double marriage. Leah and Rachel are, and would necessarily be, as unconscious of impurity and therefore in soul as pure, as two daughters of one father. It did not follow that men were never to rise from the lower state of society into the higher; or that a relapse into polygamy, now that woman needs no protection but that of the law, and has become conscious of her due position, would be anything but brutality and crime.
The Hebrew lawgiver could not have forbidden polygamy without changing the state of society by a miracle, or breeding confusion, and doing a wrong in some cases to woman. But he does not perpetuate or encourage it: he recognises it only to mitigate its evils. “If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn; but he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.”[1]
Shall we say, then, with these things before us, that the Bible sanctions Private Revenge, the right of Asylum for criminals, the exercise of a power of life and death by parents over their children, or the practice of Polygamy; that it establishes these as
