LEVITICUS XVIII. 18, CONSIDERED IN CONNECTION WITH THE LAW OF THE LEVIRATE. A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND, &c„ &c, &c. BY M. W. MAYOW, M.A., RECTOR OF SOUTH HEIGHTON CUM TARRING NEVILLE, SUSSEX, AND LATE STUDENT OF CH. CH., OXFORD. Second Edition. London and Oxford: JAMES PARKER AND CO. Brighton: G. WAKELING. 1869. BRIGHTON: G. WAKELING, PRINTER, NORTH STREET....

A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD HATHERLEY, Lord High Chancellor of England , &c. , &c. , &c. My Lord , The deep interest which for a long period you have taken in preserving intact our Table of Degrees as to prohibited marriages, will, I hope, sufficiently account for my wish to address the following remarks to your Lordship, and your unvarying kindness will no less account for the ready permission which you have given me to do so.  I will not take up any time in pref

The only two passages which I have met with taking the same line of argument with that of the foregoing letter are the following.  In an appendix to the Speech of Vice-Chancellor Sir W. Page Wood, Feb. 1st, 1860, I find this comment upon the statements in the Mishna:— “The passages from the Mishna afford singular support to the view which the Bishop of Oxford, at the late meeting, stated to be held by some divines in America, viz., that the difficult 18th verse of the 18th chapter of Leviticus w

I have said that I have no need to enter into the question of the “one hour” mentioned in the Mishna.  And this is certainly true, because the question which I have been considering is not whether, if a wife’s sister be forbidden at all she is forbidden for ever by both being alive together at a certain time but simply whether the whole matter involved in the words “in her life-time” be not explained and accounted for by its being a prohibition, narrowing the requirements of the law of the Levir

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 limi

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