“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645his own, then with rigor upon the boundlesse riots of them who serv another
Maister” (634).
Turning to Matthew 5:31–2 and 19:2–11, he now accounts more adequately for
the difficulties those texts pose. He clarifies the status of the Mosaic Law for Chris-
tians: the ceremonial and that part of the judicial law which is “meerely judaicall”
(i.e. pertaining to the Jews alone) are abrogated for them, but the part that pertains
to morality (as divorce law surely does) is part of the enduring natural law and
cannot be abrogated (II, 642–3). That Mosaic law of divorce also accords with the
gospel rule of charity, defined in humanistic terms: “the great and almost only
commandment of the Gospel, is to command nothing against the good of man”
(638–9). As well, Milton now finds a more useful interpretation for Christ’s term,
“hardness of heart.” He repeats his former explanation, that Christ used that phrase
to rebuke the Pharisee questioners who had abused the Mosiac law by divorcing for
frivolous reasons; to them he offered “nott so much a teaching, as an intangling”
(642). But now Milton also applies that phrase to all postlapsarian humanity, whose
fallenness gave rise to the “secondary law of nature and of nations” that is the sanction
for many necessary but imperfect human institutions:
Partly for this hardnesse of heart, the imperfection and decay of man from original
righteousnesse, it was that God suffer’d not divorce onely, but all that which by
Civilians is term’d the secondary law of nature and of nations. He suffer’d his own
people to wast and spoyle and slay by warre, to lead captives, to be som maisters,
som servants, some to be princes, others to be subjects, hee suffer’d propriety to
divide all things... some to bee undeservedly rich, others to bee undeservingly
poore. All which till hardnesse of heart came in, was most unjust; whenas prime
nature made us all equall.... If therefore we abolish divorce as only suffer’d for
hardnes of heart, we may as well abolish the whole law of nations, as only sufferd for
the same cause.^119Because of this universal hardness of heart, marriage cannot now be the perfect and
therefore indissoluble union Christ pointed to when he declared, “in the beginning
it was not so”:
While man and woman were both perfet each to other, there needed no divorce; but
when they both degenerated to imperfection, & oft times grew to be an intolerable
evil each to other, then law more justly did permitt the alienating of that evil which
mistake made proper.... [Now] the rule of perfection is not so much that which was
don in the beginning, as that which now is nearest to the rule of charity. (665, 667)In Tetrachordon Milton also gives a more comprehensive exposition than before
of the term “fornication,” accommodating it to his argument according to two
understandings of the term. If it means adultery, as most think, then Christ here
forbids divorce for offenses less than adultery and does not even address the “natural