Marriage to the Bridegroom

As those who know me personally are aware, I've recently been rediscovering my Italian heritage. So, I was quite happy to learn that, lo and behold, there were Italian Reformers! One of these was Don Benedetto, who wrote the work The Benefit of Christ Crucified, which is now available for free on Kindle thanks to Monergism Books. Below is an excerpt from it.

We know that the custom of marriage is that of two there become one self [same] thing, they being two in one flesh, and the goods of both become common to either of them, so that the husband saith the dowry of the wife is his, and in like manner the wife saith that the house and all the riches of the husband are hers; and so truly they be, otherwise they should not be one flesh, as the Holy Scripture saith. Even in the self-same manner God hath married his most dearly- beloved Son with the faithful soul, who having nothing of her own but alonely sin, the Son of God nevertheless hath not disdained to take her for his well- beloved spouse with her own dowry which is sin. And by the uniting and knitting together which is wrought in this most holy matrimony, the thing that appertaineth to the one is also the other's, so that Christ saith then, the dowry of the soul, my dearly-beloved spouse, that is to say, her sins, the transgression of the law, the wrath of God against her, [the] malapertness and boldness of the devil against her, the prison of hell and all her other evils, are come into my power, and are in mine own ordering, and unto me it pertaineth to do with the same dowry even as it pleaseth me, and therefore I will cast it upon the altar of my cross, and make it of none effect.