The title symbolizes Milton's attempt to connect four passages of Biblical scripture to rationalize the legalization of divorce.
[1] The first tract was created during a time of humiliation, and Milton was motivated towards writing on the topic after reading the work of Martin Bucer on divorce.
[3] This reconciliation could have come in part from the failure of the royalists, including Powell's family, to prevail during the English Civil War and lacking justification to further distance themselves from Milton.
[6]Attacks such as this demonstrate how Milton abandoned his desire to reform the laws of England in order to focus on satirizing his enemies.
Although, he does allow for some exceptions, his standard view on the matter is expressed when he argues:[7] But that which far more easily and obediently follows from this verse, is that, seeing woman was purposely made for man, and he her head, it cannot stand before the breath of this divine utterance, that man the portraiture of God, joyning to himself for his intended good and solace an inferiour sexe, should so become her thrall, whose wilfulness or inability to be a wife frustrates the occasionall end of her creation, but that he may acquitt himself to freedom by his naturall birthright, and that indelible character of priority which God crown'd him with.