent and to abolish the suspect of pollution in that natural and undefiled act. These consequences therefore cannot either in religion, law, or reason, be bound, and posted upon mankind to his sorrow and misery, but receive what force they have from the meetness of help and solace, which is the formal cause and end of that definition that sustains them. And although it be not for the majesty of Scripture, to humble herself in artificial theorems, and definitions, and corollaries, like a professor in the schools, but looks to be analyzed, and interpreted by the logical industry of her disciples and followers, and to be reduced by them, as oft as need is, into those sciential rules, which are the implements of instruction; yet Moses, as if foreseeing the miserable work that man’s ignorance and pusillanimity would make in this matrimonious business, and endeavouring his utmost to prevent it, condescends in this place to such a methodical and school-like way of defining and consequencing, as in no place of the whole law more.

Thus we have seen, and, if we be not contentious, may know what was marriage in the beginning, to which in the gospel we are referred; and what from hence to judge of nullity, or divorce. Here I esteem the work done; in this field the controversy decided; but because other places of Scripture seem to look aversely upon this our decision, (although indeed they keep all harmony with it,) and because it is a better work to reconcile the seeming diversities of Scripture, than the real dissensions of nearest friends; I shall assay in the three following discourses to perform that office.

Deuteronomy xxiv. 1, 2.

1. “When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her, then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.

2. And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man’s wife.”

That which is the only discommodity of speaking in a clear matter, the abundance of argument that presses to be uttered, and the suspense of judgment what to choose, and how in the multitude of reason to be not tedious, is the greatest difficulty which I expect here to meet with. Yet much hath been said formerly concerning this law in “the Doctrine of Divorce.” Whereof I shall repeat no more than what is necessary. Two things are here doubted: First, and that but of late, whether this be a law or no; next, what this reason of “uncleanness” might mean, for which the law is granted. That it is a plain law no man ever questioned, till Vatablus within these hundred years professed Hebrew at Paris, a man of no religion, as Beza deciphers him. Yet some there be who follow him, not only against the current of all antiquity both Jewish and Christian, but the evidence of Scripture also, Malachi ii. 16, “Let him who hateth put away, saith the Lord God of Israel.” Although this place also hath been tampered with, as if it were to be thus rendered, “The Lord God saith, that he hateth putting away.” But this new interpretation rests only in the authority of Junius: for neither Calvin, nor Vatablus himself, nor any other known divine so interpreted before. And they of best note who have translated the Scripture since, and Diodati for one, follow not his reading. And perhaps they might reject it, if for nothing else, for these two reasons: first, it introduces in a new manner the person of God speaking less majestic than he is ever wont: when God speaks by his prophet, he ever speaks in the first person, thereby signifying his majesty and omnipresence. He would have said, I hate putting away, saith the Lord; and not sent word by Malachi in a sudden fallen style, “The Lord God saith, that he hateth putting away:” that were a phrase to shrink the glorious omnipresence of God speaking, into a kind of circumscriptive absence. And were as if a herald, in the achievement of a king, should commit the indecorum to set his helmet sideways and close, not full-faced and open in the posture of direction and command. We cannot think therefore that this last prophet would thus in a new fashion absent the person of God from his own words, as if he came not along with them. For it would also be wide from the proper scope of this place; he that reads attentively will soon perceive, that God blames not here the Jews for putting away their wives, but for keeping strange concubines, to the “profaning of Judah’s holiness,” and the vexation of their Hebrew wives, v. 11, and 14, “Judah hath married the daughter of a strange god:” and exhorts them rather to put their wives away whom they hate, as the law permitted, than to keep them under such affronts. And it is received, that this prophet lived in those times of Ezra and Nehemiah, (nay by some is thought to be Ezra himself,) when the people were forced by these two worthies to put their strange wives away. So that what the story of those times, and the plain context of the eleventh verse, from whence this rebuke begins, can give us to conjecture of the obscure and curt Ebraisms that follow; this prophet does not forbid putting away, but forbids keeping, and commands putting away according to God’s law, which is the plainest interpreter both of what God will, and what he can best suffer. Thus much evinces, that God there commanded divorce by Malachi; and this confirms, that he commands it also here by Moses.

