Page:The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce - Milton (1644).djvu/90

 him by compulsion in such a unpredestin'd misery as this, is in diameter against both nature and institution: but to interpose a jurisdictive power upon the inward and irremediable disposition of man, to command love and sympathy, to forbid dislike against the guiltles instinct of nature, is not within the Province of any Law to reach, and were indeed an uncommodious rudenesse, not a just power: for that Law may bandy with nature, and traverse her sage motions, was an error in Callicles the Rhetorician, whom Socrates from high principles confutes in Plato's Gorgias. If therfore divorce may be so natural, and that law and nature are not to goe contrary, then to forbid divorce compulsively, is not only against nature, but against law. Next it must be remember'd that all law is for some good that may be frequently attain'd without the admixture of a worse inconvenience; and therfore many grosse faults, as ingratitude and the like, which are too farre within the soul, to be cur'd by constraint of law are left only to be wrought on by conscience and perswasion. Which made Aristotle in the 10th of his Ethicks to Nicomachus, aim at a kind of division of law into private or perswasive, and publick or compulsive. Hence it is that the law forbidding divorce, never attains to any good end of such prohibition, but rather multiplies evil. For if natures resistlesse sway in love or hate bee once compell'd, it grows carelesse of it selfe, vitious, uselesse to friend, unserviceable and spiritlesse to the Common-wealth. Which Moses rightly foresaw, and all wise Law-givers that ever knew man, what kind of creature he was. The Parlament also and Clergy of England were not ignorant of this, when they consented that Harry the eighth might put away his Queen Anne of Cleve, whom he could not like after he had been wedded half a yeare; unlesse it were that contrary to the proverb, they made a necessity of that which might have been a vertue in them to doe. For even the freedome and eminence of mans creation gives him to be a Law in this matter to himselfe, being the head of the other Sex which was made for him: whom therefore though he ought not to injure, yet neither should he be Forc't to retain in society to his own overthrow, nor to heare any judge therin above himselfe. It being also an unseemly affront to the sequestr'd and vail'd modesty of that sex, to have her unpleasingnesse and other concealments bandied up and down, and aggravated in open Court by those hir'd masters of tongue-fence. Such uncomely exigencies it befell no lesse a Majesty then Henry the eighth to be reduc't to; who finding iust reason in his conscience to forgoe his brothers wife, ter