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or in any part of this Act, shall authorize, permit or require any brother, even for the purpose of saving a house and family from extinction, to take to wife the sister of his own wife, his said wife her sister being yet alive; and be it therefore enacted, that in such case, where such would be the result of the enactment of the previous section of this Act the provision of the said previous section shall become inoperative and of none effect, rather than a man take a wife to her sister to vex her, beside the other, in her lifetime.
Upon this illustration I will only ask—Would not such an Act of Parliament be perfectly distinct and clear? Could any one possibly misunderstand it? Would not every clause and section have its own plain and intelligible sense? Especially would not the last clause or section have a full and sufficient both sense and application without any man's dreaming for a single moment of there being contained in it a repeal of any portion of the table or schedule of degrees? I say contained in it, because no doubt the second section would contain something of this kind, and yet, be it observed, not a repeal, but a partial exception; that is, in one particular case, and for one particular specified purpose, the second section would modify one entry in the table, that of the brother's wife or sister's husband (as it is confessed on all hands, the law of the Levirate, Deut. xxv., does modify the law of the 16th verse of Lev. xviii.), but even so, I must insist upon it, not repealing it; for the exception would operate only when the brother had died childless, leaving the entry in the schedule in fulness of prohibition in all other cases. And it is beyond all question that that modification would be due to the second and not to the third section of the Act. The third or last section would have nothing to do with any relaxation of the law, but would be merely a restrictive provision in relation to the working of the previous section, being, as I have all along been shew-
