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IV.
- Dear Sir,
You ask me my opinion upon the very important subject which is now agitating so many minds; — Marriage with a deceased Wife's Sister.
To what extent this exists in my Parish, it is impossible to say. We do not know the parties whom we marry. The poor population is always more or less migratory, which renders this knowledge in a London Parish impossible. In my Pastoral visitation, I seldom if ever inquire who is the Wife before marriage; and as you will readily believe the fact of having married two Sisters is never unnecessarily forced upon my attention, I have however several times been asked to solemnize such marriages, which, of course, under the present state of the Law, I have been reluctantly obliged to decline.
I cannot perceive that it is forbidden in the word of God; — on the contrary, the limitation of Levit. xviii. 18, seems to be a sanctioning to marrying a Sister of a Wife when deceased.
The question appears to me, to be one purely of expediency. The alteration of the law will not probably diminish the happiness of social intercourse in the upper classes, but it may make a change in those Brotherly and Sisterly familiarities which have
