although a man may often be unjust in seeking that which he loves, yet he can never be unjust or blamable in retiring from his endless trouble and distaste, whenas his tarrying can redound to no true content on either side."[268] All this despotic power is placed in the husband's hands for the woman's good; for it is "an unseemly affront to the sequestered and veiled modesty of that sex, to have her unpleasingness and other concealments bandied up and down, and aggravated in open court by those hired masters of tongue-fence.... It is true an adulteress cannot be shamed enough by any public proceeding; but the woman whose honour is not appeached is less injured by a silent dimission, being otherwise not illiberally dealt with, than to endure a clamouring debate of utterless things." Whether it would be well to shame the adulterer by publicity we are not informed. Power would thus be restored to the "master of the family," where it was divinely placed. For its exercise there is but one condition needful among Christian men. The repudiation should take place in "the presence of the minister and other grave selected elders." These are to "admonish" him; and he in turn is to declare solemnly by "the hope he has of happy resurrection, that otherwise than thus he cannot do, and thinks himself and this his case not contained in that prohibition of divorce which Christ pronounced, the matter not being of malice, but nature, and so not capable of reconciling." He must not be restrained further. To do so "were to unchristian him, to unman him, to throw the whole mountain of Sinai upon him, with the weight of the whole law to boot, flat against the liberty and essence of the gospel." The procedure thus provided for by Milton, remarks Jeaffreson, is a "strictly private trial in which the husband discharged the function of prosecutor, furnished the evidence, and played the part of a judge." But Milton is conscious that the denial of a reciprocal liberty to the wife may require some defense. This he supplies by a singular piece of logic, which in its effect would sanction and encourage the basest tyranny for even the vilest purposes, though he does not appear to see it.[269] "The law can only appoint the just and equal conditions of divorce," he declares, "and is to look how it is an injury to the divorced," that is to say, to the repudiated wife. But in truth, he hastens to add, "as a mere separation" it can be no injury to her; "for if she consent, wherein has the law to right her? or consent not, then is it either just, and so deserved; or if unjust, such in all likelihood was the divorcer: and to part from an unjust man is a happiness and no injury to be lamented. But suppose it be an injury, the law is not able to amend it, unless she think it other than a miserable redress, to return back from whence she was expelled, or but entreated to be gone;" or else, if not formally separated, "to live apart still married without marriage, a married widow." The