INCEST WITH OUR WIWES' SISTERS.

| DESIRE to place a few facts before plain people to help them in coming to a decision upon this question, which I shall look upon—(1) Religiously, (2) Socially, (8) Legally, (4) Historically, and (5) Practically. The hollowness and selfishness of the dreary agitation is shown by the fact that for more than a generation, and until very recently, when a few members of Parliament have lent their names, the whole affair has been carried on by an anonymous society working through a salaried secretary. On the other hand, the defenders of the old marriage law have never scrupled to publish their names, conscious as they are of the wide support of men, and still more of women, in every class of life, who regard the proposal with horror; while the very repulsiveness of many of the considerations which the question provokes deters those who feel most deeply from speaking out publicly. First, Religiously.—The marriage law of England is based chiefly upon the teaching of Scripture by making the “Levitical degrees” the rule of lawful and unlawful marriages. The advocates of the change go about shrieking that the Scriptural argument against the lawfulness of marriage with a wife's sister is given up, and that our table of prohibited degrees does not represent the Levitical rule. Both assertions are absolutely baseless. The Levitical law is, of course, the law of the Old Covenant,” given, as our blessed Lord Himself tell us, when speaking on the relations of husband and wife, by Moses with a regard for the “hardness of the hearts” of the Jews. It is less perfect and less strict than the perfect law of the Gospel. So, whenever any indulgence of man's passions is forbidden by the Levitical law, so much the more will that action be forbidden in the Gospel; while, on the other hand, it is not so certain that whatever is not forbidden in the Law must, therefore, hold good under the Gospel. Divorce, as to which our Lord offered that explanation, is a case immediately in point; so is the connivance shown towards polygamy. Keeping this truth in view, it is certain either that marriage with a wife's sister is forbidden in Leviticus, or else that Leviticus allows the foulest iniquity. The table of prohibited degrees in Leviticus is framed on a consistent and iutelligible principle—that of referring to each pair of corresponding degrees, such as father and daughter, or son and mother, nephew and father's sister, or nephew and mother's sister, and so on. Both of them are not always named, but occasionally one only is, while the other is left to be inferred. In the present case “thy brother's wife" is named, but “wife's sister” is left to be inferred. The man who denies this inference will be bound to contend that there is no sin by the Jewish law in a union of a man with his grandmother or with his daughter, because Leviticus passes over these degrees and fixes its prohibition on a man marrying his grand-daughter or his mother. Secondly, Socially.—Turning our wives' sisters into our possible wives would revolutionise family life. Now the wife, while in health, smiles on the affectionate intimacy of her husband and her sister, because she knows that it always must be the intimacy of a brother and a sister. If she feels that her end is near she clings with a deeper, purer satisfaction to the sight, for it is to her the warrant that her orphaned children will find in their own aunt another mother who never can become their stepmother. Alter the law to gratify Sir Thomas Chambers's friends, and all will bechanged; to the wife, alike in health or on her death-bed, her sister must be—for the law will have so ordained it—her future rival, as the stepmother of her children, and as the mother of her husband's second family; and the more closely the husband and the sister-in-law are drawn together the more certain will be the woeful anticipation, in the eyes of the helpless wife and mother, that the marriage bed is being spread for her sister, whose offspring will be the rivals if not the supplanters of her own motherless orphans. Endearments which now hallow the family circle, as they denote the innocent affection of brother and sister, may then be clouded with the sinister suspicions of being the toyings of lover and paramour. The pretext that the change would be a benefit to the poor is worthless, if the marriage is in itself a wrong thing; for a ceremony cannot wipe away the sin of incest; and in any case experience shows that, as among the working classes families disperse, the wife's sister is not the woman whom the widower would most naturally call in to take charge of children and home. The cases that can be shown of concubinage between men and their sisters-in-law are only a small percentage of that vast mass of concubinage, incestuous and otherwise, which is so great a national sin; and the argument, to be worth anything, must be pushed to the abolition of almost all prohibited degrees, and the reduction of marriage, as in Prussia and New England, to a merely temporary alliance, so that no man may have an excuse for not being able by law to call the woman, with whom he is happening to live for the moment, his wife. Thirdly, Legally.—We have under the head of “religiously” explained the principle on which the English law of prohibited degrees is based; we must here briefly notice a very common and shameless misrepresentation to which the leading advocates of the change do not blush to have recourse. Their story is, that, before

