of his afflicted servants. He loves more that his law should look with pity upon the difficulties of his own, than with rigour upon the boundless riots of them who serve another master, and, hindered here by strictness, will break another way to worse enormities. If this law, therefore, have many good reasons for which God gave it, and no intention of giving scope to lewdness, but as abuse by accident comes in with every good law, and every good thing; it cannot be wisdom in us, while we can content us with God's wisdom, nor can be purity, if his purity will suffice us, to except against this law, as if it fostered licence. But if they affirm this law had no other end, but to permit obdurate lust, because it would be obdurate, making the law of God intentionally to proclaim and enact sin lawful, as if the will of God were become sinful, or sin stronger than his direct and lawgiving will; the men would be admonished to look well to it, that while they are so eager to shut the door against licence, they do not open a worse door to blasphemy. And yet they shall be here further shewn their iniquity: what more foul common sin among us than drunkenness? And who can be ignorant, that if the importation of wine, and the use of all strong drink, were forbid, it would both clean rid the possibility of committing that odious vice, and men might afterwards live happily and healthfully without the use of those intoxicating liquors? Yet who is there, the severest of them all, that ever propounded to lose his sack, his ale, toward the certain abolishing of so great a sin? who is there of them, the holiest, that less loves his rich canary at meals, though it be fetched from places that hazard the religion of them who fetch it, and though it make his neighbour drunk out of the same tun? While they forbid not, therefore, the use of that liquid merchandise, which forbidden would utterly remove a most loathsome sin, and not impair either the health or the refreshment of mankind, sup plied many other ways, why do they forbid a law of God, the forbidding whereof brings into excessive bondage ofttimes the best men, and betters not the worse? He, to remove a national vice, will not pardon his cups, nor think it concerns him to forbear the quaffing of that outlandish grape, in his unnecessary fulness, though other men abuse it never so much; nor is he so abstemious as to intercede with the magistrate, that all matter of drunkenness be banished the commonwealth.

and yet for the fear of a less inconvenience unpardonably requires of his brethren, in their extreme necessity, to debar themselves the use of God's permissive law, though it might be their saving, and no man's endangering the more. Thus this peremptory strictness we may discern of what sort it is, how unequal, and how unjust.

But it will breed confusion. What confusion it would breed, God himself took the care to prevent in the fourth verse of this chapter, that the divorced, being married to another, might not return to her former husband. And Justinian's law counsels the same in his title of " Nuptials." And what confusion else can there be in separation, to separate upon extreme urgency the religious from the irreligious, the fit from the unfit, the willing from the wilful, the abused from the abuser? Such a separation is quite contrary to confusion. But to bind and mix together holy with atheist, heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness, light with darkness, antipathy, with antipathy, the injured with the injurer, and force them into the most inward nearness of a detested union; this doubtless is the most horrid, the most unnatural mixture, the greatest confusion that can be confused.

Thus by this plain and Christian Talmud, vindicating the law of God from irreverent and unwary expositions, I trust, where it shall meet with intelligent perusers, some stay at least in men's thoughts will be obtained, to consider these many prudent and righteous ends of this divorcing permission: that it may have, for the great Author's sake, hereafter some competent allowance to be counted a little purer than the prerogative of a legal and public ribaldry, granted to that holy seed. So that from hence we shall hope to find the way still more open to the reconciling of those places which treat this matter in the gospel. And thither now without interruption the course of method brings us.

MATTHEW V. 31, 32.

31. "It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement.

32. "But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife," &c.

Matt. xix, 3, 4, &c.

3." And the Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him," &c.

"IT hath been said."] What hitherto hath been spoke upon the law of God touching matrimony or divorce, he who will deny to have been argued according to reason and all equity of scripture, I cannot edify how, or by what rule of proportion, that man's virtue calculates, what his elements are, nor what his analytics. Confidently to those who have read good books, and to those whose reason is not an illiterate book to themselves, I appeal, whether they would not confess all this to be the commentary of truth and justice, were it not for these recited words of our Saviour. And if they take not back that which they thus grant, nothing sooner might persuade them that Christ here teaches no new precept, and nothing sooner might direct them to find his meaning than to compare and measure it by the rules of nature and eternal righteousness, which no written law extinguishes, and the gospel least of all. For what can be more opposite and disparaging to the covenant of love, of freedom, and of our manhood in grace, than to be made the yoking pedagogue of new severities, the scribe of syllables and rigid letters, not only grievous to the best of men, but different and strange from the light of reason in them, save only as they are fain to stretch and distort their apprehensions, for fear of displeasing the verbal straitness of a text, which our own servile fear gives us not the leisure to understand aright? If the law of Christ shall be written in our hearts, as was promised to the gospel, Jer. xxxi., how can this in the vulgar and superficial sense be a law of Christ, so far from being written in our hearts, that it injures and disallows not only the free dictates of nature and moral law, but of charity also and religion in our hearts? Our Saviour's doctrine is, that the end and the fulfilling of every command is charity; no faith without it, no truth without it, no worship, no works pleasing to God but as they partake of charity. He himself sets us an example, breaking the solemnest and strictest ordinance of religious rest, and justified the breaking, not to cure a dying man, but such whose cure might without danger have been deferred. And wherefore needs must the sick man's bed be carried on

