Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/81

 the miseries of a blamelesse creature, with the leaden daggers of your literall decrees, to whose ease you cannot adde the tithe of one small atome, but by letting alone your unhelpfull Surgery. As for such as think wandring concupiscence to bee here newly and more precisely forbidd'n, then it was before, if the Apostle can convince them; we know that we are to know lust by the law, and not by any new discovery of the Gospel. The Law of Moses knew what it permitted, and the Gospel knew what it forbid, hee that under a peevish conceit of debarring concupiscence, shall goe about to make a novice of Moses, (not to say a worse thing for reverence sake) and such a one of God himselfe, as is a horror to think, to bind our Saviour in the default of a down-right promise breaking, and to bind the disunions of complaining nature in chains together, and curb them with a canon bit, tis he that commits all the whordom and adultery, which himselfe adjudges, besides the former guilt so manifold that lies upon him. And if none of these considerations with all their wait and gravity, can avail to the dispossessing him of his pretious literalism, let some one or other entreat him but to read on in the same 19. of Math. till he come to that place that sayes, Some make themselves Eunuchs for the kingdom of heavns sake. And if then he please to make use of Origens knife, he may doe well to be his own carver.

 

Ut because we know that Christ never gave a Judiciall Law, and that the word fornication is variously significant in Scripture, it wil be much right done to our Saviours words, to consider diligently, whether it be meant heer that nothing but actuall fornication, prov'd by witnes, can warrant a divorce, for so our cannon law judges. Nevertheless as I find that Grotius on this place hath observ'd the Christian Emperours, Theodosius the second, and Justinian, men of high wisdom and reputed piety, decreed it to bee a divorsive fornication, if the wife attempted either against the knowledge, or obstinatly against the will of her husband, such things as gave open suspicion of adulterizing: as the wilfull haunting of feasts, and invitations with men not of her neer kindred, the lying forth of her house without probable cause, the frequenting of Theaters against her husbands mind, her endeavour to prevent or destroy conception. Hence that of Jerom, Where fornication is suspected, the wife may lawfully  Rh