Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/61

 long as the causes remain the allowance ought. And having thus at length enquir'd the truth concerning Law and dispence, their ends, their uses, their limits, and in what manner both Jew and Christian stands liable to the one, or capable of the other, we may safely conclude, that to affirm the giving of any law, or law-like dispence to sin for hardnesse of heart, is a doctrine of that extravagance from the sage principles of piety, that who so considers throughly, cannot but admire how this hath been digested all this while.

 

WHAT may we doe then to salve this seeming inconsistence? I must not dissemble that I am confident it can be don no other way then this.

Moses Deut. 24.1. establisht a grave and prudent Law, full of moral equity, full of due consideration towards nature, that cannot be resisted; a Law consenting with the Laws of wisest men and civilest Nations. That when a man hath maried a wife, if it come to passe he cannot love her by reason of some displeasing natural quality or unfitnes in her, let him write her a bill of divorce. The intent of which Law undoubtedly was this, that if any good and peaceable man should discover some helples disagreement or dislike either of mind or body, wherby he could not cheerfully perform the duty of a husband without the perpetual dissembling of offence and disturbance to his spirit, rather then to live uncomfortably and unhappily both to himself and to his wife, rather then to continue undertaking a duty which he could not possibly discharge, he might dismisse her whom he could not tolerably and so not conscionably retain. And this law the Spirit of God by the mouth of Salomon, Pro. 30.21,23. testifies to be a good and a necessary Law; by granting it that a hated woman (for so the hebrew word signifies, rather then odious though it come all to one) that a hated woman when she is maried, is a thing that the earth cannot beare. What follows then but that the charitable Law must remedy what nature cannot undergoe. Now that many licentious and hard hearted men took hold of this Law to cloak their bad purposes, is nothing strange to beleeve. And these were they, not for whom Moses made the Law, God forbid, but whose hardnes of heart taking ill advantage by this Law he held it better to suffer as by accident, where it could not be detected, rather then good men should