_Answ._ 1. Natural necessity justified Adam's children, and such would now justify you. Yea, the benediction "Increase and multiply," did not only allow, but oblige them then to marry, to replenish the earth (when else mankind would soon have ceased); but so it doth not us now when the earth is replenished. Yet I deny not, but if a man and his sister were cast alone upon a foreign wilderness, where they justly despaired of any other company, if God should bid them there "increase and multiply," it would warrant them to marry. But else there is no necessity of it, and therefore no lawfulness. For, 2. A vicious necessity justifieth not the sin. If the man or woman that should abstain will be mad or dead with passion, rather than obey God, and deny and mortify their lust, it is not one sin that will justify them in another. The thing that is necessary, is to conform their wills to the law of God; and if they will not, and then say, They cannot, they must bear what they get by it. 3. And it is no necessity that is imposed by that command of king or parents, which is against the law of God. 4. No, nor by a vow neither; for a vow to break God's law is not an obligation to be kept, but to be repented of; nor is the necessity remediless which such a one bringeth on himself, by vowing never to marry any other; seeing chastity may be kept. _Quest._ VII. Is it lawful for one to marry, that hath vowed chastity during life, and not to marry, and afterward findeth a necessity of marrying, for the avoiding of lust and fornication? _Answ._ I know that many great divines have easily absolved those, that under popery vowed chastity. The principal part of the solution of the question, you must fetch from my solution of the Case of Vows, part iii. chap. v. tit. 2. At the present this shall suffice to be added to it. 1. Such vows of chastity that are absolute, without any exceptions of after alterations or difficulties that may arise, are sinfully made, or are unlawful _quoad actum jurandi_.[8] 2. If parents or others impose such oaths and vows on their children or subjects, or induce them to it, it is sinfully done of them, and the _actus imperantium_ is also unlawful. 3. Yet as long as the _materia jurata_, the matter vowed, remaineth lawful, the vow doth bind, and it is perfidiousness to break it. For the sinfulness of the imposer's act proveth no more, but that such a command did not oblige you to vow. And a vow made arbitrarily without any command, doth nevertheless bind. And the sinfulness of the making of the vow, doth only call for repentance; (as if you made it causelessly, rashly, upon ill motives, and to ill ends, or in ill circumstances, &c.) But yet that vow which you repent that ever you made, must be nevertheless kept, if the thing vowed be a lawful thing, and the act of vowing be not made a nullity (though it was a sin). And when it is a nullity, I have showed in the forecited place.