Christ, is not still bound to be the vassal of him, who | be briefest with them who came to tempt him, account shall be given in due place. is the bondslave of Satan: she being now neither the image nor the glory of such a person, nor made for him, nor left in bondage to him; but hath recourse to the wing of charity, and protection of the church, unless there be a hope on either side: yet such a hope must be meant, as may be a rational hope, and not an endless servitude. Of which hereafter. But usually it is objected, that if it be thus, then there can be no true marriage between misbelievers and irreligious persons. I might answer, let them see to that who are such; the church hath no commission to judge those without, 1 Cor. v. But this they will say perhaps, is but penuriously to resolve a doubt. I answer therefore, that where they are both irreligious, the marriage may be yet true enough to them in a civil relation. For there are left some remains of God's image in man, as he is merely man; which reason God gives against the shedding of man's blood, Gen. ix. as being made in God's image, without expressing whether he were a good man or a bad, to exempt the slayer from punishment. So that in those marriages where the parties are alike void of religion, the wife owes a civil homage and subjection, the husband owes a civil loyalty. But where the yoke is misyoked, heretic with faithful, godly with ungodly, to the grievance and manifest endangering of a brother or sister, reasons of a higher strain than matrimonial bear sway; unless the gospel, instead of freeing us, debase itself to make us bond-men, and suffer evil to control good. "Male and female created he them."] This contains another end of matching man and woman, being the right and lawfulness of the marriage-bed; though much inferior to the former end of her being his image and help in religious society. And who of weakest insight may not see, that this creating of them male and female cannot in any order of reason, or Christianity, be of such moment against the better and higher purposes of their creation, as to enthral husband or wife to duties or to sufferings, unworthy and unbeseeming the image of God in them? Now whenas not only men, but good men, do stand upon their right, their estimation, their dignity, in all other actions and deportments, with warrant enough and good conscience, as having the image of God in them, it will not be difficult to determine what is unworthy and unseemly for a man to do or suffer in wedlock: and the like proportionally may be found for woman, if we love not to stand disputing below the principles of humanity. He that said, "Male and female created he them," immediately before that said also in the same verse," in the image of God created he him," and redoubled it, that our thoughts might not be so full of dregs as to urge this poor consideration of male and female, without remembering the nobleness of that former repetition; lest when God sends a wise eye to examine our trivial glosses, they be found extremely to creep upon the ground: especially since they confess, that what here concerns marriage is but a brief touch, only preparative to the institution which follows more expressly in the next chapter; and that Christ so took it, as desiring to Ver. 28. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth," &c. This declares another end of matrimony, the propa gation of mankind; and is again repeated to Noah and his sons. Many things might be noted on this place not ordinary, nor unworth the noting; but I undertock not a general comment. Hence therefore we see the desire of children is honest and pious; if we be not less zealous in our Christianity than Plato was in his heathenism; who in the sixth of his laws, counts offspring therefore desirable, that we may leave in our stead suns of our sons, continual servants of God: a religious and prudent desire, if people knew as well what were required to breeding as to begetting; which desire perhaps was a cause, why the Jews hardly could endure a barren wedlock: and Philo, in his book of special laws, esteems him only worth pardon, that sends net barrenness away. Carvilius, the first recorded in Rome to have sought divorce, had it granted him for the barrenness of his wife, upon his oath that he married to the end he might have children; as Dionysius and Gellius are authors. But to dismiss a wife only for barrenness, is hard: and yet in some the desire of chil dren is so great, and so just, yea sometimes so necessary, that to condemn such a one to a childless age, the fault apparently not being in him, might seem perhaps more strict than needed. Sometimes inheritances, crowns and dignities are so interested and annexed in the common peace and good to such or such lineal descent that it may prove of great moment both in the affai of men and of religion, to consider thoroughly wha might be done herein, notwithstanding the wayward ness of our school doctors. GEN. II. 18. "And the Lord said, It is not good that man sho be alone; I will make him a help meet for him Ver. 23. "And Adam said," &c. Ver. 24. "There shall a man leave," &c. THIS second chapter is granted to be a commentar on the first, and