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shall call him, and speak unto him: and if he stand to it, and say, I like not to take her; then shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and say. So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother's house. And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed." Deut. xxv., 5—10.
In this passage there is, not what I should call a contradiction to the general law, but an exception in a particular case, and for a particular case only. It is no general permission over-riding and making of none effect the general prohibition, but a particular injunction for a special purpose in one defined contingency. If a man's brother die childless, his brother shall take his wife and raise up seed unto his brother. As it was exactly quoted in the gospel:
"Master, Moses said. If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother."[1]
We have already observed that the authority of Him who gave the prohibitory law is sufficient to give also the permissive, or more than permissive, exception, so that we come into no difficulty as to the one, in such measure, over-riding (to use again the term) the other.
But of course the opponent's rejoinder is: Are you not in the very same case as to the other over-riding? Is not the authority which gave the prohibition of the 16th verse equal to give the permission of the 18th?
Granting that it is so, yet I must again call attention to this; how wholly unlikely it is that, without making any special exception, for any suggested or defined cause, there should be within two verses of each other two general laws exactly contradictory, for so they are, if the argument from parallelism is allowed. And therefore I must again urge how