I may the less doubt to mention by the way an author, though counted apocryphal, yet of no small account for piety and wisdom, the author of Ecclesiasticus. Which book, begun by the grandfather of that Jesus, who is called the son of Sirach, might have been written in part, not much after the time when Malachi lived, if we compute by the reign of Ptolemæus Euergetes. It professes to explain the law and the prophets; and yet exhorts us to divorce for incurable causes, and to cut off from the flesh those whom it there describes, Ecclesiastic. xxv. 26. Which doubtless that wise and ancient writer would never have advised, had either Malachi so lately forbidden it, or the law by a full precept not left it lawful. But I urge not this for want of better proof; our Saviour himself allows divorce to be a command, Mark x. 3, 5. Neither do they weaken this assertion, who say it was only a sufferance, as shall be proved at large in that place of Mark. But suppose it were not a written law, they never can deny it was a custom, and so effect nothing. For the same reasons that induce them why it should not be a law, will straiten them as hard why it should be allowed a custom. All custom is either evil, or not evil; if it be evil, this is the very end of lawgiving, to abolish evil customs by wholesome laws; unless we imagine Moses weaker than every negligent and startling politician. If it be, as they make this of divorce to be, a custom against nature, against justice, against charity, how, upon this most impure custom tolerated, could the God of pureness erect a nice and precise law, that the wife married after divorce could not return to her former husband, as being defiled? What was all this following niceness worth, built upon the lewd foundation of a wicked thing allowed? In few words then, this custom of divorce either was allowable, or not allowable; if not allowable, how could it be allowed? if it were allowable, all who understand law will consent, that a tolerated custom hath the force of a law, and is indeed no other but an unwritten law, as Justinian calls it, and is as prevalent as any written statute. So that their shift of turning this law into a custom wheels about, and gives the onset upon their own flanks; not disproving, but concluding it to be the more firm law, because it was without controversy a granted custom; as clear in the reason of common life, as those given rules whereon Euclid builds his propositions.

Thus being every way a law of God, who can without blasphemy doubt it to be a just and pure law? Moses continually disavows the giving them any statute, or judgment, but what he learnt of God; of whom also in his song he saith, Deut. xxxii., “He is the rock, his work is perfect, all his ways are judgment, a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.” And David testifies, the judgments of the Lord “are true and righteous altogether.” Not partly right and partly wrong, much less wrong altogether, as divines of now-a-days dare censure them. Moses again, of that people to whom he gave this law, saith, Deut. xiv., “Ye are the children of the Lord your God, the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people to himself above all the nations upon the earth, that thou shouldst keep all his commandments, and be high in praise, in name, and in honour, holy to the Lord!” chap xxvi. And in the fourth, “Behold I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, keep therefore and do them. For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of nations that shall hear all these statutes, and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh to them? and what nation that hath statutes and judgements so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?” Thus whether we look at the purity and justice of God himself, the jealousy of his honour among other nations, the holiness and moral perfection which he intended by his law to teach this people, we cannot possibly think how he could endure to let them slug and grow inveterately wicked, under base allowances, and whole adulterous lives by dispensation. They might not eat, they might not touch an unclean thing; to what hypocrisy then were they trained up, if by prescription of the same law, they might be unjust, they might be adulterous for term of life? forbid to soil their garments with a coy imaginary pollution, but not forbid, but countenanced and animated by law, to soil their souls with deepest defilements. What more unlike to God, what more like that God should hate, than that his law should be so curious to wash vessels and vestures, and so careless to leave unwashed, unregarded, so foul a scab of Egypt in their souls? What would we more? The statutes of the Lord are all pure and just: and if all, then this of divorce.

