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by divorce (so easily obtainable as divorce became among the Jews) or otherwise, if such after-release set him at liberty to marry his brother's wife, being a widow: a temptation be it observed not occurring as to any other woman left a widow by his brother's death, because the tacit sanction given to polygamy under the Jewish dispensation would in that case render it unnecessary to obtain release from his own wife at all in order to take her. If the brother had died childless, he would be enjoined to take her, irrespectively of his own wife being alive. If not childless, he could never take her at all. And this moral reason is not perhaps wholly unworthy of consideration as applying to the general question of marriage with a wife's sister in a state of things in which polygamy is forbidden. If the greater intimacy arising between a man and his wife's sister might, if unrestrained by the knowledge that she can never under any circumstances become his wife, tend to produce attachment, who shall say it is not a merciful and a wholesome restraint, that she should be forbidden to him for ever? And this restraint, be it remarked, would be wholly lost under the change in our law now sought.
APPENDIX C.
The drift of the objection considered in the Postscript may receive an illustration from that great moral drama, in the plot and conduct of which horror at the incestuous connection of the king with his brother's widow bears so prominent a part. The case of the objector who would make the law of the Levirate a dispensation for Christians, is just as if Claudius king of Denmark had pleaded that law, though his brother had not died childless (for no modern legislation proposes to regard this limitation), as a reason for taking to wife his brother's widow;—or, as if, yet further, had Queen Gertrude died, leaving a sister, he should plead again that same law (for all modern legislation proposes to go to this extent), to sanction his afterward taking her also to wife. Surely all this, as the king says of another matter, is "absurd to reason."
NOTE TO PAGE 12.
It is of much importance to mark clearly how absolute, upon Dr. M'Caul's reading of Leviticus xviii. 18, is the contradiction involved. I add, therefore:—Let it be well observed that a time beyond that expressed by the words "in her life-time," must be understood to be of the essence of all the prohibitions. That is to say (and the awful importance of the matter requires it to be stated plainly), that it is incest and not adultery which is the subject of the prohibitions throughout. A man is prohibited from marrying his Mother not merely during his Father's life-
