Page:Tetrachordon - Milton (1645).djvu/53

 how unhappy it would bee for children to bee born in such a family, gives this Law either as a prevention, that beeing an unhappy pair, they should not adde to bee unhappy parents, or els as a remedy that if ther be children, while they are fewest, they may follow either parent, as shall bee agreed, or judg'd, from the house of hatred and discord, to place of more holy and peaceable education.

Twelfthly, All Law is available to som good end, but the final prohibition of divorce avails to no good end, causing only the endles aggravation of evil, and therfore this permission of divorce was givn to the Jews by the wisdom and fatherly providence of God; who knew that Law cannot command love, without which matrimony hath no true beeing, no good, no solace, nothing of Gods instituting, nothing but so sordid and so low, as to bee disdain'd of any generous person. Law cannot inable natural inability either of body, or mind, which gives the greevance; it cannot make equal those inequalities, it cannot make fit those unfitnesses; and where there is malice more then defect of nature, it cannot hinder ten thousand injuries, and bitter actions of despight too suttle and too unapparent for Law to deal with. And while it seeks to remedy more outward wrongs, it exposes the injur'd 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 degenerates and disorders the best spirits, leavs them to unsettl'd imaginations, and degraded hopes, careles of themselvs, their houshold and their freinds, unactive to all public service, dead to the Common-wealth; wherin they are by one mishapp, and no willing trespas of theirs, outlaw'd from all the benefits and comforts of married life and posterity. It conferrs as little to the honour and inviolable keeping of Matrimony, but sooner stirrs up temptations, and occasions to secret adulteries, and unchast roaving. But it maintaines public honesty. Public folly rather, who shall judge of public honesty? the Law of God and of ancientest Christians, and all Civil Nations, or the illegitimat Law of Monks and Canonists, the most malevolent, most unexperienc't, most incompetent Judges of Matrimony?

These reasons, and many more that might bee alleg'd, afford us plainly to perceav, both what good cause this Law had to doe for good men in mischances, and what necessity it had to suffer accidentally the hard heartednes of bad men, which it could not certainly Rh