ceases." An astounding, a tremendous conclusion! Observe, so a man may marry his father's wife, his son's wife, his brother's wife, his wife's mother, his wife's daughter, his wife's grand-daughter—all expressly fordidden in Scripture! Thus he interprets St. Paul so as to make him directly contradict himself: see I Cor. V. 1. It would be treason to religion, and a wrong every Christian who venerates the Bible as God's sacred and authoritative Word, not to cry out with loudest voice—"Behold a blind guide, and beware of him!" Let there be no misconception, no shirking—here is his statement: "The relationship of affinity ceases." Who is prepared to accept it and all its consequences? This is what self-will is driven to, when it thinks itself wiser than the whole Church of God!
Mr P. wishes his friend Dr. Hodgins, to "affirm (privately) on his behalf that he tries to love Jesus"; and Dr. Hodgins, like a zealous friend, does it publicly and at once. The christian public must be allowed to doubt the love that asserts itself in such new ways—Dr. Hodgins' assurances, and, a still more unlikely method, breaking the Laws of the Lord Jesus! whose Spirit was in the Old Testament writers. "If a man love Me he will keep my words", says our Lord. Now, supposing Mr. P. "knows and is persuaded by the Lord Jesus," [N. B. St. Paul does not venture on the familiarity "Jesus"], that this marriage in question is "not unclean of itself", does that justify him in evading the laws of his native land, in presuming on the laws of this land, and outraging the moral sense of nearly all religious communities, in order to contract it? "If thy brother be grieved with thy marriage, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy marriage for whom Christ died"—as he now runs the risk of doing manifoldly, by encouraging weak consciences to act against external laws and inward convictions in compliance with unregulated desire, under the patronage of a distinguished religious leader. A religious leader might well pause in the exercise of what he thought a lawful liberty, at the Apostle's words: "Take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to them that are weak." "When ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ." I fear Dr. Hodgins's "affirmations" will hardly outweigh these last considerations in the public mind.
III. There is one more argument which is relied on to weaken the force of all that has been said. It is objected that in spite of the plain prohibition in Lev. xviii. 16. of marriage with a deceased brother's wife, (and by "parity of reasoning," as we hold, with a deceased wife's sister), yet there can be nothing intrinsically immoral in such unions, as in a special case they are even enjoined, Deut. xxv 6-10. The whole force of this objection depends upon the assumption that the brothers are own brothers, sons of one father or mother. It is truly surprising how generally this assumption has been allowed. Its force is parried by the maxim that "the exception proves the rule"—that God is the supreme Lawgiver, whom we cannot limit. Weighty and true indeed; but the assumption itself is to be denied: and thus what seemed an exception," weakening the moral force of the general prohibition, turns out to be no exception, but an unmitigated enforcement of that rule, giving it a resistless moral weight. For the knowledge of this fact (I feel bound very clearly and thankfully to say) I am entirely indebted to Mr. Galloway, whose proofs I shall do but little more than arrange in my own words.
The point of the case as put by the Sadducees to our Lord, (Matt
