us.

AND though bad causes would take licence by this pretext, if that cannot be remedied, upon their conscience be it who shall so do. This was that hardness of heart, and abuse of a good law, which Moses was content to suffer, rather than good men should not have it at all to use needfully. And he who, to run after one lost sheep, left ninety-nine of his own flock at random in the wilderness, would little perplex his thoughts for the obduring of nine hundred and ninety such as will daily take worse liberties, whether they have permis sion or not. To conclude, as without charity God hath given no commandment to men, so without it neither can men rightly believe any commandment given. For every act of true faith, as well that whereby we believe the law as that whereby we endeavour the law, is wrought in us by charity, according to that in the divine hymn of St. Paul, 1 Cor. xiii. Charity believeth all things;" not as if she were so credulous, which is the exposition hitherto current, for that were a trivial praise, but to teach us that charity is the high governess of our belief, and that we cannot safely assent to any precept written in the Bible, but as charity commends it to Which agrees with that of the same apostle to the Eph. iv. 14, 15; where he tells us, that the way to get a sure undoubted knowledge of things, is to hold that for truth which accords most with charity. Whose unerring guidance and conduct having followed as a loadstar, with all diligence and fidelity, in this question, I trust, through the help of that illuminating Spirit which hath favoured me, to have done no every day's work, in asserting, after many the words of Christ, with other scriptures of great concernment, from burdensome and remorseless obscurity, tangled with manifold repugnances, to their native lustre and consent between each other; hereby also dissolving tedious and Gordian difficuties; which have hitherto molested the church of God, and are now decided, not with the sword of Alexander, but with the immaculate hands of charity, to the unspeakable good of Christendom. And let the extreme literalist sit down now, revolve whether this in all necessity be not the due result of our Saviour's words; or if he persist to be otherwise opinioned, let him well advise, lest thinking to gripe fast the gospel, he be found instead with the canon law in his fist; whose boisterous edicts tyrannizing the blessed ordinance of marriage

and

into the quality of a most unnatural and unchristianly yoke, hath given the flesh this advantage to hate it, and turn aside, ofttimes unwillingly, to all dissolute uncleanness, even till punishment itself is weary of and overcome by the incredible frequency of trading lust and uncontrolled adulteries. Yet men whose creed is custom, I doubt not will be still endeavouring to hide the sloth of their own timorous capacities with this pretext, that for all this it is better to endure with patience and silence this affliction which God hath sent. And I agree it is true, if this be exhorted and not enjoined; but withal it will be wisely done to be as sure as may be, that what man's iniquity hath laid on be not imputed to God's sending, lest under the colour of an affected patience we detain ourselves at the gulf's mouth of many hideous temptations, not to be withstood without proper gifts, which, as Perkins well notes, God gives not ordinarily, no, not to most earnest prayers. Therefore we pray, "Lead us not into temptation; a vain prayer, if, having led ourselves thither, we love to stay in that perilous condition. God sends remedies as well as evils, under which he who lies and groans, that may lawfully acquit himself, is accessory to his own ruin; nor will it excuse him though he suffer through a sluggish fearfulness to search thoroughly what is lawful, for fear of disquieting the secure falsity of an old opinion. Who doubts not but that it may be piously said to him who would dismiss his frigidity, Bear your trial; take it as if God would have you live this life of continence? If he exhort this, I hear him as an angel, though he speak without warrant; but if he would compel me, I know him for Satan. To him who divorces an adulteress, piety might say, Pardon her; you may shew much mercy, you may win a soul: yet the law both of God and man leaves it freely to him; for God loves not to plough out the heart of our endeavours with overhard and sad tasks. God delights not to make a drudge of virtue, whose actions must be all elective and unconstrained. Forced virtue is as a bolt overshot: it goes neither forward nor backward, and does no good as it stands. Seeing, therefore, that neither scripture nor reason hath laid this unjust austerity upon divorce, we may resolve that nothing else hath wrought it but that letter-bound servility of the canon doctors, supposing marriage to be a sacrament, and out of the art they have to

lay unnecessary burdens upon all men, to make a fair shew
in the fleshly observance of matrimony, though peace and
love, with all other conjugal respects fare never so ill. And,
indeed, the papists, who are the strictest forbidders of divorce,
are the easiest libertines to admit of grossest uncleanness; as if
they had a design by making wedlock a supportless yoke, to
violate it most, under colour of preserving it most inviolable;
and withal delighting (as their mystery is) to make men the
day labourers of their own afflictions, as if there were such a
scarcity of miseries from abroad, that we should be made to
melt our choicest home blessings, and coin them into crosses,
for want whereby to hold commerce with patience. If any,
therefore, who shall hap to read this discourse, hath been
through misadventure ill engaged in this contracted evil here
complained of, and finds the fits and workings of a high im-
patience frequently upon him; of all those wild words which
men in misery think to ease themselves by uttering, let him
not open his lips against the providence of Heaven,* or tax
the ways of God and his divine truth; for they are equal,
easy, and not burdensome; nor do they ever cross the just
and reasonable desires of men, nor involve this our portion of
* In this passage, full of piety and eloquence, we discover the same
trains of thought which occur in the opening passage of "Paradise Lost :"-
"What in me is dark,

Illumine; what is low, raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument

may assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men."