these verses granted to be an exp tion of that former verse," Male and female creat he them :" and yet when this male and female is ' the explicit words of God himself here declared to not meant other than a fit help, and meet society; sor who would engross to themselves the whole trade interpreting, will not suffer the clear text of God to the office of explaining itself. "And the Lord God said, It is not good."] Am would think, that the consideration of who spake sho raise up the intention of our minds to inquire be and obey the purpose of so great a speaker: for as order the business of marriage, that which he h speaks is all made vain; and in the decision of m: mony, or not matrimony, nothing at all regarded. presumption hath utterly changed the state and dition of this ordinance: God ordained it in love and helpfulness to be indissoluble, and we in outward act and formality to be a forced bondage; so that being subject to a thousand errours in the best men, if it prove a blessing to any, it is of mere accident, as man's law bath handled it, and not of institution. "It is not good for man to be alone."] Hitherto all things, that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing, which God's eye name not good: whether it be a thing, or the want of something, I labour not; let it be their tendance, who have the art to be industriously idle. And here "alone" is meant alone without woman; otherwise Adam had the company of God himself, and angels to converse with; all creatures to delight him seriously, or to make him sport. God could have created him out of the same mould a thousand friends and brother Adams to have been his consorts; yet for all this, till Eve was given him, God reckoned him to be alone. "It is not good."] God here presents himself like to a man deliberating; both to shew us that the matter s of high consequence, and that he intended to found it according to natural reason, not impulsive command; but that the duty should arise from the reason of it, not the reason be swallowed up in a reasonless duty. "Not good," was as much to Adam before his fall, as st pleasing, not expedient; but since the coming of into the world, to him who hath not received the tinence, it is not only not expedient to be alone, but plainly sinful. And therefore he who wilfully abstains from marriage, not being supernaturally gifted, and he who by making the yoke of marriage unjust and intolerable, causes men to abhor it, are both in a diabolical sin, equal to that of Antichrist, who forbids to STY, For what difference at all whether he abstain ten from marrying, or restrain them in a marriage bpening totally discommodious, distasteful, dishonest, and pernicious to him, without the appearance of his fat? For God does not here precisely say, I make a female to this male, as he did before; but expounding hun self here on purpose, he saith, because it is not good fr man to be alone, I make him therefore a meet help. s supplies the privation of not good, with the perbet gift of a real and positive good: it is man's percooking, who hath turned this bounty of God La scorpion, either by weak and shallow construc, or by proud arrogance and cruelty to them who ther in their purposes nor in their actions have ofaded against the due honour of wedlock. Now whereas the apostle's speaking in the spirit, Cor. vii. pronounces quite contrary to this word of od, "It is good for a man not to touch a woman,' and God cannot contradict himself; it instructs us, that de rommands and words, especially such as bear the infest title of some good to man, are not to be so aly wrung, as to command without regard to the natural and miserable necessities of mankind. Therefore the apostle adds a limitation in the 26th e of that chapter, for the present necessity it is ; which he gives us doubtless as a pattern how to ferncile other places by the general rule of charity. "For man to be alone."] Some would have the sense hereof to be in respect of procreation only: and Austin contests that manly friendship in all other regard had been a more becoming solace for Adam, than to spend so many secret years in an empty world with one woman. But our writers deservedly reject this crabbed opinion; and defend that there is a peculiar comfort in the married state beside the genial bed, which no other society affords. No mortal nature can endure either in the actions of religion, or study of wisdom, without sometime slackening the cords of intense thought and labour: which lest we should think faulty, God himself conceals us not his own recreations before the world was built; " I was," saith the eternal wisdom, "daily his delight, playing always before him." And to him indeed wisdom is as a high tower of pleasure, but to us a steep hill, and we toiling ever about the bottom: he executes with ease the exploits of his omnipotence, as easy as with us it is to will: but no worthy enterprise can be done by us without continual plodding and wearisomeness to our faint and sensitive abilities. We cannot therefore always be contemplative, or pragmatical abroad, but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off a while her severe schooling; and, like a glad youth in wandering