“Because he hath found some uncleanness in her.”] That we may not esteem this law to be a mere authorizing of license, as the Pharisees took it, Moses adds the reason, for “some uncleanness found.” Some heretofore have been so ignorant, as to have thought, that this uncleanness means adultery. But Erasmus, who, for having writ an excellent treatise of divorce, was wrote against by some burly standard divine, perhaps of Cullen, or of Lovain, who calls himself Phimostomus, shows learnedly out of the fathers, with other testimonies and reasons, that uncleanness is not here so understood; defends his former work, though new to that age, and perhaps counted licentious, and fears not to engage all his fame on the argument. Afterward, when expositors began to understand the Hebrew text, which they had not done of many ages before, they translated word for word not “uncleanness,” but “the nakedness of any thing;” and considering that nakedness is usually referred in Scripture to the mind as well as to the body, they constantly expound it any defect, annoyance, or ill quality in nature, which to be joined with, makes life tedious, and such company worse than solitude. So that here will be no cause to vary from the general consent of exposition, which gives us freely that God permitted divorce, for whatever was unalterably distasteful, whether in body or mind. But with this admonishment, that if the Roman law, especially in contracts and dowries, left many things to equity with these cautions, “ex fide bona, quod æquius melius erit, ut inter bonos bene agitur;” we will not grudge to think, that God intended not license here to every humour, but to such remediless grievances as might move a good and honest and faithful man then to divorce, when it can no more be peace or comfort to either of them continuing thus joined. And although it could not be avoided, but that men of hard hearts would abuse this liberty, yet doubtless it was intended, as all other privileges in law are, to good men principally, to bad only by accident. So that the sin was not in the permission, nor simply in the action of divorce, (for then the permitting also had been sin,) but only in the abuse. But that this law should, as it were, be wrung from God and Moses, only to serve the hardheartedness, and the lust of injurious men, how remote it is from all sense, and law, and honesty, and therefore surely from the meaning of Christ, shall abundantly be manifest in due order.

Now although Moses needed not to add other reason of this law than that one there expressed, yet to these ages wherein canons, and Scotisms, and Lombard laws, have dulled, and almost obliterated the lively sculpture of ancient reason and humanity; it will be requisite to heap reason upon reason, and all little enough to vindicate the whiteness and the innocence of this divine law, from the calumny it finds at this day, of being a door to license and confusion. Whenas indeed there is not a judicial point in all Moses, consisting of more true equity, high wisdom, and godlike pity than this law; not derogating, but preserving the honour and peace of marriage, and exactly agreeing with the sense and mind of that institution in Genesis.

For, first, if marriage be but an ordained relation, as it seems not more, it cannot take place above the prime dictates of nature: and if it be of natural right, yet it must yield to that which is more natural, and before it by eldership and precedence in nature. Now it is not natural, that Hugh marries Beatrice, or Thomas Rebecca, being only a civil contract, and full of many chances; but that these men seek them meet helps, that only is natural; and that they espouse them such, that only is marriage. But if they find them neither fit helps nor tolerable society, what thing more natural, more original, and first in nature, than to depart from that which is irksome, grievous, actively hateful, and injurious even to hostility, especially in a conjugal respect, wherein antipathies are invincible, and where the forced abiding of the one can be no true good, no real comfort to the other? For if he find no contentment from the other, how can he return it from himself? or no acceptance, how can he mutually accept? What more equal, more pious, than to untie a civil knot for a natural enmity held by violence from parting, to dissolve an accidental conjunction of this or that man and woman, for the most natural and most necessary disagreement of meet from unmeet, guilty from guiltless, contrary from contrary? It being certain, that the mystical and blessed unity of marriage can be no way more unhallowed and profaned, than by the forcible uniting of such disunions and separations. Which if we see ofttimes they cannot join or piece up a common friendship, or to a willing conversation in the same house, how should they possibly agree to the most familiar and united amity of wedlock? Abraham and Lot, though dear friends and brethren in a strange country, chose rather to part asunder, than to infect their friendship with the strife of their servants: Paul and Barnabas, joined together by the Holy Ghost to a spiritual work, thought it better to separate, when once they grew at variance. If these great saints, joined by nature, friendship, religion, high providence, and revelation, could not so govern a casual difference, a sudden passion, but must in wisdom divide from the outward duties of a friendship, or a colleagueship in the same family, or in the same journey, lest it should grow to a worse division; can any thing be more absurd and barbarous, than that they whom only error, casualty, art, or plot, hath joined, should be compelled, not against a sudden passion, but against the permanent and radical discords of nature, to the most intimate and incorporating duties of love and embracement, therein only rational and human, as they are free and voluntary; being else an abject and servile yoke, scarce not brutish? and that there is in man such a peculiar sway of liking or disliking in the affairs of matrimony, is evidently seen before marriage among those who can be friendly, can respect each other, yet to marry each other would not for any persuasion. If then this unfitness and disparity be not till after marriage discovered, through many causes, and colours, and concealments, that may overshadow; undoubtedly it will produce the same effects, and perhaps with more vehemence, that such a mistaken pair would give the world to be unmarried again. And their condition Solomon to the plain justification of divorce expresses, Prov. xxx. 21, 23, where he tells us of his own accord, that a “hated, or a hateful woman, when she is married, is a thing for which the earth is disquieted, and cannot bear it:” thus giving divine testimony to this divine law, which bids us nothing more than is the first and most innocent lesson of nature, to turn away peaceably from what afflicts, and hazards our destruction; especially when our staying can do no good, and is exposed to all evil.

