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1. In respect of sin, which would not else be prevented: Marriago is like water, to quench the sparks of lust’s fire, 1 Cor. vii. 2. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, &c. Man needed no such physic when he was in perfect health. Temptations may break nature's best sense, and lay its Paradise waste; but a single lifo is a prison of unruly desires, which is daily attempted to be broken open. Some, indeed force themselves to a single life, merely to avoid the charges of a married state; they choose rather to live in their own sensuality, than to extinguish those flames with an allowed remedy: It is better to marry than to burn:—to be lawfully coupled, than to be lustfully scorched. It is best to feed these flames with ordinate fuel.
2 It is not good in respect of mankind, which then would not be propagated. The Roman historian, relating tho ravishing of the Sabine women, excused them thus, ‘Without them mankind would fall from the earth, and perish.’ Marriages do turn mutability into the image of eternity: it springs up new buds when the old are withered. It is a great honour for a man to be the father of one son, than to be the master of many servants. Without a wife, children cannot be had lawfully; without a good wife, children cannot be had comfortably. Man and woman, as the flock and the scion, being grafted in marriage, are trees bearing fruit to the world. Augustine says, ‘They are the first link of human society, to which all the rest are joined.’ Mankind had long ago decayed, and been like a taper fallen into the socket, if those breaches which are made by mortality were not repaired by matrimony.
3. It is not good in regard of the church, which