vacancy, may keep her holidays to joy and harmless pastime : which as she cannot well do without company, so in no company so well as where the different sex in most resembling unlikeness, and most unlike resemblance, cannot but please best, and be pleased in the aptitude of that variety. Whereof lest we should be too timorous, in the awe that our flat sages would form us and dress us, wisest Solomon among his gravest Proverbs countenances a kind of ravishment and erring fondness in the entertainment of wedded leisures; and in the Song of Songs, which is generally believed, even in the jolliest expressions, to figure the spousals of the church with Christ, sings of a thousand raptures between those two lovely ones far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment. By these instances, and more which might be brought, we may imagine how indulgently God provided against man's loneliness; that he approved it not, as by himself declared not good; that he approved the remedy thereof, as of his own ordaining, consequently good: and as he ordained it, so doubtless proportionably to our fallen estate he gives it; else were his ordinance at least in vain, and we for all his gifts still empty handed. Nay, such an unbounteous giver we should make him, as in the fables Jupiter was to Ixion, giving him a cloud instead of Juno, giving him a monstrous issue by her, the breed of Centaurs, a neglected and unloved race, the fruits of a delusive marriage; and lastly, giving him her with a damnation to that wheel in hell, from a life thrown into the midst of temptations and disorders. But God is no deceitful giver, to bestow that on us for a remedy of loneliness, which if it bring not a sociable mind as well as a conjunctive body, leaves us no less alone than before; and if it bring a mind perpetually averse and disagreeable, betrays us to a worse condition than the most deserted loneliness. God cannot in the justice of his own promise and institution so unexpectedly mock us, by forcing that upon us as the remedy of solitude, which wraps us in a misery worse than any wilderness, as the Spirit of God himself judges, Prov. xix. especially knowing that the best and wisest men amidst the sincere and most cordial designs of their heart, do daily err in choosing. We may conclude therefore, seeing orthodoxal expositors confess to our hands, that by loneliness is not only meant the want of copulation, and that man is not less alone by turning in a body to him, unless there be within it a mind answerable; that it is a work more worthy the care and consultation of God to provide for the worthiest part of man, which is his mind, and not unnaturally to set it beneath the formalities and respects of the body, to make it a servant of its own vassal: I say, we may conclude that such a marriage, wherein the mind is so disgraced and vilified below the body's interest, and can have no just or tolerable contentment, is not of God's institution, and therefore no marriage. Nay, in concluding this, I say we conclude no more than what the common expositors themselves give us, both in that which I have recited, and much more hereafter. But the truth is, they give us in such a manner, as they who leave their own mature positions like the eggs of an ostrich in the dust; I do but lay them in the sun; their own pregnancies hatch the truth; and I am taxed of novelties and strange producements, while they, like that inconsiderate bird, know not that these are their own natural breed. they may be helpful to each other in the family, but they cannot couple; that shall divorce them, though either party would not. They can neither serve God together, nor one be at peace with the other, nor be good in the family one to other, but live as they were dead, or live as they were deadly enemies in a cage together; it is all one, they can couple, they shall not divorce till death, not though this sentence be their death. What is this besides tyranny, but to turn nature upside down, to make both religion and the mind of man wait upon the slavish errands of the body, and not the body to follow either the sanctity or the sove reignty of the mind, unspeakably wronged, and with all equity complaining? what is this but to abuse the sacred and mysterious bed of marriage to be the compulsive stye of an ingrateful and malignant lust, stirred up only from a carnal acrimony, without either love or peace, or regard to any other thing holy or human? This I admire, how possibly it should inhabit thus long in the sense of so many disputing theologians, unless it be the lowest lees of a canonical infection livergrown to their sides; which perhaps will never uncling, without the strong abstersive of some heroic magistrate whose mind, equal to his high office, dares lead him both to know and to do without their frivolous caseputting. For certain he shall have God and this izstitution plainly on his side. And if it be true both divinity and law, that consent alone, though copal:tion never follow, makes a marriage; how can they dissolve it for the want of that which made it not, ar not dissolve it for that not continuing which made and should preserve it in love and reason, and diff “I will make him a help