TETRACHORDON:
Expositions upon the foure chief places in Scripture, which treat of
Marriage, or nullities in Marriage.
On:
Gen. i. 27-28, compar'd and explain'd by Gen. ii. 18, 23, 24
Dent. xxiv. 1-2.
Matth. v. 31-32, with Matth. xix., from the 3 v. to the 11th.
1 Cor vii., from the 10th to the 16th.
Wherein the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as was lately publish'd,
is confirm'd by explanation of Scripture, by testimony of ancient
Fathers, of civill lawes in the Primitive Church, of famousest Reformed
Divines, and lastly, by an intended Act of the Parlament and Church of
England in the last yeare of Edward the Sixth. By the former Author J.
M.—
[Greek: skaioisi kaina prospheron sopha doxeis achreios k oy sophos pephykenai ton d ay dokounton eidenai ti poikilon kreisson nomistheis en polei lupros phanæ.] Euripid. Medea London: Printed in the yeare 1645.
As the title indicates, the body of the Treatise consists mainly of an elaborate examination and comparison of the four chief passages of Scripture relating to Marriage and Divorce, viz. Genesis i. 27-28, with ii. 18, 23, 24; Deuteronomy xxiv. 1-2; Matthew v. 31-32, with xix. 3-11; and 1 Corinth, vii. 10-16. This labour of Biblical exegesis Milton had undertaken, he tells us, in consequence of the representations of some judicious friends, who thought that, while there was "reason to a sufficiency" in his first Divorce Treatise, a fuller discussion of the texts of Scripture there alleged might be desirable. How he performed the labour—how he plods through the four passages in succession, explaining, commenting, answering objections, and in the end construing each and all together into a ratification of his own Doctrine of Divorce, or at least into consistency with it—must be learnt, if it is learnt at all, from the Tetrachordon itself. Very few now-a-days will care to read it. For it is decidedly, according to our modern ideas, a heavy pamphlet. The Areopagitica bites into modern interests and the constitution of the modern intellect; the Tetrachordon, though it must have occupied the author longer, has, I should say, quite lost its bite, except for students of Milton, and for reasoners who would debate his Divorce Doctrine over again by the same method of the interpretation of Biblical texts. For Milton is most submissive to the Bible throughout. Clearly it was his opinion that whatever the Bible could be found to have ruled on any point must be accepted as the decision. There is no sign of any dissent by him from the most orthodox idea of the verbal inspiration of Scripture. Not the less he contrives that the Bible shall support his own free conclusions. It is evident that the method of his exegesis was not so much to extract positive injunctions from particular texts as to let the doctrine of the Bible as a whole invade and pervade his mind, uniting there with whatever of clear sense or high views of affairs it could find, and so forming a kind of organ of large and enlightened Christian reason, by which the Bible itself could then, in all mere particulars, be safely interpreted. Once and again, in the course of his Tetrachordon, he expresses his contempt for the grubbing literalists, who, in their microscopic infatuation over one text at a time, miss the view of the whole waving field of all the texts together. Yet he shows much ingenuity in parts of the verbal proof, and produces also commentators of repute who agreed with him.
There is, and doubtless purposely, in order to give weight to the new book, a large display of learning in its pages. Besides the motto from Euripides to begin with, there are references, in the course of the commentary, to Plato, Philo, Josephus, Cicero, Horace, Cellius, Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Tertullian, St. Augustine, Beza, Paræus, Rivetus, Vatablus, Dr. Ames, Spanheim, Diodati, Marinaro, Cameron, and many more. At the end of the commentary on the Texts, also, there is an express synopsis of testimonies, for the benefit, as Milton is careful to explain, of the weaker sort who are led by authorities, and not because he sets much store on that style of proof himself. Here we have Justin Martyr again, Tertullian again, Origen, Lactantius, several early Councils, Basil, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine again, the Laws of Theodosius and Valentinian, Leo, Wycliffe, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Bucer of course, Fagius of course, the Confession of the Church of Strasburg, Peter Martyr, Musculus, Gualter of Zurich, Hemingius, Hunnius, Bidenbachius, Harbardus, Wigandus, Beza again, Aretius of Berne, Alciat of Milan, Corasius, Wesembechius, and Grotius. When he quotes one of the Fathers, I may observe in passing, Milton is true to the Puritan instinct, and never prefixes to the name the title of Saint; it is always "Austin," for example, and not "St. Austin." Also it may be noted that he is punctual in making it clear whether he quotes from his own knowledge or at second hand. Thus, referring to Wycliffe's view of Marriage as put forth in one of his writings, he says, "This book, indeed, through the poverty of our Libraries, I am forced to cite from Arnisæus of Halberstadt on the Right of Marriage, who cites it from Corasius of Toulouse, c. 4., Cent. Set., and he from Wicklef l. 4. Dial c. 2l."