before; and if it bring a minde perpetually avers and disagreeable, betraies us to a wors condition then the most deserted lonelines. 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 then any wildernes, as the Spirit of God himself judges, Prov. 19. especially knowing that the best and wisest men amidst the sincere and most cordiall designes of their heart, doe dayly erre in choosing. We may conclude therfore seeing orthodoxall Expositors confesse to our hands, that by lonelines is not only meant the want of copulation, and that man is not lesse alone by turning in a body to him, unlesse there be within it a minde 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 minde, and not unnaturally to set it beneath the formalities and respects of the body, to make it a servant of its owne vassall, I say we may conclude that such a mariage, wherin the minde is so disgrac't and vilify'd below the bodies interest, and can have no just or tolerable contentment, is not of Gods institution, and therfore no mariage. Nay in concluding this, I say we conclude no more then 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 leav 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 taxt of novelties and strange producements, while they, like that inconsiderat bird, know not that these are their own naturall breed.
[I will make him a help meet for him.] Heer the heavnly instituter, as if he labour'd, not to be mistak'n by the supercilious hypocrisie of those that love to maister their brethren, and to make us sure that he gave us not now a servil 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 heer again, as before, I doe not require more full and fair deductions then the whole consent of our Divines usually raise from this text, that in matrimony there must be first a mutuall help to piety, next to civill fellowship of love and amity, then to generation, so to houshold affairs, lastly the remedy of incontinence. And commonly they reck'n them in such order, as leavs generation and incon-
