Page:Is Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Lawful?.djvu/9

Rh daringly impudent, for the Church is a keeper and not a breaker or dispenser of God's commands. The case I refer to was that of Leopold, King of Portugal, whose family was extinct in the next generation. To this day the Roman division of the Western portion of the Church has to give a dispensation for this kind of marriage, which proves that it holds such a marriage to be illegal.

Now comes the Anglican division of the Western portion of the Church of Christ. We hold the same doctrine, gathered from the Word of God. Right up to the sixteenth century we held the same as the Roman par, and since the Reformation we declare such connections illegal. In the Reformatio Legum of our Church, it is stated that "those degrees which affect the man, also affect the woman"—"paribus semper pro pinquitatum gradibus"—"being always equal degrees of relationship."

Now, this stands to sense, that what affects man equally affects woman. For instance, a man may not marry his mother; then a woman may not marry her father. This commends itself to our reason, if we rightly use it.

Now let us turn to the Word of God.

The code of laws for the kinds of marriage strictly forbidden by God, is given in Leviticus xviii. 1-17. God says, "None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him—I am the Lord."