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Disorders, that the Passions are in a general Disorder on both Sides, by mutual Provocations. (And how is it possible to be otherwise.) How then can it be, but that they must Sin together, must provoke one another to all those Offences which naturally attend an enraged Mind, an envenom'd Spirit, and a Soul imbitter'd by outrageous Usage.
Hence proceed vile and provoking Words, bitter and cutting Reproaches, undue and indecent Reflections, horrid Wishes, Imprecations, Railing and Cursing; till, in short, they push one another on to the Gates of Hell, and need no Devil but their own ungoverned Rage, to thrust them in.
All this, and more, if more can be thought of, is the Product of Inequalities in Matrimony, unsuitable Matches, a joyning Things together that will not, and cannot joyn; as I said, they may be tyed together, but cannot be joyned, joyned but cannot be united. Such Marriages are to me little less than a Sentence of Condemnation to a perpetual State of Misery. The Man or Woman thus married, is sentenced as the Romans sentenced Nero to die, More Majorum, that was, to have his Head put into a Collar of Iron, or kind of Pillory, and to be scourged to Death; they are condemned to be tyed together, and to be worry'd to Death.
To marry two Persons together that are of contrary Dispositions, unsuitable Tempers, disproportioned Years, and the like, is like the Way of punishing Malefactors in Persia, viz. tying the living Body to a dead Corpse, till the rotting Carcass poisoned the living, and then they rotted together.
Let
