is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear; for an odious woman when she is married. On the contrary, Eccles. ix. 9. live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee; the wife therefore which he hath given thee is she whom thou lovest, not she whom thou hatest: and thus Mal. ii. 16. whoever hateth, or, because he hateth, let him dismiss her, as all before Junius explain the passage. God therefore appears to have enacted this law by the mouth of Moses, and reiterated it by that of the prophet, with the view, not of giving scope to the hard-heartedness of the husband, but of rescuing the unhappy wife from its influence, wherever the case required it. For there is no hard-heartedness in dismissing honourably and freely her whose own fault it is that she is not loved. That one who is not beloved, who is, on the contrary, deservedly neglected, and an object of dislike and hatred; that a wife thus situated should be retained, in pursuance of a most vexatious law, under a yoke of the heaviest slavery (for such is marriage without love) to one who entertains for her neither attachment nor friendship, would indeed be a hardship more cruel than any divorce whatever. God therefore gave laws of divorce, in their proper use

• If Solomon's advice be not overfrolic, live joyfully, saith he, with the wife whom thou lovest, all thy days, for that is thy portion. .... Yea, God himself commands us in his law more than once, and by his prophet Malachi, as Calvin and the best translations read, that he who hates, let him divorce, that is, he who cannot love.' Doctrine, &c. Prose Works, I. 358. 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,' &c. Tetrachordon, II. 146. Sibi odio esse dimissionem ait Jehova Deus Israelis. Junius. Si odio habueris, dimitte, ait Dominus Deus Israelis. Lat. Vulg. It appears from Poole's Synopsis that the version of Piscator is the only one which agrees with Junius.

To retain still, and not be able to love, is to heap up more injury.' Doctrine, &c. of Divorce. Prose Works, I. 355. And again—not to be beloved, and yet retained, is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit.' Ibid. Not he who after sober and cool experience, and long debate within himself, puts away whom, though he cannot love or suffer as a wife with that sincere affection that marriage requires, yet loves at least with that civility and goodness, as not to keep her under a neglected and unwelcome residence, when nothing can be hearty, and not being, it must needs be both unjoyous and injurious to any perceiving person so detained, and more injurious than to be freely and upon good terms dismissed.' Tetrachordon. II. 196.

most equitable and humane; he even extended the benefit of them to those whom he knew would abuse them through the hardness of their hearts, thinking it better to bear with the obduracy of the wicked, than to refrain from alleviating the misery of the righteous, or suffer the institution itself to be subverted, which, from a divine blessing, was in danger of becoming the bitterest of all calamities.

The two next passages, Ezra x. 3. and Nehem. xiii. 23, 30. do not permit divorce on account of the people's hardness of heart, but positively command it for the most sacred religious reasons. On what authority did these prophets found their precept? They were not the promulgators of a new law; the law of Moses alone could be their warrant. But the law of Moses nowhere commands the dissolution of marriages of this kind; it only forbids the contracting of such: Exod. xxxiv. 15, 16. Deut. vii. 3, 4. whence they argued, that the marriage which ought never to have been contracted, ought, if contracted, to be dissolved. So groundless is the vulgar maxim, that what ought not to have been done, is valid when done.

8

Marriage therefore gives place to religion; it gives place, as has been seen, to the right of a master; and the right of a husband, as appears from the passages of Scripture above quoted, as well as from the whole tenor of the civil law, and the universal custom of nations, is nearly the same as that of the master. It gives way, finally, to

6

'This command thus gospellized to us, hath the same force with that whereon Ezra grounded the pious necessity of divorcing. Neither had he other commission for what he did, than such a general command in Deuteronomy as this, nay not so direct, for he is bid there not to marry, but not bid to divorce,' &c. Doctrine, &c. Prose Works, I. 362.

7 But,' saith the lawyer, 'that which ought not to have been done, once done, avails.' I answer, this is but a crotchet of the law, but that brought against it is plain Scripture.' Doctrine, &c. Prose Works, I. 365.

с

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. Tetrachordon. Prose Works, II. 156.

irresistible antipathies, and to that natural aversion with which we turn from whatever is unclean; but it is nowhere represented as giving way to hardness of heart, if this latter be really alleged as the sole or principal reason for enacting the law. This appears still more evidently from Deut. xxii. 19. because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel, she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days: and v. 29. she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her; he may not put her away all his days. Now if the law of Moses did not give way to his hardness of heart who was desirous of putting away the virgin whom he had humbled, or to his who was willing to put away the wife against whom he had brought up an evil report, why should we imagine that it would give way to his alone who was averse from uncleanness, supposing that such aversion could properly be included under the definition of hardness of heart? Christ therefore reproves the hardness of heart of those who abused this law, that is, of the Pharisees and others, when he says, on account of the hardness of your hearts he permitted you to put away your wives; but he does not abrogate the law itself, or the legitimate use of it; for he says that Moses permitted it on account of the hardness of their hearts, not that he permitted it wrongfully or improperly. In this sense almost the whole of the civil law might be said to have been given on account of the hardness of their hearts; whence Paul reproves the brethren, 1 Cor. vi. 6. because they had recourse to it, though no one argues from hence that the civil law is, or ought to be abrogated. How much less then can any one who understands the spirit of the Gospel believe, that this latter denies what the law did not scruple to concede, either as a matter of right or of indulgence, to the infirmity of human nature?9