Secondly, It is unjust that any ordinance, ordained to the good and comfort of man, where that end is missing, without his fault, should be forced upon him to an insufferable misery and discomfort, if not commonly ruin. All ordinances are established in their end; the end of law is the virtue, is the righteousness of law: and therefore him we count an ill expounder, who urges law against the intention thereof. The general end of every ordinance, of every severest, every divinest, even of Sabbath, is the good of man; yea, his temporal good not excluded. But marriage is one of the benignest ordinances of God to man, whereof both the general and particular end is the peace and contentment of man’s mind, as the institution declares. Contentment of body they grant, which, if it be defrauded, the plea of frigidity shall divorce: but here lies the fathomless absurdity, that granting this for bodily defect, they will not grant it for any defect of the mind, any violation of religious or civil society. Whenas, if the argument of Christ be firm against the ruler of the synagogue, Luke xiii. “Thou hypocrite! doth not each of you on the Sabbath-day loosen his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him to watering, and should not I unbind a daughter of Abraham from this bond of Satan?” it stands as good here; ye have regard in marriage to the grievance of body, should you not regard more the grievances of the mind, seeing the soul as much excels the body, as the outward man excels the ass, and more? for that animal is yet a living creature, perfect in itself; but the body without the soul is a mere senseless trunk. No ordinance therefore, given particularly to the good both spiritual and temporal of man, can be urged upon him to his mischief; and if they yield this to the unworthier part, the body, whereabout are they in their principles, that they yield it not to the more worthy, the mind of a good man?

Thirdly, As no ordinance, so no covenant, no not between God and man, much less between man and man, being, as all are, intended to the good of both parties, can hold to the deluding or making miserable of them both. For equity is understood in every covenant, even between enemies, though the terms be not expressed. If equity therefore made it, extremity may dissolve it. But marriage, they used to say, is the covenant of God. Undoubted: and so is any covenant frequently called in Scripture, wherein God is called to witness: the covenant of friendship between David and Jonathan is called the covenant of the Lord, 1 Sam. xx. The covenant of Zedekiah with the king of Babel, a covenant to be doubted whether lawful or no, yet, in respect of God invoked thereto, is called “the oath, and the covenant of God,” Ezek. xvii. Marriage also is called “the covenant of God,” Prov. ii. 17. Why, but as before, because God is the witness thereof, Mal. ii. 14. So that this denomination adds nothing to the covenant of marriage, above any other civil and solemn contract: nor is it more indissoluble for this reason than any other against the end of its own ordination; nor is any vow or oath to God exacted with such a rigour, where superstition reigns not. For look how much divine the covenant is, so much the more equal, so much the more to be expected that every article thereof should be fairly made good; no false dealing or unperforming should be thrust upon men without redress, if the covenant be so divine. But faith, they say, must be kept in covenant, though to our damage. I answer, that only holds true, where the other side performs; which failing, he is no longer bound. Again, this is true, when the keeping of faith can be of any use or benefit to the other. But in marriage, a league of love and willingness, if faith be not willingly kept, it scarce is worth the keeping; nor can be any delight to a generous mind, with whom it is forcibly kept: and the question still supposes the one brought to an impossibility of keeping it as he ought, by the other’s default; and to keep it formally, not only with a thousand shifts and dissimulations, but with open anguish, perpetual sadness and disturbance, no willingness, no cheerfulness, no contentment; cannot be any good to a mind not basely poor and shallow, with whom the contract of love is so kept. A covenant therefore brought to that pass, is on the unfaulty side without injury dissolved.

