ordinate 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 launching 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 the 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 their 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 of intending to discourage the progress andì ad

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vance 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 your wise and Christian determination? 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

of

VOL. III.

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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.

TETRACHORDON:
EXPOSITIONS

UPON THE FOUR CHIEF PLACES IN SCRIPTURE WHICH TREAT OF MARRIAGE OR NULLITIES IN MARRIAGE.

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 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 preeminence 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 teadfast knowledge, and that the want of this quells them to servile sense of their own conscious unworthiness; it may

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save the wondering why in this age many are so opposite both to human and 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 shew 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 edifies, 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 deinstruction not only of many innocent persons and families, but of

* It was in this spirit that Bacon wrote his work entitled "The Wisdom of the Ancients," attributing to the myths and relations of antiquity such meanings as he thought most appropriate. From this method of interpretation, however, many dissent, insisting that Moses, in conformity with the philosophy of his times, believed God to exist in a human form, which is the popular opinion throughout the world to this day. It was not till many ages after Moses that it was said, "God is a spirit whom no man

bath seen, or can see." But this pure doctrine would not have been suited to the apprehension of earlier times, when all the ideas of men were physical even when most removed from the vulgar. On the subject of the creation of Adam and Eve, the opinions of the learned have always been extremely various. Dr. Burnet, of the Charter-House, in his Archæologiæ Philosophica, while explaining the Mosaic account of Paradise, and the fall of man, is betrayed into a tone almost comic, though it is impossible to doubt that he was a man of the highest piety and religion.-ED.

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, it 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 us David in the shewbread, 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 transcendent 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 precep