repetition in the 18th verse emphatic? Was it not designed, as we have said before, to be a check on polygamy, and to guard against the recurrence of the particular kind of polygamy which consisted in having two sisters for wives, and which, if it had not been expressly prohibited, might have been frequent?
To the civil penalties which God, as the Head of the Hebrew commonwealth, was pleased to annex to this ecclesiastical law, and which he required the civil magistrate to inflict on transgressors, we are not subject; because we do not belong to that commonwealth: but to the law itself we, and all who come to the knowledge of it, are bound to yield implicit obedience; and from this obligation neither we nor they can be freed by any civil or ecclesiastical authority. It is Jehovah's published will; and it must be obeyed.
Were the public mind deeply impressed with the truth we have labored to establish, it would tend much to preserve the purity of domestic life; render the intercourse of a wife's sister in her family, at all times and in all circumstances, easy and pleasant, free from suspicion and em-
