MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE’S SISTER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5156, 1 October 1877, Page 2

MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE’S SISTER.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES. Sie, —Will you allow me to offer a few words in reply to the Bishop's last letter, and I will not tax your patience further ? Your readers, with the fact of the retrospective character ol the Act of 1835 distinctly before them, must judge as to whether he has so completely demolished Lord Penzance as he imagines. Ho challenges me to produce a single instance o£ any Christian writer during the first 1500 years advocating my view of this question; the fair implication of which I take to be that whatever testimony Christian literature yields during that time is in his favor. If my knowledge of that literature was as precise and extensive as his own, I might even then declino his challenge, on the ground that his estimate and mine of the worth of what the Father!

have to say in settlement of , this question is as wide apart as the piles ; or were I to accept his challenge and furnish chapter and verse, I might still get the hint that my translation was faulty, or that I really did not understand the writers—that my knowledge was got up for the occasion, and that it would take a lifetime to fathom , that meaning which from my limited experience of the Fathers I really believe. And so instead of answering the Bishop s challenge in the form he desires, I quote m reply from the note in the speaker s commentary on Leviticus xviii. 18, which is to the following effect “ The rule as it here stands would seem to bear no other meaning than that a' man is not to form a connection with his wife’s sister while his wife is alive. It appears to follow that the law permitted marriage with the sister of a deceased wife, a limitation being expressly laid down in the words ‘beside the other in her liftime.’ It may be inferred that when the limitation is removed the prohibition loses its force, and permission is implied. The testimony of the Rabbinical Jews in the Targums, the Mishna, and their later writings; that of the Hellenistic Jews, in the Septuagint and Philo; that of the early and mediaeval church in the old italic, the vulgate with the other early versions of the Old Testament, and in every, reference to the text , the Fathers and schoolmen are unanimous in supporting, or in not in any wise the common rendering of the passage. This interpretation appears indeed to have passed unchallenged from the third century before Christ to the "middle of the sixteenth century after Christ Now, I take it that the foregoing is either misleading assertion, which the Bishop would do well to try and get expunged from a commentary issued with the sanction of his right reverend brethren in England, or else his own opinion of the teaching of the Church for 1500 years respecting the permissibility of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister is decidedly wide of the mark. The value of his criticism on Leviticus seems to me to be dependent on the wider question, are the pr hibitions of this 18th chapter binding on Christians. To this I offer an emphatic denial. I cannot see that verse 6 condemns marriage with a deceased wife’s sister any more than it condemns marriages between cousins. I cannot see how prohibitory laws addressed to Jews, the violations pf which were attended with tremendous penalties, are binding when, as is acknowledged on all hands, the penalties themselves are abolished. To say that marriage with ft deceased wife’s sister is repugnant to the moral sense of man, without a revelation, as well as with one, is a conclusion quite beyond me. If it is a defect in my mental sight or a neglect to exercise the same, which renders me thus incapable, I am quite content, to extract what comfort I can from the thought that I am not alone in my misfortune. la conclusion, I would remark that masmuch as the opinions of men of equally eminent piety and scholarship can be adduced on either side, there is plainly no ground for anybody speaking dogmatically on this subject. My sole reason for breaking the silence which I have maintained on other occasions when the Bishop of Wellington has brought this matter forward through the columns of your,paper, is this, X could not sit still and hear marriages, which the communion in which it is my privilege to minister, in common with the J ewish communion, the Church of Rome, and a good half of Protestant Christendom, regard as valid and honorable, branded by the baionis epithet incestuous. With thanks for your courtesy.—l am, &c., W. H. West. ' [The Bill having been thrown cut, it is unnecessary to prolong the correspondence, and we must therefore decline to phblish any more letters on the subject. —-Ed. N. Z. Times.]