Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/54

 lore, that it is most God-like to punish those who of his creatures became his enemies with the greatest punishment; and they could attain also to think that the greatest, when God himselfe throws a man furthest from him; which then they held hee did, when he blinded, hard'n'd, and stirr'd up his offendors, to finish, and pile up their disperat work since they had undertak'n it. To banish for ever into a locall hell, whether in the aire or in the center, or in that uttermost and bottomlesse gulph of Chaos, deeper from holy blisse then the worlds diameter multiply'd, they thought not a punishing so proper and proportionat for God to inflict, as to punish sinne with sinne. Thus were the common sort of Gentiles wont to think, without any wry thoughts cast upon divine governance. And therefore Cicero not in his Tusculan or Campanian retirements among the learned wits of that age; but ev'n in the Senat to a mixt auditory (though he were sparing otherwise to broach his Philosophy among Statists and Lawyers) yet as to this point both in his oration against Piso, and in that which is about the answers of the Soothsayers against Clodius, he declares it publikly as no paradox to common ears, that God cannot punish man more, nor make him more miserable, then still by making him more sinnfull. Thus we see how in this controversie the justice of God stood upright ev'n among heathen disputers. But if any one be truly, and not pretendedly zealous for Gods honour, here I call him forth before men and Angels, to use his best and most advised skill, lest God more unavoidably then ever yet, and in the guiltiest manner be made the author of sin: if he shall not onely deliver over and incite his enemies by rebuks to sin as a punishment, but shall by patent under his own broad seal allow his friends whom he would sanctify and save, whom he would unite to himselfe, and not dis-joyne, whom he would correct by wholsome chastning, and not punish as hee doth the damned by lewd sinning, if he shall allow these in his Law the perfect rule of his own purest wil, and our most edify'd conscience, the perpetrating of an odious and manifold sin without the lest contesting. Tis wonder'd how there can be in God a secret, and a reveal'd will; and yet what wonder, if there be in man two answerable causes. But here there must be two revealed wills grappling in a fraternall warre with one another without any reasonable cause apprehended. This cannot be lesse then to ingraft sin into the substance of the law, which law is to provoke sin by crossing and forbidding, not by complying with it. Nay this is, which I tremble in uttering, to incarnat sin into the punishing