But he dwelt with more force on the theological grounds of his
position. “The wife is the weaker vessel. Wives submit yourselves to
your husbands: be in subjection to them. The Husband is the head.
Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord.” And here he had recourse to
the authority of Daniel Rogers (whom he liked the better for his
name's sake) who in his Treatise of Matrimonial Honour teaches that
the duty of subjection, is woman's chief commandment; and that she is
properly made subject by the Law of Creation and by the Law of
Penalty. As thus. All other creatures were created male and female at
the same time; man and woman were not so, for the Man was first
created—as a perfect creature, and afterwards the woman was thought
of. Moreover she was not made of the same matter, equally, with
man,—but of him, of a rib taken from him, and thirdly, she was made
for his use and benefit as a meet help-mate, “three weighty reasons
and grounds of the woman's subjection to the man, and that from the
purpose of the Creator; who might have done otherwise, that is, have
yielded to the Woman co-equal beginning, sameness of generation, or
relation of usefulness; for he might have made her without any such
precedency of matter, without any dependency upon him, and equally for
her good as for his. All shew at ennobling the Man as the Head and
more excellent, not that the Man might upbraid her, but that she might
in all these read her lesson of subjection. And doubtless, as Malachi
speaks, herein is wisdom, for God hath left nothing to be bettered by
our invention.
“The woman, being so created by God in the integrity of Nature had a
most divine honour and partnership of his image, put upon her in her
creation; yea, such as (without prejudice of those three respects)
might have held full and sweet correspondence with her husband. But
her sin still augmented her inequality, and brought her lower and
lower in her prerogative. For since she would take upon her, as a
woman, without respect to the order, dependence and use of her
creation, to enterprize so sad a business, as to jangle and demur with
the Devil about so weighty a point as her husband's freehold, and of
her own brain to lay him and it under foot, without the least parley
and consent of his, obeying Satan before him,—so that till she had put
all beyond question and past amendment, and eaten, she brought not the
fruit to him, therefore the Lord stript her of this robe of her
honour, and smote into the heart of Eve an instinct of inferiority, a
confessed yielding up of her insufficient self to depend wholly upon
her husband.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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