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32 late been grievous abuse of power, and that dispensations only hold good if they are granted for sufficient cause. It was a source of weakness in dealing with the first signs of Protestantism in England to adopt a position which had been so recently discarded in the conflict with the Reformation in Germany. But Fisher went still farther. The strength of the argument for the Queen was that a prohibition could not be absolute from which the contingency of a brother dying childless had been specially excepted. But her advisers would not trust that plea. The law was clearer than the exception. No brother, in the history of Christianity, had felt bound to obey the injunction of Deuteronomy. The prohibition of Leviticus had been almost universally observed. This objection was felt so strongly, that Fisher and the advocates of Catharine contended that even if the Divine law forbade the marriage, the Divine law must yield to the law of the Church. Clement, however, admitted that the right to dispense against the law of God was not generally assigned to him by divines, and, being so little versed in books himself that he took no offence when men spoke of his want of learning, he did not insist on it. The claim was an unsafe ground for sustaining the marriage ; for the marriage was the most effective precedent by which papal Canonists sustained the claim. The argument was set aside by the more cautious disputants, both in Rome and in England ; but it had done the work of a signal of distress, to indicate the insecurity of the cause,