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to do with the agitation on this subject, and the desire for the relaxation of the existing marriage laws. It must also be observed with great regret that there is another source from whence this restlessness and desire of change may proceed, namely this: persons transgress the law, and then seek to have the law altered to meet their particular case; surely to give way to such an argument would be the adoption of a most pernicious principle. And once more, perhaps the most fruitful source of all this agitation is to be found in the adoption of these marriages in our colonies; but surely the mother country has not fallen so low as to be obliged to take lessons in morality or the contrary from her colonies, and to learn from them the conveniences or inconveniences, in a social point of view, which would be attached to such marriages. It were much to be wished that this matter were once for all set at rest by the legislature of this country refusing to give the class of persons to whom I have just alluded any and all hopes of success in their restless agitation and desires to get the marriage laws altered to suit their own personal convenience; and surely this might not be unreasonably asked if the threefold arguments against such marriages were found to be conclusive, which I have already mentioned, and which I now proceed briefly to discuss in their order, beginning first with the following proposition:
That Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister is Contrary
to the Law of God.
In considering this point I shall not dwell long upon the disputed meaning of Lev. xviii. 18: "Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time". On this point, and also regarding the marriages, mentioned in this chapter, both of blood relations and also of those related by marriage, I shall quote at some length from Bishop Wordsworth's commentary on the book of Leviticus. He says: "The original words of this sentence are thus to be rendered literally, in the order in which they stand in the text, 'And a wife to her sister thou shalt not take, to