meet for him."] Here the heavenly institutor, as if he laboured not to be mis-ence it from a brute conjugality? taken by the supercilious hypocrisy of those that love "Meet for him."] The original here is more expre to master their brethren, and to make us sure that hesive than other languages word for word can renderi gave us not now a servile yoke, but an amiable knot, contents not himself to say, I will make him a wife; but resolving to give us first the meaning before the name of a wife, saith graciously, "I will make him a help meet for him." And here again, as before, I do not require more full and fair deductions than the whole consent of our divines usually raise from this text, that in matrimony there must be first a mutual help to piety, next to civil fellowship of love and amity, then to generation, so to household affairs, lastly the remedy of incontinence. And commonly they reckon them in such order, as leaves generation and incontinence to be last considered. This I amaze me at, that though all the superior and nobler ends both of marriage and of the married persons be absolutely frustrate, the matrimony stirs not, loses no hold, remains as rooted as the centre: but if the body bring but in a complaint of frigidity, by that cold application only this adamantine Alp of wedlock has leave to dissolve; which else all the machinations of religious or civil reason at the suit of a distressed mind, either for divine worship or human conversation violated, cannot unfasten. What courts of concupiscence are these, wherein fleshly appetite is heard before right reason, lust before love or devotion? They may be pious Christians together, they may be loving and friendly, but all agree effectual conformity of disposition al affection to be hereby signified; which God as it wer not satisfied with the naming of a help, goes on scribing another self, a second self, a very self its Yet now there is nothing in the life of man, throug our misconstruction, made more uncertain, more b zardous and full of chance, than this divine bless. with such favourable significance here conferred up us; which if we do but err in our choice, the most blameable errour that can be, err but one minute, er moment after those mighty syllables pronounce which take upon them to join heaven and hell tog ther unpardonably till death pardon: this divine bles ing that looked but now with such a humane su upon us, and spoke such gentle reason, straight va ishes like a fair sky, and brings on such a scene cloud and tempest, as turns all to shipwreck with haven or shore, but to a ransomless captivity. A then they tell us it is our sin: but let them bet again, that sin through the mercy of God hath n made such waste upon us, as to make utterly void to use any temporal benefit, much less any so much ava ing to a peaceful and sanctified life, merely for a m incident errour, which no wariness can certainly sh And wherefore serves our happy redemption, and t liberty we have in Christ, but to deliver us from mitous yokes, not to be lived under without the endangerment of our souls, and to restore us in some competent measure to a right in every good thing both of this life, and the other? Thus we see how treatably and distinctly God hath here taught us what the prime ends of marriage are; mutual solace and help. That we are now, upon the most irreprehensible mistake in choosing, defeated and defrauded of all this original benignity, was begun first through the snare of anti-body again, to stick for ever there a thorn in his heart. christian canons long since obtruded upon the church of Rome, and not yet scoured off by reformation, out of a lingering vain-glory that abides among us to make fair shews in formal ordinances, and to enjoin continence and bearing of crosses in such a garb as no scripture binds us, under the thickest arrows of temptation, where we need not stand. Now we shall see with what acknowledgment and assent Adam received this new associate which God brought him. mind and heart. And he might as easily know what were the words of God, as he knew so readily what had been done with his rib, while he slept so soundly. He might well know, if God took a rib out of his inside to form of it a double good to him, he would far sooner disjoin it from his outside, to prevent a treble mischief to him; and far sooner cut it quite off from all relation for his undoubted ease, than nail it into his Ver. 23. “ And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man." That there was a nearer alliance between Adam and Eve, than could be ever after between man and wife, is visible to any. For no other woman was ever moulded out of her husband's rib, but of mere strangers for the most part they come to have that consanguinity, which they have by wedlock. And if we look bearly upon the matter, though marriage be most agreeable to holiness, to purity, and justice, yet is it not a natural, but a civil and ordained relation. For if it were in nature, no law or crime could disannul it, to make a wife, or husband, otherwise than still a wife er husband, but only death; as nothing but that can make a father no father, or a son no son. But divorce fer adultery or desertion, as all