the matrimony can no longer hold: but adding, that he often wonder'd, how the antient and most christian Emperors establisht those lawes of divorce, and neither Ambrose, who had such influence upon the lawes of Theodosius, nor any of those holy fathers found fault, nor any of the Churches, why the Magistrats of this day should be so loth to constitute the same. Perhaps they feare an inundation of divorces, which is not likely, whenas we reade not either among the Ebrews, Greeks, or Romans, that they were much frequent where they were most permitted. If they judge christian men, worse then Jewes or Pagans, they both injure that name, and by this reason will bee constrain'd to grant divorces the rather; because it was permitted as a remedy of evil, for who would remove the medicin, while the disease is yet so rife? This being read both in his common places, & on the first to the Corinthians, with what we shall relate more of him yet ere the end, sets him absolutely on this side. Not to insist that in both these, & other places of his commentaries hee grants divorce not onely for desertion, but for the seducement and scandalous demeanour of a heretical consort.
Musculus a divine of no obscure fame distinguishes betweene the religious and the civil determination of divorce; and leaving the civil wholly to the lawyers, pronounces a conscionable divorce for impotence not only natural, but accidental, if it be durable. His equity it seems, can enlarge the words of Christ to one cause more then adultery; why may not the reason of another man as wise, enlarge them to another cause.
Gualter of Zuric, a well known judicious commentator in his Homilies on Matthew, allows divorce for Leprosie, or any other cause which renders unfit for wedloc, and calls this rather a nullity of mariage then a divorce, and who, that is not himselfe a meer body, can restrain all the unfitnes of mariage only to a corporeal defect.
Hemingius an Author highly esteem'd, and his works printed at Geneva, writing of divorce, confesses that lerned men vary in this question, some granting three causes thereof, some five, others many more; he himselfe gives us sixe, adultery, desertion, inability, error, evill usage, and impiety, using argument that Christ under one special containes the whole kind, & under the name & example of fornication he includes other causes equipollent. This discours he wrote at the
