My Lord, I have not designed or attempted to go through the whole argument on the question of the alteration of the Marriage law as now proposed, but have sought to confine myself to these points:
I. That the whole strength of the case of the promoters of the change, so far as Holy Scripture is concerned, rests upon the text, Lev. xviii. 18, this text being taken to override the prohibition of Lev. xviii. 16.
II. That the contradiction of two general laws in God’s Word, the one to the other, in the course of three verses is highly unlikely and improbable; so improbable that we are justified in expecting to find some other solution of the difficulty.
III. That in the case in hand, there is another solution falling very naturally into its place by careful comparison of Scripture with Scripture.
To sum up the general argument, even at the risk of some repetition, we may state it thus:—
(i.) We have the general rule laid down: “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him” (verse 6).
(ii.) We have the instances and exemplifications of what this “nearness of kin” means, all of these given directly with reference to the man, leaving the corresponding woman’s duty to be inferred (verses 7–17).
(iii.) We have the particular case of the brother’s wife (verse 16); whereupon, by parity of reasoning, is inferred the prohibition of the wife’s sister, it being here to be observed, that unless the cases of the different sex, by parity of reason, be taken as contemplated by the Holy Ghost in giving this Scripture, we have no written law against several most frightful kinds of incest. [24]
(iv.) We have an exception to the very letter of the law as to the brother’s wife, by the injunction of the law of the Levirate, in the provision for preventing the extinction of a house in Israel, by the brother’s taking his deceased brother’s wife (if he have died childless), and raising up seed unto his brother: this, not in the nature of a prohibition, but of an exceptional injunction or command. (Deut. xxv. 5–10.)
(v.) We have an exception to the above exception, forbidding its being extended to the taking the wife’s sister in the case of the above injunction working (as in one special case it might work), to the result of a brother, in taking his deceased brother’s widow, taking also, by the same act, his own wife’s sister, and thus, if his own wife were still alive, having the two sisters together as wives. For this would be the case, were there no exceptional prohibition, when two brothers had married two sisters, and when, though one of the brothers had died childless, yet both sisters were alive. Then there comes in the exception: “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her . . . beside the other in her lifetime” (verse 18); as if it were said, In no case—no, not when the law of the Levirate would otherwise require it—no, not when the saving of a house in Israel from extinction would otherwise demand it—shall a man take his wife’s sister, his own wife, her sister, being yet alive: where, too, we may observe, that the parallelism in the cases of the two brothers and the two sisters is strictly and exactly maintained; for the woman in no case could take a second brother, the other being alive; for her husband, the first brother, must be dead before the law of the Levirate could operate at all; therefore the wife’s sister could not (even when two brothers had married two sisters) take her husband’s brother beside the other in his lifetime, and thus the wife’s sister is exactly equally restrained from taking the sister’s husband, when the circumstances would lead to it by a man taking “a wife to her sister . . . beside the other in her lifetime.”