The clause in the eighth verse, from the beginning it was not so, means nothing more than what was more clearly intimated above in the

''O perverseness! that the law should be made more provident of peace-making than the gospel; that the gospel should be put to beg a most necessary help of mercy from the law, but must not have it!' Doctrine, &c. Prose Works, I. 358. See also Book II. chap. vii. ‹But if those indulgences, &c. work of our redemption.' II. 19, 20.

fourth verse, he which made them at the beginning, made them male and female; namely, that marriage in its original institution was not capable of being dissolved even by death, for sin and death were not then in existence. If however the purpose of the institution should be violated by the offence of either, it was obvious that death, the consequence of that offence, must in the course of things dissolve the bond; and reason taught them that separation must frequently take place even before that period. No age or record, since the fall of man, gives a tradition of any other beginning in which it was not so.' In the earliest ages of our faith, Abraham himself, the father of the faithful, put away his contentious and turbulent wife Hagar by the command of God, Gen. xxi. 10, 12, 14.

Christ himself, v. 9. permitted divorce for the cause of fornication; which could not have been, if those whom God had once joined in the bands of matrimony were never afterwards to be disunited. According to the idiom of the eastern languages, however, the word fornication signifies, not adultery only, but either what is called any unclean thing, or a defect in some particular which might justly be required in a wife, Deut. xxiv. 1. (as Selden was the first to prove by numerous Rabbinical testimonies in his Uxor Hebræa3) or it signifies what

'From the beginning, that is to say, by the institution in Paradise, it was not intended that matrimony should dissolve for every trivial cause, as you Pharisees accustom. But that it was not thus suffered from the beginning ever since the race of men corrupted, and laws were made, he who will affirm must have found out other antiquities than are yet known. Besides, we must consider now, what can be so as from the beginning, not only what should be so. In the beginning, had men continued perfect, it had been just that all things should have remained, as they began to Adam and Eve,' &c. Tetrachordon. Prose Works, II. 192.

For the language of Scripture signifies by fornication .... not only the trespass of body..... but signifies also any notable disobedience, or intractable carriage of the wife to the husband.' Tetrachordon. Prose Works, II. 198.

* See Book III. Chap. xxii. and xxvii. Selden is quoted again with approbation in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Let him hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, 'Of the Law of Nature and of Nations,' a work more useful and more worthy to be perused by whosoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice,' &c. Prose Works, II. 59. He calls him also in the Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenced

ever is found to be irreconcilably at variance with love, or fidelity, or help, or society, that is, with the objects of the original institution; as Selden proves, and as I have myself shown in another treatise* from several texts of Scripture. For it would have been absurd, when the Pharisees asked, whether it was allowable to put away a wife for every cause, to answer, that it was not lawful except in case of adultery, when it was well known already to be not only lawful but necessary to put away an adulteress, and that not by divorce, but by death. Fornication, therefore, must be here understood in a much wider sense than that of simple adultery, as is clear from many passages of Scripture, and particularly from Judg. xix. 2. his concubine played the whore against him; not by committing adultery, for in that case she would not have dared to flee to her father's house, but by refractory behaviour towards her husband. Nor could Paul have allowed divorce in consequence of

Unlicensed Printing, 'the chief of learned men reported in this land.' I. 298. Again, in his Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano, referring to the treatise here quoted, he says, 'quid item de excepta solum fornicatione sentiendum sit, et meam aliorumque sententiam exprompsi, et clarissimus vir Seldenus noster, in Uxore Hebræa plus minus biennio post edita, uberius demonstravit.' V. 234.

This is the only direct reference to any of Milton's printed works which this treatise contains. The allusion is to a passage in Tetrachordon, where the author explains the text, saving for the cause of fornication. Prose Works, II. 197-201. It has been generally supposed that Milton's opinions on the subject of divorce were influenced by the well-known circumstances connected with his first marriage, and Warton says that he published Tetrachordon in consequence. Some probability seems to have been given to this conjecture by the passage quoted in note 2, page 250. But though Milton's attention may have been first directed to this subject by his own domestic unhappiness, it is evident from the work now published, that his sentiments respecting divorce were deliberately conceived, and that the treatises which he printed during his life time were not merely intended to serve a temporary purpose in which he was personally interested.

5 'Grotius shows also, that fornication is taken in Scripture for such a continual headstrong behaviour, as tends to plain contempt of the husband, and proves it out of Judg. xix. 2. where the Levite's wife is said to have played the whore against him; which Josephus and the Septuagint, with the Chaldean, interpret only of stubbornness and rebellion against her husband.....Had it been whoredom, she would have chosen any other place to run to than to her father's house, it being so infamous for a Hebrew woman to play the harlot,

and