Fourthly, The law is not to neglect men under greatest sufferances, but to see covenants of greatest moment faithfulest performed. And what injury comparable to that sustained in a frustrate and false-dealing marriage, to lose, for another’s fault against him, the best portion of his temporal comforts, and of his spiritual too, as it may fall out? It was the law, that for man’s good and quiet reduced things to propriety, which were at first in common; how much more lawlike were it to assist nature in disappropriating that evil, which by continuing proper becomes destructive? But he might have bewared. So he might in any other covenant, wherein the law does not constrain error to so dear a forfeit. And yet in these matters wherein the wisest are apt to err, all the wariness that can be, ofttimes nothing avails. But the law can compel the offending party to be more duteous. Yes, if all these kind of offences were fit in public to be complained of, or being compelled were any satisfaction to a mate not sottish, or malicious. And these injuries work so vehemently, that if the law remedy them not, by separating the cause when no way else will pacify, the person not relieved betakes him either to such disorderly courses, or to such a dull dejection, as renders him either infamous, or useless to the service of God and his country. Which the law ought to prevent as a thing pernicious to the commonwealth; and what better prevention than this which Moses used?

Fifthly, The law is to tender the liberty and the human dignity of them that live under the law, whether it be the man’s right above the woman, or the woman’s just appeal against wrong and servitude. But the duties of marriage contain in them a duty of benevolence, which to do by compulsion against the soul, where there can be neither peace, nor joy, nor love, but an enthralment to one who either cannot or will not be mutual in the godliest and the civilest ends of that society, is the ignoblest and the lowest slavery that a human shape can be put to. This law therefore justly and piously provides against such an unmanly task of bondage as this. The civil law, though it favoured the setting free of a slave, yet, if he proved ungrateful to his patron, reduced him to a servile condition. If that law did well to reduce from liberty to bondage for an ingratitude not the greatest, much more became it the law of God, to enact the restorement of a freeborn man from an unpurposed and unworthy bondage to a rightful liberty, for the most unnatural fraud and ingratitude that can be committed against him. And if that civilian emperor, in his title of “Donations,” permit the giver to recall his gift from him who proves unthankful towards him; yea, though he had subscribed and signed in the deed of his gift not to recall it, though for this very cause of ingratitude; with much more equity doth Moses permit here the giver to recall no petty gift, but the gift of himself, from one who most injuriously and deceitfully uses him against the main ends and conditions of his giving himself, expressed in God’s institution.

Sixthly, Although there be nothing in the plain words of this law, that seems to regard the afflictions of a wife, how great soever; yet expositors determine, and doubtless determine rightly, that God was not uncompassionate of them also in the framing of this law. For should the rescript of Antoninus in the civil law give release to servants flying for refuge to the emperor’s statue, by giving leave to change their cruel masters; and should God, who in his law also is good to injured servants, by granting them their freedom in divers cases, not consider the wrongs and miseries of a wife, which is no servant? Though herein the counter sense of our divines to me, I must confess, seems admirable; who teach that God gave this as a merciful law, not for man whom he here names, and to whom by name he gives this power; but for the wife, whom he names not, and to whom by name he gives no power at all. For certainly if man be liable to injuries in marriage, as well as women, and man be the worthier person, it were a preposterous law to respect only the less worthy; her whom God made for marriage, and not him at all for whom marriage was made.

