Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/34

 cohabitation of marriage can be kept, how that benevolent and intimate communion of body can be held with one that must be hated with a most operative hatred, must be forsak'n and yet continually dwelt with and accompanied, he who can distinguish, hath the gift of an affection very odly divided and contriv'd: while others both just and wise, and Salomon among the rest, if they may not hate and forsake as Moses enjoyns, and the Gospell imports, will find it impossible not to love otherwise then will sort with the love of God, whose jealousie brooks no corrivall. And whether is more likely, that Christ bidding to forsake wife for religion, meant it by divorce as Moses meant it, whose Law grounded on morall reason, was both his office and his essence to maintain, or that he should bring a new morality into religion, not only new, but contrary to an unchangeable command, and dangerously derogating from our love & worship of God. As if when Moses had bid divorce absolutely, and Christ had said, hate & forsake, and his Apostle had said, no communion with Christ & Belial, yet that Christ after all this could be understood to say, divorce not, no not for religion, seduce, or seduce not. What mighty and invisible Remora is this in matrimony able to demurre, and to contemne all the divorsive engines in heaven or earth. Both which may now passe away if this be true, for more then many jots or tittles, a whole morall Law is abolisht. But if we dare beleeve it is not, then in the method of religion, and to save the honour and dignity of our faith, we are to retreat, and gather up our selves from the observance of an inferior and civill ordinance, to the strict maintaining of a generall and religious command, which is written, Thou shalt make no cov'nant with them, Deut. 7. 2, 3. and that cov'nant which cannot be lawfully made, we have directions and examples lawfully to dissolve. Also Chron. 2. 19. Shouldst thou love them that hate the Lord? No doubtlesse: for there is a certain scale of duties, there is a certain Hierarchy of upper and lower commands, which for want of studying in right order, all the world is in confusion.

Upon these principles I answer, that a right beleever ought to divorce an idolatrous heretick unlesse upon better hopes: however, that it is in the beleevers choice to divorce or not.

The former part will be manifest thus; first, an apostate idolater whether husband or wife seducing was to die by the decree of God, Deut. 13. 6, 9. that mariage therfore God himself dis-joyns: for others born idolaters the morall reason of their dangerous keeping, and