Marriage with a deceased wife's sister prohibited by Holy Scripture ... / Evidence given before the Commission appointed to inquire into the state and operation of the law of marriage, as relating to the prohibited degrees of affinity, with a preface by E. B. Pusey ... To which is appended, a speech delivered in the court of Queen's Bench, June 15, 1847, in the case of the queen v. the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, by Edward Badeley.

  • Edward Bouverie Pusey
Date:
1849
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Marriage with a deceased wife's sister prohibited by Holy Scripture ... / Evidence given before the Commission appointed to inquire into the state and operation of the law of marriage, as relating to the prohibited degrees of affinity, with a preface by E. B. Pusey ... To which is appended, a speech delivered in the court of Queen's Bench, June 15, 1847, in the case of the queen v. the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, by Edward Badeley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    might be adduced And now, too, the mind of that large portion of the Western Church remains unchanged ; and it carries out, in this respect, the practice of the earlier Church, where other circumstances do not seem to them to hinder it. “ Abroad,” “ in [Roman] Catholic countries,” it is said by a Roman Catholic bishop^, ^‘you very seldom find marriages within the prohibited degrees.” “ I hardly,” he says, “ recollect such a thing” [as even “marriages of 1st cousins” “in Italy”], “and it is far more difficult to obtain a dispensation.” “In England and all countries of mixed religion, dispensations are granted the more readily, so as to prevent mixed marriages.” These marriages are tolerated then as the least of two evils. The existing canon of the Church of England represents, in this respect, the better mind and wishes of the Church of Rome, which, but for what seems to her a greater evil, she would wish to see adopted. In the whole extent of the Greek and Russian Church, and all the bodies which in the whole East bear the name of Christ, even those involved in heresy, these marriages with a wife’s sister are wholly unknown and abhorred as incest, as in the time of St. Basil, and those before him. Whatever, then, may be the decay in practice, the mind of the three great portions of the Church is in accordance with that of the Apostles, as attested by the universal practice of the whole Church, wherever she was planted in all lands, and which, until a late unhappy period, remained unimpaired. The greater part of the evidence given before Her Majesty’s Commissioners does not touch upon these questions. It is mostly taken up in the attempt to establish two contradictory points, that the present civil prohibition of these marriages is at once nugatory and ^ Code Matrim. i. 433, 5. I* Bp. Wiseman’s Evidence, No. 1194, 5.