our churches agree but England, not only separates, but nullifies, and extinguishes the relation itself of matrimony, so that they are no more man and wife; otherwise the innocent party could not marry elsewhere, without the guilt of adultery. Next, were it merely natural, why was it here ordained more than the rest of moral law to man Sa is original rectitude, in whose breast all that was natural or moral was engraven without external constitutions and edicts? Adam therefore in these words Ges not establish an indissoluble bond of marriage in the carnal ligaments of flesh and boues; for if he did, I would belong only to himself in the literal sense, every one of us being nearer in flesh of flesh, and bone bones, to our parents than to a wife; they therefore were not to be left for her in that respect. But Adam, who had the wisdom given him to know all creatures, a to name them according to their properties, no doubt but had the gift to discern perfectly that which concerned him much more; and to apprehend at first ught the true fitness of that consort which God proadd him. And therefore spake in reference to those words which God pronounced before; as if he had This is she by whose meet help and society I shall no suore be alone; this is she who was made my image, even Ithe image of God; not so much in body, as in unity of Whenas nature teaches us to divide any limb from the body to the saving of its fellows, though it be the maiming and deformity of the whole; how much more is it her doctrine to sever by incision, not a true limb so much, though that be lawful, but an adherent, a sore, the gangrene of a limb, to the recovery of a whole man! But if in these words we shall make Adam to erect a new establishment of marriage in the mere flesh, which God so lately had instituted, and founded in the sweet and mild familiarity of love and solace, and mutual fitness; what do we but use the mouth of our general parent, the first time it opens, to an arrogant opposition and correcting of God's wiser ordinance? These words therefore cannot import any thing new in marriage, but either that which belongs to Adam only, or to us in reference only to the instituting words of God, which made a meet help against loneliness. Adam spake like Adam the words of flesh and bones, the shell and rind of matrimony; but God spake like God, of love, and solace, and meet help, the soul both of Adam's words and of matrimony. Ver. 24. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh." This verse, as our common herd expounds it, is the great knot-tier, which hath undone by tying, and by tangling, millions of guiltless consciences: this is that grisly porter, who having drawn men and wisest men by subtle allurement within the train of an unhappy matrimony, claps the dungeon-gate upon them, as irrecoverable as the grave. But if we view him well, and hear him with not too hasty and prejudicant ears, we shall find no such terror in him. For first, it is not here said absolutely without all reason he shall cleave to his wife, be it to his weal or to his destruction as it happens, but he shall do this upon the premises and considerations of that meet help and society before mentioned. "Therefore he shall cleave to his wife,” no otherwise a wife than a fit help. He is not bid to leave the dear cohabitation of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, to link himself inseparably with the mere carcass of a marriage, perhaps an enemy. This joining particle "Therefore" is in all equity, nay in all necessity of construction, to comprehend first and most principally what God spake concerning the inward essence of marriage in his institution, that we may learn how far to attend what Adam spake of the outward materials thereof in his approbation. For if we shall bind these words of Adam only to a corporal meaning, and that the force of this injunction upon all us his sons, to live individually with any woman wnick hath befallen us in the most mistaken wedlock, shall consist not in those moral and relative causes of Eve's creation, but in the mere anatomy of a rib, and that Adam's insight concerning wedlock reached no further, we shall make him as very an idiot as the Socinians make him; which would not be reverently done of us. Let us be content to allow our great forefather so much wisdom, as to take the instituting words of God along with him into this sentence, which if they | be well minded, will assure us that flesh and ribs are but of a weak and dead efficacy to keep marriage united where there is no other fitness. The rib of marriage, to all since Adam, is a relation much rather than a bone; the nerves and sinews thereof are love and meet help, they knit not every couple that marries, and where they knit they seldom break; but where they break, which for the most part is where they were never truly joined, to such at the same instant both flesh and rib cease to be in common: so that here they argue nothing to the continuance of a false or violated marriage, but must be led back again to receive their meaning from those institutive words of God, which give them all the life and vigour they have. "Therefore shall a man leave his father," &c.] What to a man's