It is to the honor of Milton, and one of his chief claims on our gratitude, that he is the first great protagonist in Christendom of the doctrine that marriage is a private matter, and that, therefore, it should be freely dissoluble by mutual consent, or even at the desire of one of the parties.  We owe to him, says Howard, “the boldest defence of the liberty of divorce which had yet appeared.  If taken in the abstract, and applied to both sexes alike, it is perhaps the strongest defence which can be made through an appeal to mere authority;” though his arguments, being based on reason and experience, are often ill sustained by his authority; he is really speaking the language of the modern social reformer, and Milton’s writings on this subject are now sometimes ranked in importance above all his other work (Masson, Life of Milton, vol. iii; Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 86, vol. iii, p. 251; C.B.  Wheeler, “Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Nineteenth Century, Jan., 1907).

Marriage, said Milton, “is not a mere carnal coition, but a human society; where that cannot be had there can be no true marriage” (Doctrine of Divorce, Bk. i, Ch.  XIII); it is “a covenant, the very being whereof consists not in a forced cohabitation, and counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfeigned love and peace” (Ib., Ch.  VI).  Any marriage that is less than this is “an idol, nothing in the world.”  The weak point in Milton’s presentation of the matter is that he never explicitly accords to the wife the same power of initiative in marriage and divorce as to the husband.  There is, however, nothing in his argument to prevent its equal application to the wife, an application which, while never asserting he never denies; and it has been pointed out that he assumes that women are the equals of men and demands from them intellectual and spiritual companionship; however ready Milton may have been to grant complete equality of divorce to the wife, it would have been impossible for a seventeenth century Puritan to have obtained any hearing for such a doctrine; his arguments would have been received with, if that were possible, even more neglect than they actually met. (Milton’s scornful sonnet concerning the reception of his book is well known.)

Milton insists that in the conventional Christian marriage exclusive importance is attached to carnal connection.  So long as that connection is possible, no matter what antipathy may exist between the couple, no matter how mistaken they may have been “through any error, concealment, or misadventure,” no matter if it is impossible for them to “live in any union or contentment all their days,” yet the marriage still holds good, the two must “fadge together” (op. cit., Bk. i).  It is the Canon law, he says, which is at fault, “doubtless by the policy of the devil,” for the Canon law leads to licentiousness (op. cit.).  It is, he argues, the absence of reasonable liberty which