Seventhly, The law of marriage gives place to the power of parents: for we hold, that consent of parents not had may break the wedlock, though else accomplished. It gives place to masterly power; for the master might take away from a Hebrew servant the wife which he gave him, Exod. xxi. If it be answered, that the marriage of servants is no matrimony; it is replied, that this in the ancient Roman law is true, not in the Mosaic. If it be added, she was a stranger, not a Hebrew, therefore easily divorced; it will be answered, that strangers not being Canaanites, and they also being converts, might be lawfully married, as Rahab was. And her conversion is here supposed; for a Hebrew master could not lawfully give a heathen wife to a Hebrew servant. However, the divorcing of an Israelitish woman was as easy by the law, as the divorcing of a stranger, and almost in the same words permitted, Deut. xxiv. and Deut. xxi. Lastly, it gives place to the right of war, for a captive woman lawfully married, and afterwards not beloved, might be dismissed, only without ransom, Deut. xxi. If marriage be dissolved by so many exterior powers, not superior, as we think, why may not the power of marriage itself, for its own peace and honour, dissolve itself, where the persons wedded be free persons? Why may not a greater and more natural power complaining dissolve marriage? For the ends, why matrimony was ordained, are certainly and by all logic above the ordinance itself; why may not that dissolve marriage without which that institution hath no force at all? For the prime ends of marriage are the whole strength and validity thereof, without which matrimony is like an idol, nothing in the world. But those former allowances were all for hardness of heart. Be that granted, until we come where to understand it better; if the law suffer thus far the obstinacy of a bad man, is it not more righteous here, to do willingly what is but equal, to remove in season the extremities of a good man?

Eighthly, If a man had deflowered a virgin, or brought an ill name on his wife, that she came not a virgin to him, he was amerced in certain shekels of silver, and bound never to divorce her all his days, Deut. xxii., which shows that the law gave no liberty to divorce, where the injury was palpable; and that the absolute forbidding to divorce was in part the punishment of a deflourer, and a defamer. Yet not so but that the wife questionless might depart when she pleased. Otherwise this course had not so much righted her, as delivered her up to more spite and cruel usage. This law therefore doth justly distinguish the privilege of an honest and blameless man in the matter of divorce, from the punishment of a notorious offender.

Ninthly, Suppose it should be imputed to a man, that he was too rash in his choice, and why he took not better heed, let him now smart, and bear his folly as he may; although the law of God, that terrible law, do not thus upbraid the infirmities and unwilling mistakes of man in his integrity: but suppose these and the like proud aggravations of some stern hypocrite, more merciless in his mercies, than any literal law in the rigour of severity, must be patiently heard; yet all law and God’s law especially, grants every where to error, easy remitments, even where the utmost penalty exacted were no undoing. With great reason therefore and mercy doth it here not torment an error, if it be so, with the endurance of a whole life lost to all household comfort and society, a punishment of too vast and huge dimension for an error, and the more unreasonable for that the like objection may be opposed against the plea of divorcing for adultery: he might have looked better before to her breeding under religious parents: why did he not more diligently inquire into her manners, into what company she kept? every glance of her eye, every step of her gait, would have prophesied adultery, if the quick scent of these discerners had been took along; they had the divination to have foretold you all this, as they have now the divinity to punish an error inhumanly. As good reason to be content and forced to be content with your adulteress, if these objectors might be the judges of human frailty. But God, more mild and good to man, than man to his brother, in all this liberty given to divorcement, mentions not a word of our past errors and mistakes, if any were; which these men objecting from their own inventions, prosecute with all violence and iniquity. For if the one be to look so narrowly what he takes, at the peril of ever keeping, why should not the other be made as wary what is promised, by the peril of losing? for without those promises the treaty of marriage had not proceeded. Why should his own error bind him, rather than the other’s fraud acquit him? Let the buyer beware, saith the old law-beaten termer. Belike then there is no more honesty, nor ingenuity in the bargain of a wedlock, than in the buying of a colt: we must it seems drive it on as craftily with those whose affinity we seek, as if they were a pack of salemen and complotters. But the deceiver deceives himself in the unprosperous marriage, and therein is sufficiently punished. I answer, that the most of those who deceive are such as either understand not, or value not the true purposes of marriage; they have the prey they seek, not the punishment: yet say it prove to them some cross, it is not equal that error and fraud should be linked in the same degree of forfeiture, but rather that error should be acquitted, and fraud bereaved his morsel, if the mistake were not on both sides; for then on both sides the acquitment would be reasonable, if the bondage be intolerable; which this law graciously determines, not unmindful of the wife, as was granted willingly to the common expositors, though beyond the letter of this law, yet not beyond the spirit of charity.

