Page:Vindicationoflaw00hath.djvu/58

50 Diodorus mentioned by St. Basil) who had any doubt that the marriage with the deceased wife's sister was forbidden by the law of God." This challenge Dr. M'Caul has not accepted, nor has he made the attempt, which I believe would have been a vain one, to find the least support from Christian antiquity in favour of his inference from verse 18, as distinguished from its translation. Yet this surely was the very gist of the case. Because if the received translation be proved to be correct, and yet the inference derived from it, so far from being clear (as it ought to be) in favour of a licence to marry a deceased wife's sister, was never recognized, nor the verse regarded as affording such licence by the Church either before, or (as I shall presently show, by the Church of England at least) after the Reformation, then the whole of Dr. M' Caul's learned argument for the translation may be admitted by the opponents of a change in the law of our Church, including in that term (as I always do) the laity, without any fear of their interpretation of Scripture being shaken. On the contrary. Dr. M'Caul, in fact, only makes his own case the worse, when he proves (as he thinks) an all but universal acceptation from the earliest times of his translation, if there co-existed amongst Christians an equally universal belief that the marriage in question was nevertheless prohibited by God's law, and if our own Ecclesiastical and Lay tribunals, with his translation before them, still held the