and modify'd, but is alwaies an excesse. The least sinne that is, exceeds the measure of the largest law that can bee good; and is as boundlesse as that vacuity beyond the world. If once it square to the measure of Law, it ceases to be an excesse, and consequently ceases to be a sinne; or else law conforming it selfe to the obliquity of sin, betraies it selfe to be not strait, but crooked, and so immediatly no law. And the improper conceit of moderating sin by law, will appeare, if wee can imagin any lawgiver so senselesse as to decree that so farre a man may steale, and thus farre bee drunk, that moderately he may cozen, and moderately committ adultery. To the same extent it would be as pithily absurd to publish that a man may moderately divorce, if to doe that be intirely naught. But to end this moot, the law of Moses is manifest to fixe no limit therein at all, or such at lest as impeaches the fraudulent abuser no more then if it were not set; only requires the dismissive writing without other caution, leaves that to the inner man, and the barre of conscience. But it stopt other sins. This is as vaine as the rest, and dangerously uncertain: the contrary to be fear'd rather, that one sin admitted courteously by law, open'd the gate to another. However evil must not be don for good. And it were a fall to be lamented, and indignity unspeakable, if law should becom tributary to sin her slave, and forc't to yeild up into his hands her awfull minister Punishment, should buy out her peace with sinne for sinne, paying as it were her so many Philistian foreskins to the proud demand of Transgression. But suppose it any way possible to limit sinne, to put a girdle about that Chaos, suppose it also good; yet if to permitt sin by Law bee an abomination in the eyes of God, as Cameron acknowledges, the evil of permitting will eate out the good of limiting. For though sin be not limited, there can but evil come out of evil; but if it be permitted & decreed lawfull by divine law, of force then sin must proceed from the infinit Good, which is a dreadfull thought. But if the restraining of sinne by this permission beeing good, as this author testifies, be more good then the permission of more sin by the restraint of divorce, and that God waighing both these like two ingots in the perfet scales of his justice and providence found them so, and others coming without authority from God, shall change this counterpoise, and judge it better to let sin multiply by setting a judicial restraint upon divorce, which Christ never set; then to limit sin by this permission, as God himselfe thought best to permitt it, it will behoove them to consult betimes whether these their ballances be not fals and abominable; and this their limiting that which God loosen'd, and their loosning the sinnes that he limited, which they
