Excerpt from Marriage With a Deceased Wife's Sister: 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 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.