MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 132, 18 August 1870, Page 7

MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER.

The House of Lords has rejected the bill to legalize marriage with a deceased wife's sister, by the narrow inarjority of 4—774 — 77 non-contents to 73 contents. Lord Houghton, Lord Lifford, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Kern, bei'ley, Lord Westbury, Lord Gran ville, and the Bishops of Kipon, supported the bill; the Duke of Marlborough the Duke of Argyll, Lord Harrowby, Lord Lyveden, Lord Hatherley, and the Bishops of Ely, Lincoln, and peterborough, opposed it. The most graphic incident of the debate was a Scriptural exegesis by Lord Westbury, who dearly loves to lecture the Bishops on their own themes, pavtly, perhaps, from the consciousness that he is held lighter than vanity itself by the Episcopal Bench. He improved the occasion to them on their loose methods of interpreting Scripture, and especially refuted a view of the Bishop of Ely's as to a marginal reading forbidding polygamy, which that prelate prefers to the text of Leviticus as it stands. Lord Westbury grew very eloquent in demonstrating the Jewish pratice of polygamy — so eloquent that it looked like admiration — asking with almost the melancholy of a hon-vivant in recalling a feast of other days, " was it not one of the rewards of David that he received the wives of Saul in a lump ?" Lord Hatherley was very bitter and earnest against the bill, insisting on the identification of the wife and husband, and the necessity, for the sake of the purity of domestic life, of their viewing each other's relatives as absolutely their owrL — to which Lord Granville aptly replied that in that case two brothers must not marry two sisters, as, after the first marriage, the sister of the wife and the brother of the husband must be regarded aa brother and sister. The importance attached to the language of the book of Leviticus throughout the debate was to our minda something marvellous. That the regulations imposed by Moses on the marriages of a wandering Syrian tribe should be supposed to have incorporated an everlasting truth is to us hardly credible, We might just as well adopt as political divinity the provisions fopthe cities of refuge.—" SpQetator,"