—Appended to the collation of Testimonies, and winding up the whole treatise, is a historical statement to which Milton attached great importance, and which is really interesting. It was only by chance, he says, that a notion of Divorce not far short of his own was not then actually part and parcel of the Law of England. For, when young Edward VI. had abolished the Canon Law out of his dominions, a Committee of two- and-thirty select persons, Divines and Lawyers, had been appointed by Parliament—Cranmer, Peter Martyr, Walter Haddon, and Sir John Cheke, the King's tutor, being members of this Committee—to frame a new set of ecclesiastical laws. The draft was actually finished, and it included a law of Divorce substantially such as Bucer had then recommended to the English. It allowed complete Divorce not only for the causes usually esteemed grave and capital, but for such causes as desertion, cruel usage, or even continued contentiousness and wrangling. The untimely death of the young King alone had prevented this Law from coming into effect. This fact in English history, it is evident, together with the knowledge of such an amount of scattered opinion in his favour lying in the works of other authors besides his formerly quoted Bucer, Fagius, Erasmus and Grotius, had been acquired by Milton by fresh research since he had published his Bucer Tract. And here again there is the curious struggle between Milton's delight in finding auxiliaries and his feeling of property in his own idea. "God, I solemnly attest him," he says, "withheld from my knowledge the consenting judgment of these men so late until they could not be my instructors, but only my unexpected witnesses to partial men that in this work I had not given the worst experiment of an industry joined with integrity, and the free utterance though of an unpopular truth." Again, in a passage where he points out that a truth is never thoroughly sifted out in one age, and that some of those who had preceded him in the Divorce notion had only hinted it in vague terms, and others who had been more explicit in the assertion of it had still left it to be fully argued, he concludes with a gentle remark that perhaps, after all, it will be his fortune "to meet the praise or dispraise of being something first."
There is no abatement in the Tetrachordon of the bitterness of Milton's feeling on the subject of an unsuitable marriage. Rather the bitterness is more concentrated and intense. It is as if eighteen months of rumination over his own unhappy condition had made him savage. There is careful abstinence still from all direct allusion to his own case; but there are again the repeated phrases of loathing with which he contemplates, chiefly from the man's side, the forced union of two irreconcileable or ill-matched minds:—"a creature inflicted on him to the vexation of his righteousness"; "a carnal acrimony without either love or peace"; "a ransomless captivity"; "the dungeon-gate as irrecoverable as the grave"; "the mere carcase of a marriage"; "the disaster of a no-marriage"; "counter-plotting and secret wishing one another's dissolution"; "a habit of wrath and perturbation"; "heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness," &c. "God commands not impossibilities," he bursts out, "and all the ecclesiastical glue that Liturgy or Laymen can compound is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage." Or take this remarkable passage, repeating an opinion we have already had from him, "No wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness than to lead a wearisome life of unloving and unquiet conversation with one who neither affects nor is affected, much less with one who exercises all bitterness, and would commit adultery too, but for envy lest the persecuted condition should thereby get the benefit of his freedom." This assertion that adultery is more venial than mental unfitness is reiterated in another place, with a bold addition: "Adultery does not exclude her other fitness, her other pleasingness; she may be otherwise loving and prevalent." Occasionally, it may be added, in a less startling way than this, Milton leaves the man's point of view and tries to be considerate about the woman. Not that he recants his doctrine of the inferiority of her sex to man's. On the contrary he repeats it, extracting out of Genesis the absolute certainty that it was Man that was made primarily and immediately in the image of God, and that the image of God is in Woman only by derivation from Man. But he qualifies the doctrine at once gallantly and shrewdly. "Nevertheless," he says, "man is not to hold woman as a servant, but receives her into a part of that empire which God proclaims him to,—though not equally, yet largely, as his own image and glory; for it is no small glory to him that a creature so like him should be made subject to him. Not but that particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield; for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female."
