Page:Ourstandardsandtheirteachingsasbea.pdf/18

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15

APPENDIX.

While correcting the proofs of the foregoing pages, Dr. Cameron's pamphlet reached us. We have read it carefully, but have only been confirmed in our own views by the Doctor's ponderous production. The Doctor fails to see that his "familiar principle of interpretation" has no bearing on the passage in dispute. If the wife after her death was to remain in the family, and sustain the same relations to her husband, as she did before her death —i.e., be liable to be influenced by the presence and doings of her sisterwife—there would then be some pertinence in his citing such passages as "Remember your Creator," &c.—-for an individual remains and sustains the same relation to God in his manhood as in his youth, and God to him, The Doctor is as fallacious in the second part of his argument, for in it he appears to be uninformed regarding the fact that married sisters with children, under the same roof, are more jealous of attentions paid to the one and her children over the other and here than women who were strangers before their marriage, and that by their jealousies and strifes they produce a far greater amount of suffering than other women in like circumstance. Of this fact Moses was fully aware, as he shews us in wsat he records, of the heart-burnings in Jacob's family. While he speaks of the jealousy and strife of the two sisters, he gives not the slightest hint of any approach to such on the part of their handmaids. If the jealousy of married sisters having children, and living under the same roof, be much greater and more bitter than of other women in like circumstances, then we see the wisdom of Moses, while permitting polygamy, forbidding that sisters should be brought into such a relation. In this view of the case we see the meaning of "in her lifetime," or, as the Doctor would have it, "all her days," a distinction without a difference. "The abomination" of which the Doctor Imakes ao much could be nothing but the consummation of the marriage which, in the case of sistera, would be such an abomination as to justify Moses forbidding it. The Doctor's argument is, after all, but a superficial gloss, instead of a learned interpretation of the text. An unsophisticated mind will see the text to be a simple prohibition of marriage with the Biater of a wife during her lifetime, for it is only during the lifetime of a wife that the taking of her sister to wife could vex her, hence the restriction is during her lifetime, for it is only then that the uncovering of her nakedness could vex her. We have other difficulties in connection with Dr. Cameron's pamphlet, passing by the adulation so cordially given to bis "facile princeps," the sarcasm of a cartload of the opinions of authorities' ostentatiously paraded on the other side," so uncalled for. We cannot overlook the more serioua defecta into which his homage to the traditions of the Fathers has drawn an acute and cultivated intellect; and this we do out of no disrespect of a "brother beloved," whom we highly esteem, but in the name of truth; e.g., Dr. Cameron holds that the marriage law as laid down in Lev. Ivii. is neither municipal nor Judaic, bat moral, " he Divine law of nature," initended for all nations and times, and yet at the same time he admits that the eighteenth verse of the same chapter, and wich is a portion of the same law, countenances polygamy—ergo, polygamy is lawful for all times and for all nations. Can Dr. Cameron lift us out of this difficulty! Further, in his exegesis of the words "to uncover her nakedness," he says not a single instance can be adduced in which the phrase is used to indicate lawful intercourse. If this exegesis be correct, then the prohibitions contained in the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus have no reference to marriage at all. What, then, comes of the marriage law?—the Divinelawof nature for all times and all people! Or apply it to the verse in hand, and it upsets the very law of that verse which says "thou shalt not take a wife to her sister," Again, the Doctor, in his "Exegesis," aaserts that the eighteenth verse means, Thou shalt not take