st rank, Wilhelm von Humboldt, spoke out with equal authority
and clearness in favor of free marriage and free divorce.

It is to the honor of Milton, and one of his chief claims on our
gratitude, that he is the first great protagonist in Christendom
of the doctrine that marriage is a private matter, and that,
therefore, it should be freely dissoluble by mutual consent, or
even at the desire of one of the parties. We owe to him, says
Howard, "the boldest defence of the liberty of divorce which had
yet appeared. If taken in the abstract, and applied to both sexes
alike, it is perhaps the strongest defence which can be made
through an appeal to mere authority;" though his arguments, being
based on reason and experience, are often ill sustained by his
authority; he is really speaking the language of the modern
social reformer, and Milton's writings on this subject are now
sometimes ranked in importance above all his other work (Masson,
_Life of Milton_, vol. iii; Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 86,
vol. iii, p. 251; C.B. Wheeler, "Milton's Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce," _Nineteenth Century_, Jan., 1907).

Marriage, said Milton, "is not a mere carnal coition, but a human
society; where that cannot be had there can be no true marriage"
(_Doctrine of Divorce_, Bk. i, Ch. XIII); it is "a covenant, the
very being whereof consists not in a forced cohabitation, and
counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfeigned love and
peace" (Ib., Ch. VI). Any marriage that is less than this is "an
idol, nothing in the world." The weak point in Milton's
presentation of the matter is that he never explicitly accords to
the wife the same power of initiative in marriage and divorce as
to the husband. There is, however, nothing in his argument to
prevent its equal application to the wife, an application which,
while never asserting he never denies; and it has been pointed
out that he assumes that women are the equals of men and demands
from them intellectual and spiritual companionship; however ready
Milton may have been to grant complete equality of divorce to the
wife, it would have been impossible for a seventeenth century
Puritan to have obtained any hearing for such a doctrine; his
arguments would have been received with, if that were possible,
even more neglect than they actually met. (Milton's