that day by his appointment? And why were the disciples, who could not forbear on that day to pluck the corn, so industriously defended, but to shew us that, if he preferred the slightest occasions of man's good before the observing of highest and severest ordinances, he gave us much more easy leave to break the intolerable yoke of a never well-joined wedlock for the removing of our heaviest afflictions? Therefore it is, that the most of evangelic precepts are given us in proverbial forms, to drive us from the letter, though we love ever to be sticking there. For no other cause did Christ assure us that whatsoever things we bind or slacken on earth, are so in heaven, but to signify that the Christian arbitrement of charity is supreme decider of all controversy, and supreme resolver of all scripture, not as the pope determines for his own tyranny, but as the church ought to determine for its own true liberty. Hence Eusebius, not far from the beginning of his history, compares the state of Christians to that of Noah and the patriarchs before the law. And this indeed was the reason why apostolic tradition in the ancient church was counted nigh equal to the written word, though it carried them at length awry, for want of considering that tradition was not left to be imposed as law, but to be a pattern of that Christian prudence and liberty, which holy men by right assumed of old; which truth was so evident, that it found entrance even into the council of Trent, when the point of tradition came to be discussed. And Marinaro, a learned Carmelite, for approaching too near the true cause that gave esteem to tradition, that is to say, the difference between the Old and New Testament, the one punctually prescribing written law, the other guiding by the inward spirit, was reprehended by Cardinal Pool as one that had spoken more worthy a German Colloquy, than a general council. I omit many instances, many proofs and arguments of this kind, which alone would compile a just volume, and shall content me here to have shewn briefly, that the great and almost only commandment of the gospel is, to command nothing against the good of man, and much more no civil command against his civil good. If we understand not this, we are but cracked cymbals, we do but tinkle, we know nothing, we do nothing, all the sweat of our toilsomest obedience will but mock us. And what we suffer superstitiously returns us no thanks.

Thus medicining our eyes, we need not doubt to see more into the meaning of these our Saviour's words, than many who have gone before us.

"It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife."] Our Saviour was by the doctors of his time suspected of intending to dissolve the law. In this chapter be wipes off this aspersion upon his accusers, and shews, how they were the lawbreakers. In every commonwealth, when it decays, corruption makes two main steps: first, when men cease to do according to the inward and uncompelled actions of virtue, caring only to live by the outward constraint of law, and turn the simplicity of real good into the craft of seeming so by law. To this hypocritical honesty was Rome declined in that age wherein Horace lived, and discovered it to Quintius. "Whom do we count a good man, whom but he Who keeps the laws and statutes of the Senate ? Who judges in great suits and controversies? Whose witness and opinion wins the cause? But his own house, and the whole neighbourhood Sees his foul inside through his whited skin."

The next declining is, when law becomes now too strait for the secular manners, and those too loose for the cincture of law. This brings in false and crooked interpretations to eke out law, and invents the subtle encroachments of obscure traditions hard to be disproved. To both these descents the pharisees themselves were fallen. Our Saviour therefore shews them both where they broke the law, in not marking the divine intent thereof, but only the letter; and where they depraved the letter also with sophistical expositions. This law of divorce they had depraved both ways: first, by teaching that to give a bill of divorce was all the duty which that law required, whatever the cause were; next, by running to divorce for any trivial, accidental cause; whenas the law evidently stays in the grave causes of natural and immutable dislike. "It hath been said," saith he. Christ doth not put any contempt or disesteem upon the law of Moses, by citing it so briefly; for in the same manner God himself cites a law of greatest caution, Jer. iii.; "They say, If a man put away his wife, shall he return to her again?" &c. Nor doth he more abolish it than the law of swearing, cited next with the same brevity, and more appearance of contradicting: for divorce