Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be justified in disregarding the limitation, which our version of the Scriptures assigns to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of opinion that this limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others held that, if a wrong rendering of a particular word were replaced by its true English equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the dissolution of marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more than some serious mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the Commissioners’ recommendations were a compromise between the requirements of bold reformers who wished for a much larger, and of timid reformers, who would have preferred a smaller, measure of freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer been on the Commission, as he certainly would have been but for his recent death, it cannot be questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained a far greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s opinion (_vide_ his _Judgment touching Divorce_, addressed to Edward the Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the husband and wife did not ‘love one another to the height of dearness,’ or the husband could not rightly govern and cherish the wife, or the wife was flagrantly disobedient and unprofitable to her lord, or either party ‘defrauded the other of conjugal benevolence,’--views which commended themselves so cordially to John Milton, that he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s conclusions, John Milton’s four works on divorce--the _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, the _Tetrachordon_, the _Colasterion_, and the new edition of Bucer’s _Judgment touching Divorce_--show also how far he went beyond the sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s right to secede from an uncongenial partner, and to associate himself with an acceptable helpmate. No libertine, for the gratification of vile desire, ever demanded greater license of re-marriage than Milton, in the name of religion, demanded for Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.