God's Law or within the Levitical degrees[1]; and this being the only exception, nevertheless the Courts of Common Law uniformly down to the last conclusive decree of Pent on v. Livingstone (the judgments in which, so far as they bear on this point, are given in the Appendix), have held that marriage with a deceased wife's sister is within the Levitical degrees, and therefore void.
The clergy, of course, are further bound by the Canon of 1611; but both clergy and laity are bound by the statutes as interpreted by the highest courts of the realm, and, therefore, my proposition is established, that the Church of England has for all time held these marriages to be prohibited by the Levitical degrees. Hence will be seen what a singular mistake Dr. M'Caul makes in supposing in the passage I have cited, from page 50 of his letter to me, that the translation of the 18th verse in our Bible has released either clergy or laity from the effect of the Statute as well as Canon Law, which both expressly hold such marriages invalid, as being within the prohibition contained in the 18th chapter of Leviticus.
But Dr. M'Caul, in the same passage, falls into the singularly prevailing error of supposing that the Act of 1835 rendered valid marriages already contracted, and which the Canon Law declared to be incestuous. I have already shown, in my previous letter, that the Act of 1835 did no such thing.
- ↑ See the Statute cited in my first letter.
