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his wife have married her sister, she being also a communicant, let them be suspended from communion for five years, except there be need through sickness of a more speedy reconciliation”. “Elvira is in Spain, Neo-Cæsarea in Pontus; these marriages were therefore condemned at that time from one end to the other of the Christian world.” (Dr. Pusey, II., p. 12) (Keble, p. 26). "In the General Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, the first canon pronounces it 'fit and just that the canons of the Holy Fathers make in every Synod to this present time be in full force'; thus adopting among others the censures which had been previously enacted against marrying two sisters. St. Ambrose (born A.D. 333, Bishop of Milan 374, died 397), and St. Augustine (born A.D. 354, converted 386, Assistant Bishop of Hippo 395, died 430), distinctly recognise the Levitical degrees as binding on all Christians; not only those which are expressed, but those which are implied by parity of reasoning." (See Keble, p. 29.) “The language of St. Basil (born about A.D. 329, Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia 370, died Jan. 1, 379), is exceedingly strong, for its having been an universal hereditary practice to forbid the marriage with the sister of the deceased wife. He speaks of it as being something unheard of, which people would shudder at. He speaks of ‘the practice established among us having the power of a law, because these laws (using a word which means sacred laws), have been delivered down to us by holy men’. So that he speaks of it as a traditional custom before his time, and this as an exception which anybody would shudder at. His words refer to an universal sacred practice.” (See Dr. Pusey's Evidence before the Commissioners, II., p. 12.) And regarding this evidence I may here mention what the Ecclesiastic says (Vol. VII., p. 192), “no one can be considered as having made himself master of this question who has not read Dr. Pusey's evidence; the research and learning it displays, being something that belongs rather to a past age than to our own”; and I may add he has prefixed to his evidence a valuable preface. A very important piece of evidence Dr. Pusey gives in the next page to that from which I have just quoted, when he says, “we actually know from the Roman laws (which I have investigated lately) that these marriages were allowed, and that as soon as the
