Transcribed from the 1869 James Parker and Co. edition byDavid Price,
LEVITICUS XVIII. 18,
CONSIDERED IN CONNECTION WITH THE LAW
OF THE LEVIRATE.
A LETTER
TO
THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY,
LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND,
&c„ &c, &c.
BY
M. W. MAYOW, M.A.,
RECTOR OFSOUTH HEIGHTON CUM TARRING NEVILLE, SUSSEX,
AND LATE STUDENT OF CH. CH.,OXFORD.
Second Edition.
London and Oxford: JAMES PARKER ANDCO.
Brighton: G. WAKELING.
1869.
p. 2BRIGHTON:
G. WAKELING, PRINTER,
NORTH STREET.
A LETTER
TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY,
Lord High Chancellor of England,
&c., &c., &c.
My Lord,
The deep interest which for a long period you have taken inpreserving intact our Table of Degrees as to prohibitedmarriages, will, I hope, sufficiently account for my wish toaddress the following remarks to your Lordship, and yourunvarying kindness will no less account for the ready permissionwhich you have given me to do so. I will not take up anytime in preface further than just to observe that of course youare not in any way responsible for the views or the argument ofthe ensuing pages, though I am, I hope, justified in believingthat, whatever be their imperfections, the object at which theyaim will meet with your sympathy and approval. My earnestand anxious wish is to do what I may, God helping me, to aid inaverting what I feel would be a grievous sin if our marriage lawwere altered in the sense desired by the promoters of theWife’s Sister’s Marriage Bill. I do not purposeto go over the whole ground which has been so often contested,(to do which would be almost an impertinence in remarks addressedto your Lordship), but rather to confine my observations to theScriptural p.4argument, or, perhaps I should say, to a portion of theScriptural argument against the change proposed, viz.—tothe due sense and application of the 18th verse of the xviii.chapter of Leviticus.
There is, I suppose, no room for reasonable doubt that thecase of the advocates of a change in our law which may sanctionthe marriage of a man with his deceased wife’s sister,rests mainly, so far as the Scriptural argument is concerned,upon the 18th verse of the xviii. chapter of Leviticus. “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her,to uncover her nakedness, beside the other, in her lifetime,” where, the translation being assumed to be correct,the interpretation put upon it is that if such a union isforbidden in the life time of the first wife, there is a tacitsanction of the same after her decease. If it were not forthis one verse thus translated and thus interpreted, there would,I think, hardly be a question raised or a doubt felt by one in athousand that such