Page:Vindicationoflaw00hath.djvu/57

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ON SCRIPTURAL PRINCIPLES.
49

The above passage will be again referred to, in respect of its most singular mistakes both as to our Ecclesiastical and our Civil Law. I shall then show that our Civil Courts, in the time of Charles II., held marriage with the wife's sister to be void, on the very ground that it was within the Levitical degrees. But what I am at this moment concerned with is the quiet assumption made by Dr. M'Caul, that the translation which he advocates, and in which he is doubtless supported by the authorized version, and by many authorities ancient and modern, at once settles the question of the lawfulness of marriage with a deceased wife's sister. Now so far is this from being the case, that Dr. M'Caul has not been able to produce a single Christian writer, prior to the Reformation, who has intimated an expression even of doubt as to the illegality of the marriage in question. He was distinctly challenged to do this in a learned pamphlet, published by Dr. Pusey in 1860, called "God's Prohibition of the Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister not to be set aside by an Inference from a Restriction of Polygamy among the Jews." Dr. M'Caul must have read this pamphlet, for in page 17 of his letter to me he quotes with approbation a passage from page 37 of the pamphlet. And almost immediately preceding the passage quoted by Dr. M'Caul, viz. in page 36, Dr. Pusey says, "But no Christian writer, I believe, can be found for fifteen centuries (except that