If now it be said that the Church of Rome allows such marriages, and that we ought to do the same, first, we deny the fact; for she does not solemnize them without a dispensation, and thus is still a witness to their illegality. But having been tempted by the lust of lucre and of power to swerve from the rule of her fathers, and to grant such dispensations, which she did first in the sixteenth century;2 her eyes are blinded, and she cannot see, what formerly she saw clearly, that these marriages are forbidden by God's Word, lest haply she be forced to allow that she has been guilty of the heinous sin of dispensing with God's Law.

And shall we follow her in this?

If it should be urged that some Protestant communions do not censure these marriages, which we for our part are loth to believe, our only reply need be, that all their pious predecessors condemned those marriages; and if some of our Protestant brethren have now fallen away from the faith and practice of their forefathers, whose names they hold in reverence, we hope that they will not censure us for proving

2 The first dispensation of this kind was given A.D. 1500, by one of the most infamous Popes, Pope Alexander VI. (Borgia), to Emmanuel, King of Portugal. In the next generation the King's family was extinct.

3 So Beza, Melancthon, Luther, and Chemnitz. See Gerhard, Loci Commun. de Conjugio, sec. 347, vol. vii., p. 374, the Westminster Divines, M. Henry, and Dr. C. J. Brown, of Edinburgh. The judgment of our Reformers is clear from the Table of Degrees set forth by them, and from Reformatio Legum, fol. 23, where it is said that marriage with a deceased wife's sister "communi doctorum virorum consensu putatur in Levitico prohiberi."

Leviticus xviii. verse 18.

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our reverence for their forefathers by vindicating their wisdom, and by following their example.

And now let me refer to the eighteenth verse of this eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, a verse which is pleaded by some as in favour of these Marriages.

There we read as follows :—“ Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister to vex her . . . . beside the other in her lifetime."

Here, then, the question is asked, When God forbids a man to marry his wife's sister during his wife's life, may it not be fairly inferred that He does not forbid him to marry her after his wife's death?

To this we would answer, No; such an inference is not sound.

For, first, suppose, for argument's sake, that the English words just recited are a correct translation of the Hebrew original, then we affirm, that in all interpretations of law the general drift of the whole must be considered, and be used as the clue for its exposition; and that in right constructions of law, that which is doubtful is to be elucidated by means of what is clear, and not that which is clear be obscured by that which is doubtful. And we assert that such an inference as has just been recited is at variance with the whole context of the law, by which a man is expressly forbidden to contract marriage with the kindred of his wife, as has been already shown, and in which a sister is specially mentioned as near of kin.

Next, if it were allowable to infer that, because a man is forbidden to marry his wife's sister during his

wife's litetime, therefore he may marry her after his wife's death, it would be equally reasonable to infer, that because he may not marry his wife's sister in his wife's lifetime, he may marry any other person who is not his wife's sister during his wife's life-time.

The fact is, as has been well observed by one of our wisest divines, that it is altogether inconsistent with a right interpretation of the Holy Scriptures to imagine that "a thing denied with special circumstance doth import an opposite affirmation when that circumstance is expired."

For example: when Samuel had uttered a stern prophecy against Saul, we read that he came no more to see him until the day of his death (1 Sam. xv. 35). But are we therefore to infer from this text, that Samuel came to see Saul after his death. Again, we read that Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child until the day of her death (2 Sam. vi. 23). Was she then a mother in the grave ?-Christ promised to be with the Apostles until the end of the world (Matt. xxviii. 20. Will He begin to be absent from them then? No; He will then come in His glorified body, and they will be for ever with the Lord (1 Thess. v. 17).

If, then, our English translation represents correctly here the sense of the original, the meaning of this verse is, that though a man's wife may be old and infirm, or ungracious, and though her sister may be more fair and attractive in person and disposition, yet

4 Hooker, v., xlv. 2, with reference to the memorable text, Matt. i. 25. cp. Bp. Pearson on The Creed, Art. iii., "Born of the Virgin Mary."

What its meaning is.

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he may not espouse the sister in addition to the wife, however long the wife may live. And this prohibition may have been occasioned by the case of the patriarch Jacob, who, under extenuating circumstances (Gen. xxix. 25-28), married Rachel, the sister of Leah his wife, in her lifetime; and whose example, by reason of his patriarchal dignity, might perhaps be construed into a dangerous precedent (so Gerhard, de Conjugio, $350; and others).

But this prohibition is not to be drawn into a permission to marry a wife's sister after her death-a marriage which had been excluded by previous enactments in the same code, forbidding marriages with a wife's kindred, and specifying a sister as near of kin.

But, after all, it is very doubtful whether this verse, the eighteenth, which has been pleaded in favour of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, has any connection with the question at all.

It is very probable that the true rendering of this verse is that which our Translators have placed in the margin of our Bibles; and that the real sense of the passage is, Neither shalt thou take one wife to another to vex her, beside the other, in her lifetime.

In a word, this verse has, probably, nothing to do with the marriage of a wife's sister, but is a prohibition against the marriage of more wives than one at a time. It forbids polygamy.

Why, you may ask, do we affirm this? Look, we may reply, at the scope of the code. It forbids a

marriage with a wife's kindred after her death. It specifies a sister as near of kin. Can it then permit marriage with a wife's sister? Surely not.

Next remark, that the reason given against a man's taking a second wife in his wife's lifetime is, lest by so doing he vex her. But this is no special argument against marrying her sister: she would be as much vexed, whether that second wife were any other woman, as she would be if she were her sister.

Next observe the place of this verse. It stands at the end of the prohibitions concerning affinity, and at the head of a series of general prohibitions, which have no reference to affinity. It may therefore belong to the latter, and not to the former.

Next, examine the words of the original. The Hebrew phrase is ishah el achothah; and this is rightly rendered in our margin one wife to another; or one woman to another; not one wife to her sister.

For, if you look through the books of Moses, you will find this Hebrew phrase used to describe the coupling of one thing with another. Hence Pagnini (Lex. Hebr., p. 83) observes that it is carefully to be noted, that by a Hebrew idiom, any thing is called ish (man) or ishah (woman), as the faces of the Cherubim in Exod. xxv. 20, where the original literally means "one man to his brother" (Cp. Exod. xxxvii. 9). And so the curtains in Exod. xxvi. 3 are said to be coupled

one woman to her sister," that is, one curtain to another. (See also Gesenius, Hebrew Lex., pp. xxvii. xxx., ed. London, 1847. Cp. Gen. xiii. 11; xxvi. 31 ;