Tenthly, Marriage is a solemn thing, some say a holy, the resemblance of Christ and his church: and so indeed it is where the persons are truly religious; and we know all sacred things, not performed sincerely as they ought, are no way acceptable to God in their outward formality. And that wherein it differs from personal duties, if they be not truly done, the fault is in ourselves; but marriage to be a true and pious marriage is not in the single power of any person; the essence whereof, as of all other covenants, is in relation to another, the making and maintaining causes thereof are all mutual, and must be a communion of spiritual and temporal comforts. If then either of them cannot, or obstinately will not, be answerable in these duties, so as that the other can have no peaceful living, or endure the want of what he justly seeks, and sees no hope, then straight from that dwelling, love, which is the soul of wedlock, takes his flight, leaving only some cold performances of civil and common respects; but the true bond of marriage, if there were ever any there, is already burst like a rotten thread. Then follows dissimulation, suspicion, false colours, false pretences, and worse than these, disturbance, annoyance, vexation, sorrow, temptation even in the faultless person weary of himself, and of all actions public or domestic; then comes disorder, neglect, hatred, and perpetual strife; all these the enemies of holiness and Christianity, and every one persisted in, a remediless violation of matrimony. Therefore God, who hates all feigning and formality, where there should be all faith and sincereness, and abhors the inevitable discord, where there should be greater concord; when through another’s default faith and concord cannot be, counts it neither just to punish the innocent with the transgressor, nor holy, nor honourable for the sanctity of marriage, that should be the union of peace and love, to be made the commitment and close fight of enmity and hate. And therefore doth in this law what best agrees with his goodness, loosening a sacred thing to peace and charity, rather than binding it to hatred and contention; loosening only the outward and formal tie of that which is already inwardly and really broken, or else was really never joined.

Eleventhly, One of the chief matrimonial ends is said to seek a holy seed; but where an unfit marriage administers continual cause of hatred and distemper, there, as was heard before, cannot choose but much unholiness abide. Nothing more unhallows a man, more unprepares him to the service of God in any duty, than a habit of wrath and perturbation, arising from the importunity of troublous causes never absent. And where the household stands in this plight, what love can there be to the unfortunate issue, what care of their breeding, which is of main conducement to their being holy? God therefore, knowing how unhappy it would be for children to be born in such a family, gives this law as a prevention, that, being an unhappy pair, they should not add to be unhappy parents, or else as a remedy that if there be children, while they are fewest, they may follow either parent, as shall be agreed, or judged, from the house of hatred and discord to a place of more holy and peaceable education.

Twelfthly, All law is available to some good end, but the final prohibition of divorce avails to no good end, causing only the endless aggravation of evil, and therefore this permission of divorce was given to the Jews by the wisdom and fatherly providence of God; who knew that law cannot command love, without which matrimony hath no true being, no good, no solace, nothing of God’s instituting, nothing but so sordid and so low, as to be disdained of any generous person. Law cannot enable natural inability either of body, or mind, which gives the grievance; it cannot make equal those inequalities, it cannot make fit those unfitnesses; and where there is malice more than defect of nature, it cannot hinder ten thousand injuries, and bitter actions of despight, too subtle and too unapparent for law to deal with. And while it seeks to remedy more outward wrongs, it exposes the injured person to other more inward and more cutting. All these evils unavoidably will redound upon the children, if any be, and upon the whole family. It