Matt. xix. 3, 4, &c.

Ver. 3." And the pharisees came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him."

66

"Tempting him."] The manner of these men coming to our Saviour, not to learn, but to tempt him, may give us to expect, that their answer will be such as is fittest for them; not so much a teaching, as an entangling. No man, though never so willing or so well enabled to instruct, but if he discern his willingness and candour made use of to entrap him, will suddenly draw in himself, and laying aside the facil vein of perspicuity, will know his time to utter clouds and riddles; if he be not less wise than that noted fish, whenas he should be not unwiser than the serpent. Our Saviour at no time expressed any great desire to teach the obstinate and unteachable pharisees; but when they came to tempt him, then least of all. As now about the liberty of divorce, so another time about the punishment of adultery, they came to sound him; and what satisfaction got they from his answer, either to themselves, or to us, that might direct a law under the gospel, new from that of Moses, unless we draw his absolution of adultery into an edict? So about the tribute, who is there can pick out a full solution, what and when we must give to Cæsar, by the answer which he gave the pharisees? If we must give to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's and all be Cæsar's which hath his image, we must either new stamp our coin, or we may go new stamp our foreheads with the superscription of slaves instead of freemen. Besides, it is a general precept not only of Christ, but of all other sages, not to instruct the unworthy and the conceited, who love tradition more than truth, but to perplex and stumble them purposely with contrived obscurities. No wonder then if they who would determine of divorce by this place, have ever found it difficult and unsatisfying through all the ages of the church, as Austin himself and other great writers confess. Lastly, it is manifest to be the principal scope of our Saviour, both here and in the fifth of Matthew, to convince the pharisees of what they being evil did licentiously, not to explain what others being good and blameless men might be permitted to do in case of extremity. Neither was it seasonable to talk of honest and conscientious liberty among them, who had abused legal and ivil liberty to uncivil licence. We do not say to a servant

20

no

what we say to a son; nor was it expedient to preach freedom to those who had transgressed in wantonness. When we rebuke a prodigal, we admonish him of thrift, not of magnificence, or bounty. And to school a proud man, we labour to make him humble, not magnanimous. So Christ, to retort these arrogant inquisitors their own, took the course to th lay their haughtiness under a severity which they deserved; not to acquaint them, or to make them judges either of the just man's right and privilege, or of the afflicted man's necessity. And if we may have leave to conjecture, there is a likelihood offered us by Tertullian in his fourth against Marcion, whereby it may seem very probable, that the pharisees had a private drift of malice against our Saviour's life in proposing this question; and our Saviour had a peculiar aim in the rigour of his answer, both to let them know the freedom of his spirit, and the sharpness of his discerning. "This I must not shew," saith Tertullian, "whence our Lord deduced this sentence, and which way he directed it, whereby it will more fully appear, that he intended not to dissolve Moses.' And thereupon tells us, that the vehemence of this our Saviour's speech was chiefly darted against Herod and Herodias. The story is out of Josephus. Herod had been a long time married to the daughter of Aretas, king of Petra, till happening on his journey towards Rome to be entertained at his brother Philip's house, he cast his eye unlawfully and unguestlike upon Herodias there, the wife of Philip, but daughter to Aristobulus, their common brother, and durst make words of marrying her his niece from his brother's bed. She assented, upon agreement he should expel his former wife. All was accomplished, and by the Baptist rebuked with the loss of his head. Though doubtless that stayed not the various discourses of men upon the fact, which while the Herodian flatterers, and not a few perhaps among the pharisees, endeavoured to defend by wresting the law, it might be a means to bring the question of divorce into a hot agitation among the people, how far Moses gave allowance. The pharisees therefore knowing our Saviour to be a friend of John the Baptist, and no doubt but having heard much of his sermon on the mount, wherein he spake rigidly against the licence of divorce, they put him this question, both in hope to find him a contradictor of Moses, and a condemner of Herod; so to insnare him within com

1

pass of the same accusation which had ended his friend; and our Saviour so orders his answer, as that they might perceive Herod and his adulteress, only not named; so lively it concerned them both what he spake. No wonder then if the sentence of our Saviour sounded stricter than his custom was; which his conscious attempters doubtless apprehended sooner than his other auditors. Thus much we gain from hence to inform us, that what Christ intends to speak here of divorce, will be rather the forbidding of what we may not do herein passionately and abusively, as Herod and Herodias did, than the discussing of what herein we may do reasonably and necessarily.

"Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?") It might be rendered more exactly from the Greek, "to loosen, or to set free;" which though it seems to have a milder signification than the two Hebrew words commonly used for divorce, yet interpreters have noted that the Greek also is read in the Septuagint for an act which is not without constraint.