This may be taken as the summary of Milton's doctrine about Woman's Rights. Incidentally also the Treatise furnishes us with his opinion on Teetotalism and the Permissive Bill. It comes in thus:—The Mosaic Law (Deut. xxiv. 1-2) allowing a man to give his wife a writing of divorcement and send her away, if he did not like her, had been interpreted by some, in consequence of Christ's comment upon it (Matt. xix. 8), as only a Permissive Bill on this subject to the hard-hearted Jews. To continue it in modern times would be to open the door to license: it would be abused; everybody would be putting away his wife; there must therefore be no longer any such Permissive Bill, but a strict Law of indissoluble marriage. Well then, by the same reasoning, Milton argues, there ought to be a great many more strict laws, that nobody had ever thought of. "What more foul and 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 marchandise, which forbidden would utterly remove a most loathsome sin, and not impair either the health or the refreshment of mankind, supplied many other ways, why do they forbid a Law of God, the forbidding whereof brings into an excessive bondage oft-times the best of 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 manner 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." Lest the meaning of this passage should be mistaken, we may point out that the Permissive Bill in the matter of drinking which it defends by implication is a Permissive Bill to drink and not a Permissive Bill to prevent drinking. The passage, therefore, cannot be quoted as Milton's testimony in favour of the so-called modern Permissive Bill. It is dead the reverse. And yet there is a lurking kindness in the passage towards a Permissive Bill of that sort, contemplated as possible, though yet unheard of; and, though Milton's principle of Liberty would have bound him to oppose it, he would perhaps have done so reluctantly. The idea of a country cleared of all its apparatus of Bacchus, and in which wine, or ale, or any other form of intoxicating fluid, ruby, amber, or crystal at its purest, should be unattainable by any mortal breathing on its surface, had, so far as his personal tastes and habits were concerned, no terrors for Milton. Had it been a matter of personal preference, instead of principle, he would gladly, I doubt not, have consented to a Permissive Bill in England to prevent absolutely the drinking of intoxicating liquors, if it had been accompanied by a ratification of Moses's Permissive Bill in quite the contrary sense, by which the sobered nation should have the right of divorcing.
Nothing has been said yet about the few pages prefixed to the Tetrachordon, in which Milton dedicates the treatise, as he had done three already (the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the Buear Tract, and the Areopagitica), to the Parliament of England. These pages, though put first, were doubtless written last. They are signed with the writer's name in full. In respect of biographical information, of the external kind at least, they are more interesting than the treatise itself. Most of the information, however, will now be sufficiently intelligible, if given in the form of mere extracts, without more of explanation than may be supplied by Italic headings:—
Thanks to Parliament for Past Favour and Protection:—"Although it be generally known how and by whom ye have been instigated to a hard censure of that former Book entitled The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce—an opinion held by some of the best among Reformed writers without scandal or confinement, though now thought new and dangerous by some of our severe Gnostics, whose little reading and less meditating holds ever with hardest obstinacy that which it took up with easiest credulity—I do not find yet that aught, for the furious incitements that have been used, hath issued by your appointment that might give the least interruption or disrepute either to the Author or the Book. Which he who will be better advised than to call your neglect, or connivance at a thing imagined so perilous, can attribute it to nothing more justly than to the deep and quiet stream of your direct and calm deliberations, that gave not way either to the fervent rashness or the immaterial gravity of those who ceased not to exasperate without cause. For which uprightness, and incorrupt refusal of what ye were incensed to, Lords and Commons— though it were done to justice, not to me, and was a peculiar demonstration how far your ways are different from the rash vulgar— besides those allegiance of oath and duty which are my public debt to your public labours, I have yet a store of gratitude laid up which cannot be exhausted; and such thanks perhaps they may live to be as shall more than whisper them to the next ages."
