Marriage with a deceased wife's sister / Leviticus XVIII. 18, considered in connection with the Law of the Levirate

Transcribed from the 1869 James Parker and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
LEVITICUS XVIII. 18, CONSIDERED IN CONNECTION WITH THE LAW OF THE LEVIRATE.
A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND, &c„ &c, &c.
M. W. MAYOW, M.A.,
RECTOR OF SOUTH HEIGHTON CUM TARRING NEVILLE, SUSSEX, AND LATE STUDENT OF CH. CH., OXFORD.
Second Edition.
London and Oxford: JAMES PARKER AND CO. Brighton: G. WAKELING. 1869.
BRIGHTON: G. WAKELING, PRINTER, NORTH STREET.
A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY, Lord High Chancellor of England , &c. , &c. , &c.
My Lord,
The deep interest which for a long period you have taken in preserving intact our Table of Degrees as to prohibited marriages, will, I hope, sufficiently account for my wish to address the following remarks to your Lordship, and your unvarying kindness will no less account for the ready permission which you have given me to do so. I will not take up any time in preface further than just to observe that of course you are not in any way responsible for the views or the argument of the ensuing pages, though I am, I hope, justified in believing that, whatever be their imperfections, the object at which they aim will meet with your sympathy and approval. My earnest and anxious wish is to do what I may, God helping me, to aid in averting what I feel would be a grievous sin if our marriage law were altered in the sense desired by the promoters of the Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Bill. I do not purpose to go over the whole ground which has been so often contested, (to do which would be almost an impertinence in remarks addressed to your Lordship), but rather to confine my observations to the Scriptural argument, or, perhaps I should say, to a portion of the Scriptural argument against the change proposed, viz.—to the due sense and application of the 18th verse of the xviii. chapter of Leviticus.
There is, I suppose, no room for reasonable doubt that the case of the advocates of a change in our law which may sanction the marriage of a man with his deceased wife’s sister, rests mainly, so far as the Scriptural argument is concerned, upon the 18th verse of the xviii. chapter of Leviticus. “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other, in her life time,” where, the translation being assumed to be correct, the interpretation put upon it is that if such a union is forbidden in the life time of the first wife, there is a tacit sanction of the same after her decease. If it were not for this one verse thus translated and thus interpreted, there would, I think, hardly be a question raised or a doubt felt by one in a thousand that such unions are prohibited, denounced as incestuous, and forbidden under God’s general law, just as we find them set down in Archbishop Parker’s table of prohibited degrees.