As when Achish drove from his presence David, counterfeiting madness, Psalm xxxiv., the Greek word is the same with this here, "to put away." And Erasmus quotes Hilary, rendering it by an expression not so soft. Whence may be doubted whether the pharisees did not state this question in the strict right of the man, not tarrying for the wife's consent. And if our Saviour answered directly according to what was asked in the term of putting away, it will be questionable whether the rigour of his sentence did not forbid only such putting away as is without mutual consent, in a violent and harsh manner, or without any reason but will, as the tetrarch did. Which might be the cause that those Christian emperors feared not in their constitutions to dissolve marriage by mutual consent; in that our Saviour seems here, as the case is most likely, not to condemn all divorce, but all injury and violence in divorce. But no injury can be done to them, who seek it, as the ethics of Aristotle sufficiently prove. True it is, that an unjust thing may be done to one though willing, and so may justly be forbidden: but divorce being in itself no unjust or evil thing, but only as it is joined with injury or lust; injury it cannot be at law, if tonsent be, and Aristotle err not. And lust it may as frequently not be, while charity hath the judging of so many

dir

Lo

private grievances in a misfortuned wedlock, which may pardonably seek a redemption. But whether it be or not, the law cannot discern or examine lust, so long as it walks from one lawful term to another, from divorce to marriage, both in themselves indifferent. For if the law cannot take hold ta punish many actions apparently covetous, ambitious, ingrateful, proud, how can it forbid and punish that for lust, which is but only surmised so, and can no more be certainly proved in the divorcing now, than before in the marrying? Whence if divorce be no unjust thing, but through lust, a cause not discernible by law as law is wont to discern in other cases, and can be no injury, where consent is; there can be nothing in the equity of law, why divorce by consent may not be lawful: leaving secrecies to conscience, the thing which our Saviour here aims to rectify, not to revoke the statutes of Moses. In the meanwhile the word "to put away," being in the Greek to loosen or dissolve, utterly takes away that vain papistical distinction of divorce from bed, and divorce from bond, evincing plainly, that Christ and the pharisees mean here that divorce which finally dissolves the bond, and frees Eboth parties to a second marriage.

"For every cause."] This the pharisees held, that for every cause they might divorce, for every accidental cause, any quarrel or difference that might happen. So both Josephus and Philo, men who lived in the same age, explain; and the Syriac translator, whose antiquity is thought parallel to the Evangelists themselves, reads it conformably, "upon any occasion or pretence." Divines also generally agree, that thus the pharisees meant. Cameron, a late writer, much applauded, commenting this place not undiligently, affirms that the Greek preposition xarà, translated unusually "for," hath a force in it implying the suddenness of those pharisaic divorces; and that their question was to this effect, "whether for any cause, whatever it chanced to be, straight as it rose, the divorce might be lawful." This he freely gives, whatever moved him, and I as freely take, nor can deny his observation to be acute and learned. If therefore we insist upon the word of "putting away," that it imports a constraint without consent, as might be insisted, and may enjoy what Cameron bestows on us, that "for every cause' is to be understood, "according as any cause may happen," with a rela

tion to the speediness of those divorces, and that Herodian act especially, as is already brought us, the sentence of our Saviour will appear nothing so strict a prohibition as hath been long conceived, forbidding only to divorce for casual and temporary causes, that may be soon ended, or soon remedied and likewise forbidding to divorce rashly, and on the sudden heat, except it be for adultery. If these qualifications may be admitted, as partly we offer them, partly are offered them by some of their own opinion, and that where nothing is repugnant why they should not be admitted, nothing can wrest them from us; the severe sentence of our Saviour will straight unbend the seeming frown into that gentleness and compassion which was so abundant in all his actions, his office, and his doctrine, from all which otherwise it stands off at no mean distance.

Ver. 4." And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning, made them male and female?

Ver. 5. "And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.

Ver. 6. "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder."

4 and 5. "Made them male and female; and said, For this cause," &c.] We see it here undeniably, that the law which our Saviour cites to prove that divorce was forbidden, is not an absolute and tyrannical command without reason, as now-a-days we make it little better, but is grounded upon some rational cause not difficult to be apprehended, being in a matter which equally concerns the meanest and the plainest sort of persons in a household life. Our next way then will be to inquire if there be not more reasons than one; and if there be, whether this be the best and chiefest. That we shall find by turning to the first institution, to which Christ refers our own reading: he himself, having to deal with treacherous assailants, useth brevity, and lighting on the first place in Genesis that mentions anything tending to marriage in the first chapter, joins it immediately to the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter, omitting all the prime words