Punishment for Mr. Herbert Palmer:—"I shall here briefly single one of them [his detractors], because he hath obliged me to it—who, I persuade me, having scarce read the book, nor knowing him who writ it, or at least feigning the latter [!], hath not forborne to scandalize him, unconferred with, unadmonished, undealt with by any pastorly or brotherly convincement, in the most open and invective manner, and at the most bitter opportunity that drift or set design could have invented. And this, whenas the Canon Law, though commonly most favouring the boldness of their priests, punishes the naming or traducing of any person in the Pulpit, was by him made no scruple. If I shall therefore take licence by the right of nature, and that liberty wherein I was born, to defend myself publicly against a printed calumny, and do willingly appeal to those Judges to whom I am accused, it can be no immoderate or unallowable course of seeking so just and needful reparations. Which I had done long since, had not these employments which are now visible deferred me.—It was preached before ye, Lords and Commons, in August last, upon a special Day of Humiliation, that 'there was a wicked book abroad;' and ye were taxed of sin. that it was yet 'uncensured, the book deserving to be burnt;' and 'impudence' also was charged upon the Author, who durst 'set his name to it, and dedicate it to yourselves.' First, Lords and Commons, I pray to that God before whom ye then were prostrate so to forgive ye those omissions and trespasses which ye desire most should find forgiveness, as I shall soon show to the world how easily ye absolve yourselves of that which this man calls your sin, and is indeed your wisdom and your nobleness, whereof to this day ye have done well not to repent. He terms it 'a wicked book,' and why but 'for allowing other causes of Divorce than Christ and his Apostles mention;' and with the same censure condemns of wickedness not only Martin Bucer, that elect instrument of Reformation, highly honoured and had in reverence by Edward the Sixth and his whole Parliament—whom also I had published in English, by a good providence, about a week before this calumnious digression was preached, so that, if he knew not Bucer then, as he ought to have known, he might at least have known him some months after, ere the Sermon came in print; wherein, notwithstanding, he persists in his former sentence, and condemns again of wickedness, either ignorantly or wilfully, not only Martin Bucer, and all the choicest and holiest of our Reformers, but the whole Parliament and Church of England in those best and purest times of Edward the Sixth. All which I shall prove with good evidence at the end of these Explanations. And then let it be judged and seriously considered with what hope the affairs of our Religion are committed to one among others [the Westminster Assembly] who hath now only left him which of the twain he will choose—whether this shall be his palpable ignorance, or the same 'wickedness' of his own Book which he so lavishly imputes to the writings of other men; and whether this of his, that thus peremptorily defames and attaints of wickedness unspotted Churches, unblemished Parliaments, and the most eminent Restorers of Christian Doctrine, deserve not to be 'burnt' first. And, if his heat had burst out only against the opinion, his wonted passion had no doubt been silently borne with wonted patience. Eut, since, against the charity of that solemn place and meeting, it served him further to inveigh opprobriously against the person, traducing him with no less than 'impudence,' only for setting his name to what he had written, I must be excused not to be so wanting to the defence of an honest name, or to the reputation of those good men who afford me their society, but to be sensible of such a foul endeavoured disgrace—not knowing aught, either in mine own deserts or the laws of this land, why I should be subject, in such a notorious and illegal manner, to the intemperancies of this man's preaching choler. … But, if only to have writ my name must be accounted 'impudence' how doth this but justify another, who might affirm, with as good warrant, that the late Discourse of Scripture and Reason, which is certain to be chiefly his [Palmer's] own draft, was published without a name out of base fear, and the sly avoidance of what might follow if the party at Court should hap to reach him! And I, to have set my name where he accuses me to have set it, am so far from recanting that I offer my hand also, if need be, to make good the same opinion which I there maintain by inevitable consequences drawn parallel from his own principal arguments in that of Scripture and Reason; which I shall pardon him if he can deny without shaking his own composition to pieces. The 'impudence,' therefore, since he weighed so little what a gross revile that was to give his equal, I send him back again for a phylactery to stitch upon his arrogance, that censures not only before conviction so bitterly without so much as one reason given, but censures the Congregation of his Governors to their faces, for not being so hasty as himself to censure." [Footnote: The discourse Scripture and Reason, which Milton here ascribes to Palmer, charging him with cowardice in having published it anonymously, was a quarto pamphlet of 80 pages, published in April 1643, and purporting to be "by divers Reverend and Learned Divines." More fully its title was Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Armes: or the whole Controversie about Subjects taking up Armes. It was, in fact, an elaborate proof, from Scripture and Reason, of the right of the English Parliament and People to make war upon the King. Doubtless Milton had ascertained that Palmer was its chief author: hence, rather unnecessarily, his taunt. Palmer had also published more recently (Dec. 1644), but with his name, the First Part of a Book called Memorials of Godliness and Christianity. It was afterwards completed by two additional Parts, also with his name, Part II. containing, among other things, a set of aphorisms entitled "The character of a Christian in Paradoxes and seeming Contradictions." It had so chanced, however, that, before he had published this Part II. of his Memorials, a surreptitious edition of the aforesaid Aphorisms had found its way into print, with no author's name attached (July 1645). Hence a strange result. Palmer died in 1647, ætat . 46; and in the following year—though his Memorials, containing the "Christian Paradoxes," were in circulation with his name—the "Christian Paradoxes" by themselves, as they had been published anonymously in the surreptitious edition of July 1645, were published as Lord Bacon's in a quarto volume of Bacon's "Remaines." The blunder was probably then detected; but it was again committed in 1730, when the "Paradoxes" were included in Blackburn's Edition of Bacon's works. From that date till 1864 the "Paradoxes" were printed as Bacon's, and, though suspected by some, yet often written about as Bacon's; but in the last-mentioned year the mistake was rectified, and Herbert Palmer reinstated in the authorship of the "Paradoxes," by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (See his little volume Lord Bacon not the Author of "The Christian Paradoxes:" see also Spedding's Bacon, VII. 289 et seq.).]
