Excerpt from Marriage With a Deceased Wife's Sister: Prohibited by Holy Scripture, as Understood for the Church for 1500 Years, 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

It would, in human laws too, be considered as a presump tion against a novel interpretation of those laws, that it was introduced under an evident bias. Passion pleads acutely; corruption is very dull to see very evident grounds against it. I suppose it would be imagined to be the very strongest ground against a case being drawn into. A precedent, that a judgment in a single case went against the deliberate judgment of all before, and was given under a bias. Much more in Divine laws. Holy Scripture being given by inspiration of God, and written for such as have in their degree the Spirit of God, is un derstood through that Spirit by which it is given. When then the first precedent in favour of the infringement of what up to that time had been, by the deliberate judg ment of the Church, century after century, accounted the law of God, took place through the judgment of a man stained with almost every crime by which human nature has been disgraced, and that to conciliate the favour of princes, - it will hardly be thought, except by the extremest upholders Of Papal infallibility, that he was guided in this by the Spirit Of God. Yet such, in the person of Alexander VI., 'was he who, amid the con tinned protests of eminent Canonists, innovated, in this case, upon the received practice of the Church. This was followed by a Pope, who, whatever may have been his military or political talent, certainly was not one whom the Church could trust in any religious matters, Julius II. His act furnished the ground for the quarrel with England; and although in this case, probably, there was no real affinity, the first marriage not having been completed, the Council of Trent, espousing the side Of the Pope, established a power of dispensation, which, except by these two bad Popes, had never been assumed.

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