thinking more plain by this appointment, that the fatherly power should give place to conjugal prerogative? Yet it is generally held by reformed writers against the papist, that though in persons at discretion the marriage in itself be never so fit, though it be fully accomplished with benediction, board, and bed, yet the father not consenting, his main will without dispute shall dissolve all. And this they affirm only from collective reason, not any direct law; for that in Exod. xxii. 17, which is most particular, speaks that a father may refuse to marry his daughter to one who hath defloured her, not that he may take her away from one who hath soberly married her. Yet because the general honour due to parents is great, they hold he may, and perhaps hold not amiss. But again, when the question is of harsh and rugged parents, who defer to bestow their children seasonably, they agree jointly, that the church or magistrate may bestow them, though without the father's consent: and for this they have no express authority in Scripture. So that they may see by their own handling of this very place, that it is not the stubborn letter must govern us, but the divine and softening breath of charity, which turns and winds the dictate of every positive command, and shapes it to the good of mankind. Shall the outward accessory of a father's will wanting rend the fittest and most affectionate marriage in twain, after all nuptial consummations; and shall not the want of love, and the privation of all civil and religious concord, which is the inward essence of wedlock, do as much to part those who were never truly wedded? Shall a father have this power to vindicate his own wilful honour and authority to the utter breach of a most dearly united marriage, and shall not a man in his own power have the permission to free his soul, his life, and all his comfort of life from the disaster of a nomarriage? Shall fatherhood, which is but man, for his own pleasure dissolve matrimony; and shall not matrimony, which is God's ordinance, for its own honour and better conservation dissolve itself, when it is wrong and not fitted to any of the chief ends which it owes us? "And they shall be one flesh."] These words also infer, that there ought to be an individuality in marriage; but without all question presuppose the joining causes. Not a rule yet that we have met with, so universal in this whole institution, but hath admitted limitations and conditions according to human necessity. The very foundation of matrimony, though God laid it deliberately," that it is not good for man to be alone,” holds not always, if the apostle can secure us. Soon after we are bid leave father and mother, and cleave to a wife, but must understand the father's consent withal, else not. "Cleave to a wife," but let her be a wife, let her be a meet help, a solace, not a nothing, not an adversary, not a desertrice: can any law or command be so unreasonable, as to make men cleave to calamity, to ruin, to perdition? In like manner here “they shall be one flesh;" but let the causes hold, and be made really good which only have the possibility to make them one flesh. We know that flesh can neither join nor keep together two bodies of itself; what is it then must make them one flesh, but likeness, but fitness of mind and disposition, which may breed the spirit of concord and union between them? If that be not in the nature of either, and that there has been a remediless mistake, as vain we go about to compel them into one flesh, as if we undertook to weave a garment of dry sand. It were more easy to compel the vegetable and nutritive power of nature to assimilations and mixtures, which are not alterable each by other; or force the concoctive stomach to turn that into flesh, which is so totally unlike that substance, as not to be wrought on. For as the unity of mind is nearer and greater than the union of bodies, so doubtless is the dissimilitude greater and more dividual, as that which makes between bodies all difference and distinction. Espe cially whenas besides the singular and substantial di ferences of every soul, there is an intimate quality good or evil, through the whole progeny of Adam, which like a radical heat, or mortal chillness, joi them, or disjoins them irresistibly. In whom there fore either the will or the faculty, is found to have nevem joined, or now not to continue so, it is not to say, they shall be one flesh, for they cannot be one flesh. Go commands not impossibilities; and all the ecclesiasti cal glue, that liturgy or laymen can compound, is n able to sodder up two such incongruous natures int the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage. Why di Moses then set down their uniting into one flesh And I again ask, why the gospel so oft repeats the eat ing of our Saviour's flesh, the drinking of his blo "That we are one body with him, the members his body, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, Ephes. v. Yet lest we should be Capernaitans, as " are told there, that the flesh profiteth nothing; are told here, if we be not as deaf as adders, that th union of the flesh proceeds from the union of a fit he and solace. We know, that there was never a m |