# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S291
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Matters of Marriage. 291

The case of malicious desertion is similar. Yet, depending on the circumstances that call for a milder or a stricter judgment, modifications become necessary. Imprudent parents, for example, marry off their daughter, while she is still a child, to a man of coarse, brutish character; the girl — or rather, his wife — runs back, on account of his treatment of her, into her father's house; the fellow troubles himself no further about it, changes his residence, and disappears without a trace. Meanwhile the former comes into her full maturity, and a marriage presents itself to her with an honorable Christian young neighbor. The parents pursue a legal divorce from the former husband, of whom nothing further can be heard or learned, and the new marriage is contracted. Is this marriage culpable before God, or not? We think, not in the least.

Second Question: Does marriage with a brother's widow, or with a deceased wife's sister, belong among those unions that reach too closely into the blood-kinship, or not?

1. Concerning this marriage there has always existed great difference of opinion, inasmuch as even respected Lutheran theologians not only issued opinions in favor of the princes who entered into such marriages, but in fact themselves followed such an example. In the ancient church it was the Council of Neocaesarea that first, in A.D. 314, established the following canon: "A woman who marries the brother of her deceased husband shall die the death, unless she separates herself from this marriage" — the reason earlier traces of such a rule are not to be found probably lay in the fact that the influence of the church upon the state, and upon the marital relations belonging to its sphere, was wholly suppressed by heathenism. Forty years later already, the Christian emperor Constantius therefore gave the law which we read in the Codex Theodosianus, book II: "Although the ancients held it lawful to take a brother's widow to wife, yet all shall nonetheless withdraw from such a marriage, and shall not believe that lawful children can be begotten from this union, for it is hereby ordained that they shall be reckoned equal to bastards, as is fitting." Likewise the emperor Theodosius himself, around A.D. 393: "L. 5, C. de incestis nuptiis — we here entirely forbid the taking of a brother's widow to wife, or the marrying of two sisters one after the other, whether during their lifetime or after a preceding divorce." At the end of the fifth century Anastasius confirmed the law by the following: "L. 5. We hereby make known that all who are subjects of our realm must abstain from incestuous marriages; for we ordain that all rescripts, pragmatic formulas, and constitutions which, in ungodly fashion, in the times of tyranny, permitted certain persons to give the name of a lawful marriage-bond to a criminal cohabitation, so that it was permitted, with the daughter of a brother or sister, or with the once-espoused wife of a deceased brother, to unite themselves in shameful embrace