Catalogue Entry: THEM00348

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My author and disposer, what thou bidd'st

Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains;

God is thy law, thou mine. Paradise Lost, IV. 635.

Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey

Before his voice, or was she made thy guide,

Superior, or but equal, that to her

Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place

Wherein God set thee above her made of thee

And for thee, whose perfection far excelled

Hers in all real dignity. X. 145.

... To thy husband's will

Thine shall submit; lie over thee shall rule. Ibid. 195.

See also Tetrachordon: 'But St. Paul ends the controversy that indelible character of priority which God crowned him with.' Prose Works, II. 121, 122.

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'Nevertheless, as I find that Grotius on this place hath observed, the Christian emperors, Theodosius the second, and Justinian, men of high wisdom and reputed piety, decreed it to be a divorcive fornication, if the wife attempted either against the knowledge, or obstinately against the will of her husband, such things as gave open suspicion of adulterizing, as the wilful haunting of feasts, and invitations with men not of her near kindred, the lying forth of her house without probable cause, the frequenting of theatres against her husband's mind,' &c. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, II. 45.

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It will he remembered that Milton was reproached by his enemies with having been a schoolmaster. In the Transposer Rehearsed, written by R. Leigh, Oxon. 1673, 12mo. he is called a Latin Secretary and an English Schoolmaster, p. 128. and Salmasius in his posthumous reply to the 'Defence of the People of England,' describes him as 'ludimagister in schola triviali Londinensi.' Newton and Symmons have vindicated him from this crime with more seriousness than the charge seems to deserve.