“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645(439) to overcome opposition to his Doctrine and Discipline, he registers a keen sense
of conflict between such appeals to authority and his insistent claims to scholarly
autonomy and independence. He uses much of his preface to construct an elaborate
narrative about writing his divorce tracts first and then discovering various con-
firming authorities: “I ow no light, or leading receav’d from any man in the discov-
ery of this truth, what time I first undertook it in the doctrine and discipline of divorce,
and had only the infallible grounds of Scripture to be my guide” (433). He insists
that he found Grotius’s supporting argument only after he finished writing DDD 1
and then added a few citations – a sequence of events indicating that God “in-
tended to prove me, whether I durst alone take up a rightful cause against a world
of disesteem, & found I durst” (434). He added further references to Grotius in
DDD 2, characterizing him as an “able assistant,” who broached “at much dis-
tance” somewhat parallel concepts of “the law of charity and the true end of wed-
lock” (434). He also found Paulus Fagius’s “somewhat brief” comments on the
divorce question, which he used chiefly to silence his critics, “thinking sure they
would respect so grave an author, at lest to the moderating of their odious infer-
ences” (435). Bucer he heard about when DDD 2 had been out for three months,
and he was amazed to find “the same opinion, confirm’d with the same reasons
which in that publisht book without the help or imitation of any precedent Writer,
I had labour’d out, and laid together” (435–6). He insists on the status of a “collat-
eral teacher” with Bucer and Fagius (436), whom he casts simply as character-
witnesses:
Not that I have now more confidence by the addition of these great Authors to my
party; for what I wrote was not my opinion, but my knowledge; evn then when I
could trace no footstep in the way I went: nor that I think to win upon your appre-
hensions with numbers and with names, rather then with reasons, yet certainly the
worst of my detracters will not except against so good a baile of my integritie and
judgement, as now appeares for me. (439–40)His method as translator also asserts his independence, and reveals his distaste for
that exercise. He explains that he translated only “so much of this Treatise as runs
parallel” to his own Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, i.e. that marriage is a civil, not
an ecclesiastical, matter; that there can be no true marriage without love and con-
sent; that Christ could not have branded as adultery a practice God allowed to his
own people; that the passage in Matthew 19 reproved the Pharisees for divorcing
for light causes; that the institution of marriage in Eden defined as its primary pur-
pose the communication of all duties with affection and benevolence; and that the
commonwealth cannot be reformed until the family is.^86 He summarizes some chap-
ters, epitomizes some passages, and freely condenses Bucer’s prolix Latin, skipping
clauses, sentences, and even paragraphs, but he generally renders Bucer’s meaning
fairly. Occasionally, he adds a few words or phrases (usually italicized) to clarify a