INCEST WITH OUR WIVES SISTERS. 75

the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Marriage Act of 1885, marriage with a wife's sister was lawful. This is an audacious misrepresentation. Lord Lyndhurst's Act made no difference in the table of prohibited degrees. All that it did was to make it more easy than before to detect and annul unlawful marriages. Up to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act marriages within the prohibited degrees were what lawyers called “voidable.” That is, though they were unlawful, yet the unlawfulness had to be proved during the lifetime of both parties, while, if this proceeding were neglected, no proof could be offered after the death of the man or the woman. The trick resorted to was to set up a collusive suit, which was kept simmering till one or other of the couple died, so as to shut out any other real one. Thus, a man might marry his nearest of kin, and by keeping up a collusive suit he might have prevented the horrible union from being voided. All that Lord Lyndhurst's Act did was to put a stop to this great scandal by declaring all such marriages “void” for the future, so that they could be attacked whether the offending couple were still alive or not. Fourthly, Historically.—One fact is enough to state. The first instance in the history of the Christian Church of such an alliance being declared unlawful was those most corrupt of all ages and of countries, the end of the fifteenth century, and Italy; and the man who gave the licence was the most corrupt of all Popes—Roderick Borgia—Alexander VI., generally accused of sin with his own daughter Lucretia. Fifthly, Practically.— The proposed change is shamelessly inconsistent aud selfish. It claims that the man who covets his wife's sister may marry her; it forbids the woman who is in love with her husband's brother to marry him. Yet these two degrees of affinity are absolutely identical. Nay, more, while it allows the man to marry his wife's sister, it says he shall not marry his wife's sister's daughter, although she is a woman who stands a degree off in affinity. As the Bill was originally brought into Parliament it includes the wife's niece; but the wire-pullers found that the people whose game they were playing happened not to be in love with their wife's nieces, so they lightened 1... ship of ballast and threw the poor niece overboard. They pretend to be shocked when anyone asks them what they mean to do with the brother's widow or the wife's niece, and they protest that they will resist any further relaxation. This is a ridiculous pretence, as may be seen by looking round at the condition of the marriage law in the various countries of Europe. Alike in Protestant and in Roman Catholic countries— First, Wherever, either by general law, as virtually in France and formally in Protestant countries, or by way of an exception, as in other Roman Catholic lands, a man can marry his wife's sister, there always he can equally marry his brother's widow, and his wife's niece.

Secondly, Wherever, either by general law, or by way of an exception, a man can marry his sister-in-law or his niece-in-law, there also under the same conditions a man can marry his blood niece, daughter of his brother or of his sister; and he can also marry his blood aunt, sister of his father or sister of his mother. This is now the law of France and of Germany, and of nearly all the continent.

There is no possible halting or looking back. Our present marriage law is consistent, and based on Scripture. The permission to marry a wife's sister being granted, coupled with the table of prohibited degrees being kept otherwise as it is, would be revolting to all men of logical minds from its inconsistency, its selfishness, and its contradiction to all natural justice, and nothing could prevent its being replaced by another law as consistent as the present one, while differing from it, in rejecting instead of respecting Scripture—the present law, we mean, of continental marriage. Let Parliament allow a man to join himself to his wife's sister, then it will be but a matter of a brief time before Parliament will have to allow him to marry his mother's sister, perhaps her twin sister—the counterpart, it may be, in mind, in voice, in look, in person, of her who bore him.

- A. J. B. BERESFORD HoPE.

PALM S.

%:N every country where Palm Sunday is observed, unless real palms can be obtained, the branches of some kind of tree or shrub are used in their stead. In English villages we generally have the catkin; in France small twigs of box, or some equally common evergreen, are carried to the parish churches, and after having been blessed, are hung up in every cottage home, recalling to the eyes of the inmates the homage which our Blessed Lord received during his lowly ride into Jerusalem. But though villages may be content with these substitutes, real palms are to be found in nearly all town churches throughout England, France, Spain, and Italy, and the immense number which are annually used come from Bordighera and small country places on the Mediterranean coast, where they are extensively cultivated for this purpose. Bordighera, says a writer in “Picturesque Europe,” is the home of palms. No one knows the origin of its Palm-trees. They are said to have been planted by the Dominican friars, but they are many hundred years older than the foundation of the Order. The Capucins found them here in their first settlement, and some of the trunks are supposed to have lived for more than one thousand years. Many are laden with rich yellow fruit, some of which we find shed on the ground. There are said now to be more palms in Bordighera than in Judaea, where they were once so plentiful that