Pope, in his "Essay on Man," professes to write with the same design; and although his ideas range through a much lower sphere than Milton's, there seems to be no reason for doubting his sincerity :

"Let us, (since life can little more supply,
Than just to look about us and to die,)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man,
A mighty maze! bat not without a plan:

A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

Together let us beat this ample field,

Try what the open, what the coverts yield;
The latent tracks, the giddy heights explore,
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar.
Eye nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise;
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,
But vindicate the ways of God to man."-ED.

mortal life into a necessity of sadness and malcontent, by laws commanding over the unreducible antipathies of nature, sooner or later found, but allow us to remedy and shake off those evils into which human error hath led us through the midst of our best intentions, and to support our incident extremities by that authentic precept of sovereign charity, whose grand commission is to do and to dispose over all the ordinances of God to man, that love and truth may advance each other to everlasting. While we, literally superstitous, through customary faintness of heart, not venturing to pierce with our free thoughts into the full latitude of nature and religion, abandon ourselves to serve under the tyranny of usurped opinions; suffering those ordinances which were allotted to our solace and reviving, to trample over us, and hale us into a multitude of sorrows, which God never meant us. And where he sets us in a fair allowance of way, with honest liberty and prudence to our guard, we never leave subtilizing and casuisting till we have straightened and pared that liberal path into a razor's edge to walk on; between a precipice of unnecessary mischief on either side, and starting at every false alarm, we do not know which way to set a foot forward with manly confidence and Christian resolution, through the confused ringing in our ears of panic scruples and amaze

ments.

CHAPTER XXI.

That the Matter of Divorce is not to be tried by Law, but by Conscience, as many other Sins are. The Magistrate can only see that the Condition of the Divorce be just and equal. The Opinion of Fagius, and the Reasons of the Assertion.

ANOTHER ac of papal encroachment it was to pluck the power and arbitrement of divorce from the master of the family, into whose hands God and the law of all nations had put it, and Christ so left it, preaching only to the conscience, and not authorizing a judicial court to toss about and divulge the unaccountable and secret reason of disaffection between man and wife, as a thing most improperly answerable to any such kind of trial. But the popes of Rome, perceiving the great revenue and high authority it would give them even

over princes, to have the judging and deciding of such a main consequence in the life of man as was divorce, wrought so upon the superstition of those ages, as to divest them of that right, which God from the beginning had entrusted to the husband: by which means they subjected that ancient and naturally domestic prerogative to an external and unbefitting judicature. For although differences in divorce about dowries, jointures, and the like, besides the punishing of adultery, ought not to pass without referring, if need be, to the magistrate; yet that the absolute and final hindering of divorce cannot belong to any civil or earthly power, against the will and consent of both parties, or of the hus band alone, some reasons will be here urged as shall not need to decline the touch. But first I shall recite what hath been already yielded by others in favour of this opinion. Grotius and many more agree, that notwithstanding what Christ spake therein to the conscience, the magistrate is not thereby enjoined aught against the preservation of civil peace, of equity, and of convenience. And among these Fagius is most remarkable, and gives the same liberty of pronouncing divorce to the Christian magistrate as the Mosaic had. For whatever," saith he, "Christ spake to the regenerate, the judge hath to deal with the vulgar: if therefore any through hardness of heart will not be a tolerable wife to her husband, it will be lawful as well now as of old to pass the bill of divorce, not by private but by public authority. Nor doth man separate them then, but God by his law of divorce given by Moses. What can hinder the ma gistrate from so doing, to whose government all outward things are subject, to separate and remove from perpetual vexation, and no small danger, those bodies whose minds are already separate; it being his office to procure peaceable and convenient living in the commonwealth; and being as certain also, that they so necessarily separated cannot all receive a single life?" And this I observe, that our divines do generally condemn separation of bed and board, without the liberty of second choice: if that therefore in some cases be most purely necessary, (as who so blockish to deny ?) then is this also as needful. Thus far by others is already well stepped, to inform us that divorce is not a matter of law, of charity; if there remain a furlong yet to end the question,

but