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Rh were not deemed allowable; the words of the text were indeed taken in a literal sense, but still such alliances were looked upon as against the spirit of the law. Hence the Council of Illiberis, about the year 305, excluded from holy communion for five years those persons who had contracted such a marriage. St. Basil was even more severe in punishing such persons, he visited them with the ecclesiastical penalties fixed for adultery. According to his letter on this subject, "a custom equivalent to a law, and handed down by holy men," had been established in the Church against such marriages. Bishop Diodorus of Tarsus, on the contrary, held that these marriages were not prohibited. Influenced by the opinions of the Bishops some of the Christian emperors likewise enforced this law. Yet dispensations were readily granted in the Roman Church from time to time, from which one would infer that the Popes themselves did not look upon such marriages as absolutely forbidden by Holy Writ. In England, marriage with a deceased wife's sister, was forbidden, in 1603, in a Canon by the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. Martin Luther was of opinion that only those prohibitions in the marriage laws were binding which were expressly set forth in Scripture, and his opinion, no doubt, had great influence in the Protestant Churches. Hence Frederick the Great, at the very beginning of his reign, in the year 1740, allowed marriages in ten cases which hitherto had been prohibited, because they had been thought to be against the spirit of the law. One of these is marriage with a deceased wife's sister.

Philip Jacob Spener, born in 1635, who is regarded as the founder of the sect of Pietists, following the opinion of Luther, also maintained that marriages with a deceased wife's sister was allowed, since it was not unequivocally forbidden in the Bible.