And what, after all, and in precise practical form, _was_ this tremendous proposition of Milton respecting Divorce? Reduced out of large and cloudy terms, it was simply this,--that marriage, as it respected the continued union of the two married persons, was a thing with which Law had nothing whatever to do; that the two persons who had contracted a marriage were the sole judges of its convenience, and, if they did not suit each other, might part by their own act, and be free again; at all events, that for husbands the Mosaic Law on the subject was still in force: viz. (Deut. xxiv. 1) "When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her [interpreted as including any moral or intellectual incompatibility, any unfitness whatever], then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house." Milton avoids as much as possible such reductions of his proposition to harsh practical form, and would have disowned such brief popular summaries of his doctrine as _Divorce at pleasure_, or _Divorce at the Husband's pleasure_; but, in reality, it came to this. The husband, in modern times, had still, he maintained, the old Mosaic right of giving his wife a "bill of divorcement," if she did not satisfy him, and sending her back to her father's house. The right was a purely personal one. Friends, indeed, might interfere with their good offices; nay it would be fitting, and perhaps necessary, that there should be a solemn formality "in presence of the minister and other grave selected elders," who should admonish the man of the seriousness of the step he was about to take. But, if he persisted in taking it--if "he shall have protested, on the faith of the eternal Gospel and the hope he has of a 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 (Matth. v. 31-32), the matter not being of malice, but of nature, and so not capable of reconciling"--then the Church had done her part to the full, and the man was to be left to his own liberty. This passage, proposing a kind of public oath on the man's part, as a formality to be required in every case of dissolution of marriage, occurs near the end of the treatise in both editions; and it indicates, I think, Milton's recoil from any rough or free and easy version of his doctrine, and his desire to temper it as much as he could. Essentially, however, the proposal mattered little. The husband was still left sole judge of his wife's fitness or unfitness for him, and whether he should exercise his right of putting her away was a matter finally for his private conscience.