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guarded and protested against in those words of the contract for better for worse which signify something to be fure, and what else can they fignify? The hazard of other circumstances being provided for in the words next following, [for richer for poorer, in fickness and in health. If danger of life be pleaded, or the sufferance of violent injuries and abuses, yet is there no such virtue as patience, no such duty as fubmission to the providence, and trust in the protection of God, required of us? And if they are, when must they be expected, when can they be exercised, but in a state of suffering? But if a remedy is to be fought for, all that can regularly be done, is first to fee what the good offices of private friends can do, and if they fail, then to apply to the proper court, and submit the case to the determination of those whom the law has appointed judges therein. And still separation, whether legal or illegal, is so bad a remedy, that like desperate medicines, it should not be so much as thought of, till all other means have proved utterly incapable of effect, and that they cannot poffibly live any longer together: For to any good and difcreet person, such separation must be so comfortless a state, attended with fuch danger of ruin, both temporal and eternal, that all the hardships which it is applied to cure, could scarcely make the fufferer more uneafy or unhappy. But the unconcernedness of many loose, unthinking people under it, as full of mirth, and air, and jollity, as if no such misfortune had happen'd to them, makes it too evident, that it is sometimes a state of choice, more than of necessity. And if this practice goes on, perhaps in half an age more, it will be thought needless so much as to pretend, or talk of such a formal thing as a reason for parting; and marriage will become of course, no more than a temporary concubinage, that may be broke off at pleasure, with as much freedom, as we change our servants. The laws indeed have hitherto secured the continuance of the marriage, by maintaining (in spight of any fuch separation) the validity of jointures, settlements, and other civil rights of it, but the affection, cohabitation, &c. which I beg leave to call the facred rights of marriage (as being the performance of what was folemnly vowed before God and the congregation, when it was contracted) are even now by some people, broke through with as little scruple, as if the contract had been really made but for a time. And tho' I will not charge our laws with favouring this, any otherwise than by too general and dangerous a connivance; yet I must say there is a custom which directly encourages separation, and therefore wants a full and positive law to restrain it: I mean the scandalous provision usually made before-hand, by settlements or marriage-articles for the wives separate maintenance, in case her husband and she should not think fit to live together. All such provisions, call them by what name you will, whether pin-money, or any thing else, which serve, and are designed to serve this purpose, with whatever plausible pretence they may be varnished over, I take to be of most pernicious consequence; as providing for a cafe, that ought not to be supposed amongst Christians, and putting a couple in mind of parting from each other, even then, when they are going folemnly to contract, for a strict union, affection, and cohabitation during life; and laying professedly a scheme for their doing that with convenience, which ought not to be done at all, and which with almost the same breath they vow before God and the congregation, that they will never do. Now what is all this, but a monstrous absurdity in the very nature of the thing, a most notorious shuffling in the accounts of common honesty, and a most impu

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dent prevarication with God himself? What is it but to empower and teach the wife to difregard her husband, and to loosen that dependance, which by the divine * law she should always have upon him; for fuch a maintenance is secured to her, that she may carry well or ill to him, without danger to her intereft, and leave him when she pleases. And as to the real influence of mischief fuch provifions may have had, I am fatisfied, that many separations would never have been thought of, if this security given before-hand, had not encouraged and prepared the way for them. But perhaps pin-money, and the like provifions before-hand for differtion with convenience, being not morally evil; nor falling directly within the letter of this prohibition of divorce, may be thought not to deserve fo much notice, in a short summary of chriftian practice, as I have taken of them; but because our Saviour certainly defigned here, to condemn every thing that any ways promoted a disunion after marriage: I should not have been faithful to my subject, if I had been less severe upon a custom, which so much encourages a wife upon the least diflike to leave her husband; and the rather, because the practice grows every day more and more fashionable.

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CHAP.

XIII.

227

Of taking God's Name in vain.

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MATTH. V. 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

Again, ye have heard, That it hath been faid by them of old time, Thou shalt not forfwear thy self, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths.

But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven, for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: neither by Jerufalem, for it is the city of the great King.

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Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.

But let your communication be yea, yea; nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these, cometh of evil.

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HE third commandment, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, was understood by the Jewish doctors, as no more than a prohibition of perjury. And therefore as they taught the people took it, and looked no farther for the

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sense of the precept, than this short paraphrafe : Thou shalt not forswear thy self, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths; which probably was their allowed and common gloss, established by authority in their schools, and cited as fuch by our blessed Saviour; who ('tis obfervable) does not here repeat the very words of the commandment, as he had done those of the fixth and seventh before, but their interpretation only: Because the words of the commandment, as God had delivered them, are fo general, that perjury is no more expressed in them than prophane swearing; and as both are alike included and intended, the one is as easily reducible as the other, to the very terms of the law. But it was their gloss, that had injuriously restrain'd those general words; and therefore our Saviour cites that, in order to correct and supply the defects of it. Nor shall I need, in discoursing hereupon, to infift upon the crime of swearing falsly; which was then, and always has been (not only by the force of this divine precept, but by the light of nature) acknowledged to be a grievous fin; as murder and adultery also were, and for that reason I forbore to enlarge upon them in the foregoing paragraphs. For our Saviour left every precept of the decalogue, in the fame full force and latitude, wherein it had ever been received or interpreted by the Jews: But where their interpretation had too much narrowed a command, and straitned the meaning of it, he enlarged it to its due perfection and extent. His new explications therefore and improvements, are what I am properly to confider: And what those are with regard to this third commandment, will be the clearer, if we suppose him only thus to have expressed himself.

" YE all acknowledge your selves obliged in con"science, by authority of the third command"ment, to swear nothing falfly, but to be very " fure

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