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sister, who was the sister spoken of in the main clause of the sentence, and had been spoken of in a clause just preceding, as of the second sister who is spoken of subordinately in the last only. In this case, according to a well-known idiom, 'I will praise my God so long as I live' the words would be the most emphatic prohibition ever to take her."
But turning from the consideration of verse 18, we come now to the consideration of that which may well be considered the key of the whole position, and that on which I would desire to build my proposition, that marriage with a deceased wife's sister is contrary to the Law of God, namely, the full meaning of Lev. xviii. 6: "None of you shall, approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover his nakedness: I am the Lord"; or giving the first part of this verse literally according to Bishop Wordsworth, it would read: "Man, man, you shall not approach to any flesh of his flesh". And continuing Dr. Pusey's remarks from where I left off just above, he goes on to say: "I do not rest the argument upon this, for I believe that the real and sufficient ground which makes these marriages illegal is, that they are directly prohibited by God's Law, Lev. xviii. 6, in its natural sense, in the only sense in which it is in harmony with the rest of the chapter: that moreover, the Apostles in the decree of Jerusalem rejected them; and that having been rejected by them then, the Church has ever since rejected them, as contrary to the Law of God. But at least it cannot be said, that the weight of authority which has been of late produced against the interpretation which would make Lev. xviii. 18 a prohibition of polygamy generally, lies against this natural construction of the words." And, p. 32, he says: "Christians should be careful how, in the face of an emphatic prohibition, they justify themselves in contravening the obvious meaning of that prohibition, by aid of a (if so it seem to them) plausible inference from a limited prohibition, and that whole prohibition done away in Christ. The principle in common to both cases is this, that a positive prohibition of God once given, is not evacuated by a restricted prohibition on a kindred subject." I have now to show that the marriages of those near of kin were forbidden to Gentiles as well as to Jews, that is, that the pro-
