Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/38

 without mariage would easily chast'n. Next that it drives many to transgresse the conjugall bed, while the soule wanders after that satisfaction which it had hope to find at home, but hath mis't. Or els it sits repining even to Atheism; finding it self hardly dealt with, but misdeeming the cause to be in Gods Law, which is in mans unrighteous ignorance. I have shew'n also how it unties the inward knot of mariage, which is peace and love (if that can be unti'd which was never knit) while it aimes to keep fast the outward formalitie; how it lets perish the Christian man, to compell impossibly the maried man.

 

He sixt place declares this prohibition to be as respectlesse of human nature as it is of religion, and therfore is not of God. He teaches that an unlawfull mariage may be lawfully divorc't. And that those who having throughly discern'd each others disposition which oft-times cannot be till after matrimony, shall then find a powerful reluctance and recoile of nature on either side blasting all the content of their mutuall society, that such persons are not lawfully maried (to use the Apostles words) Say I these things as a man, or saith not the Law also the same? for it is writt'n, Deut. 22. Thou shalt not sowe thy vineyard with divers seeds, lest thou defile both.Thou shalt not plow with an Oxe and an Asse together; and the like. I follow the pattern of S. Pauls reasoning; Doth God care for Asses and Oxen, how ill they yoke together, ''or is it not said altogether for our sakes? for our sakes no doubt this is writt'n''. Yea the Apostle himself in the forecited 2 Cor. 6.14. alludes from that place of Deut. to forbid mis-yoking mariage; as by the Greek word is evident, though he instance but in one example of mis-matching with an Infidell: yet next to that what can be a fouler incongruity, a greater violence to the reverend secret of nature, then to force a mixture of minds that cannot unite, and to sowe the furrow of mans nativity with seed of two incoherent and uncombining dispositions; which act being kindly and voluntarie, as it ought, the Apostle in the language he wrote call'd Eunoia, and the Latines Benevolence, intimating the original therof to be in the understanding and the will; if not, surely there is nothing which might more properly be call'd a malevolence rather; and is the most injurious and unnaturall tribute that can be extorted from a person  dew'd