Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/40

 them invalid, unkindly, and even unholy against the fundamentall law book of nature; which Moses never thwarts, but reverences: therefore he commands us to force nothing against sympathy or naturall order, no not upon the most abject creatures; to shew that such an indignity cannot be offer'd to man without an impious crime. And certainly those divine meditating words of finding out a meet and like help to man, have in them a consideration of more then the indefinite likenesse of womanhood; nor are they to be made waste paper on, for the dulnesse of Canon divinity: no nor those other allegorick precepts of beneficence fetcht out of the closet of nature to teach us goodnes and compassion in not compelling together unmatchable societies, or if they meet through mischance, by all consequence to dis-joyn them, as God and nature signifies and lectures to us not onely by those recited decrees, but ev'n by the first and last of all his visible works; when by his divorcing command the world first rose out of Chaos, nor can be renew'd again out of confusion but by the separating of unmeet consorts.

 

Seventhly, The Canon Law and Divines consent, that if either party be found contriving against anothers life, they may be sever'd by divorce; for a sin against the life of mariage is greater then a sin against the bed: the one destroyes, the other defiles: The same may be said touching those persons who being of a pensive nature and cours of life, have sum'd up all their solace in that free and lightsome conversation which God and man intends in marriage: wherof when they see themselves depriv'd by meeting an unsociable consort, they oft-times resent one anothers mistake so deeply, that long it is not ere griefe end one of them. When therfore this danger is foreseen that the life is in perill by living together, what matter is it whether helples griefe, or wilfull practice be the cause; This is certain that the preservation of life is more worth then the compulsory keeping of mariage; and it is no lesse then crueltie to force a man to remain in that state as the solace of his life, which he and his friends know will be either the undoing or the disheartning of his life. And what is life without the vigor and spiritfull exercise of