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58 supporting these marriages, notwithstanding many writers favour his translation of the 18th verse of Leviticus.

But how has the Church of England on this subject interpreted Scripture? Dr. M'Caul (in the passage I have already cited) says, "No doubt the Anglo-Saxon Church received the law as laid down by Gregory the First. When the English Church lay prostrate at the feet of Rome it received Rome's Canon Law, and all her prohibited degrees." He will not, therefore, require me to prove that down to the Reformation, at least, our Church regarded the marriages in question as prohibited. In the word "Church" I include, of course, the laity. No doubt corruptions had crept in, by which the prohibitions had been extended beyond the Levitical degrees. It is to be feared this was done with a view of augmenting the revenues of the Pope by dispensations, but until the licence granted by the infamous Alexander VI. to the King of Portugal to marry a wife's sister, dispensations had never been granted to authorize marriage within the Levitical degrees. In Henry the Eighth's case all the foreign Universities were unanimous in opinion as to the unlawfulness by God's Law of marriage with a deceased brother's widow, and many of them distinguished between marriages forbidden by the law of God, and those forbidden by the rule of the Church. The real point of difficulty in that case was, whether or not the rule applied where there