Punishment for Dr. Featley:—"Some whose necessary shifts have long inured them to cloak the defects of their unstudied years and hatred now to learn under the appearance of a grave solidity—which estimation they have gained among weak perceivers—find the ease of slighting what they cannot refute, and are determined, as I hear, to hold it not worth the answering. In which number I must be forced to reckon that Doctor who, in a late equivocating Treatise plausibly set afloat against the Dippers, diving the while himself with a more deep prelatical malignance against the present State and Church Government, mentions with ignominy the 'Tractate of Divorce;' yet answers nothing, but instead thereof (for which I do not commend his marshalling), sets Moses also among the crew of his Anabaptists, as one who to a holy nation, the Commonwealth of Israel, gave laws 'breaking the bonds of marriage to inordinate lost' These are no mean surges of blasphemy—not only 'dipping' Moses the Divine Lawgiver, but dashing with a high hand against the justice and purity of God Himself; as these ensuing Scriptures, plainly and freely handled, shall verify to the lancing of that old apostemated error. Him, therefore, I leave now to his repentance." [Footnote: Poor Dr. Featley died April 17, 1645 (ætat 65), only six weeks after this punishment of him was published. He had then been restored to liberty, for he died in his house at Chelsea. Milton knew him perfectly when he characterized him as one of those who had gained among "weak perceivers" a reputation for "grave solidity." And yet it is touching to have before me, as I now have in a copy of the Sixth Edition of the Dippers Dipt (1651), not only an elaborate portrait of Featley by the engraver Marshall, done in the ordinary way, but also an engraving representing the old man most painfully as he looked when lying in his winding-sheet before they put him into his coffin. Over the corpse are these words, "I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith;" and underneath is Featley's Latin Epitaph, telling that he was "Impugnator Papismi, Propugnator Reformationis," and "Theologus Insignis, Disputator Strenuus, Conscionator Egregius."—The word "marshalling" which I have italicised in the extract from Milton about Featley is, no doubt, a punning allusion to an engraving by Marshall in the Dippers Dipt, giving caricatures of different kinds of Sectaries, with a representation of men and women bathing in the centre (see antè, p. 188, Note). ]
A fact which might have been guessed independently, but which it is interesting to have told us by Milton himself, is that there were some persons who were particularly courteous in acknowledging the ability shown in the Divorce treatise, the "wit and parts" of the author, his "elocution," and the more than ordinary "industry, exactness, and labour" he had expended on the subject, but who made all this only an excuse for not discussing his proposition seriously. On this class of his critics Milton is very severe. They were like those, he said, who used to get off from Socrates, when they could not resist the force of his truths, by saying that Socrates could at any time make the worse cause seem the better. To what would the world, to what would England, come, if this habit of regarding all novelty as sophistry, of making the very ability and learning bestowed upon a doctrine an objection to the receipt of that doctrine, were to become general? "Ignorance and illiterate presumption," he says, "which is yet but our disease, will turn at length into our very constitution, and prove the hectic evil of this age." He hoped better of the Parliament; he hoped that they would not overlook the necessity of a change of the Law in this matter of Divorce. At all events he had done his part. "Henceforth, except new cause be given, I shall say less and less. For, if the Law make not a timely provision, let the Law, as reason is, bear the censure of those consequences which her own default now more evidently produces. And, if men want manliness to expostulate the right of their due ransom, and to second their own occasions, they may sit hereafter and bemoan themselves to have neglected, through faintness, the only remedy of their sufferings, which a seasonable and well-grounded speaking might have purchased them. And perhaps in time to come others will know how to esteem what is not every day put into their hands, when they have marked events, and better weighed how hurtful and unwise it is to hide a secret and pernicious rupture under the ill counsel of a bashful silence." Here Milton seems to be speaking for himself. He seems to be giving warning what he means to do without leave of the Law if the Law will not give him leave,