of either, and that there has bin a remediles mistake, as vain wee goe about to compell them into one flesh, as if wee undertook to weav a garment of drie sand. It were more easy to compell the vegetable and nutritive power of nature to assimilations and mixtures which are not alterable each by other; or force the concoctive stomach to turn that into flesh which is so totally unlike that substance as not to be wrought on. For as the unity of mind is neerer and greater then the union of bodies, so doubtles is the dissimilitude greater and more dividuall, as that which makes between bodies all difference and distinction. Especially whenas besides the singular and substantial differences of every Soul, there is an intimat quality of good or evil, through the whol progeny of Adam, which like a radical heat, or mortal chilnes, joyns them, or disjoyns them irresistibly. In whom therefore either the will, or the faculty is found to have never joyn'd, or now not to continue so, 'tis not to say, they shall be one flesh, for they cannot be one flesh. God commands not impossibilities; and all the Ecclesiastical glue, that Liturgy, or Laymen can compound, is not able to soder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming Mariage. Why did Moses then set down thir uniting into one flesh? And I again ask, why the Gospel so oft repeats the eating of our Saviours flesh, the drinking of his blood? That we are one body with him, the members of his body, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone. Ephes. 5. Yet lest we should be Capernaitans, as wee are told there, that the flesh profiteth nothing; so wee are told heer, if we be not as deaf as Adders, that this union of the flesh proceeds from the union of a fit help and solace. Wee know that there was never a more spiritual mystery then this Gospel taught us under the terms of body and flesh; yet nothing less intended then that wee should stick there. What a stupidnes then is it, that in Mariage, which is the nearest resemblance of our union with Christ, we should deject our selvs to such a sluggish and underfoot Philosophy, as to esteem the validity of Mariage meerly by the flesh, though never so brokn and disjoynted from love and peace, which only can give a human qualification to that act of the flesh, and distinguish it from bestial. The Text therefore uses this phrase, that they shall bee one flesh, to justify and make legitimat the rites of Mariage-bed; which was not unneedfull, if for all this warrant they were suspected of pollution by some sects of Philosophy, and Religions of old, and latelier among the
