# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S292
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

292 On Matters of Marriage.

to unite themselves in marriage, or committed anything else of the like, shall lack all legal force, so that wanton, insolent license not be strengthened by a culpable pretext of law." Likewise one reads in the legibus Longobardorum tit. V. de incestis conjugiis et adulteriis: "No one shall marry out of the kindred of the father or of the mother, nor of the grandfather or the grandmother, nor of the parents of the wife; likewise not the betrothed or widow left behind by a brother, or by any other of the blood relatives, etc."; and in the same place, l. II. tit. de prohibitis nuptiis: "Let no one be permitted to join himself in marriage with his stepmother, who has been his father's wife, nor with his stepdaughter, nor with his brother's widow; and if she has consented thereto, then the man who has taken her to wife shall pay a fine of 100 ducats at the town hall, and shall forthwith be judicially divorced from her again." Luther was at first of the conviction that certain marriage laws concerning the collateral lines were not divine but human, as indeed he set forth, namely in the booklet "On Married Life" of the year 1522 (Leipzig edition, vol. XXII, p. 196ff.), his thoughts on matters of marriage, so far as he believed them grounded in Holy Scripture, maintaining that marriage with a wife's sister after the death of the former wife was permissible, but that marriage with a brother's widow he even then held to be contrary to the divine command — except that he explained the case, with respect to the New Testament, as a matter of indifference, where a brother died without heirs and the widow he left behind married the next of blood, in order to raise up, through the firstborn son, a name for her former husband. Ibid., p. 198f., 208. On the other hand, in the treatise "On Matters of Marriage" he had already laid down as his highest principle: "As for kinship and the members of relationship, my lesser counsel would be that one let it rest with the civil laws (that is, the imperial political ordinances, partly cited above, in Roman civil law), or, if one would rather hold, according to the ecclesiastical law (that is, the papal or so-called canon church law), the third and fourth degree likewise forbidden, I let that be done. For on account of the coarse, brutish, wild people, who despise the Gospel and abuse it for their own willfulness, I would wish that they need not reach into the fifth, sixth, or seventh degree; for they are worthy of no comfort or freedom." In what follows he then counsels that one should see to it that no burden be laid upon anyone's conscience before God on account of those who have entered, or still enter, into the third or fourth degree, especially where they are otherwise good, pious, reasonable people, since it is forbidden neither by imperial law nor by Scripture, etc. *) (Leipzig edition, vol. XXII, p. 460.) From this it now follows that Luther considered it necessary to restrict the freedom he had asserted in 1522; and so it should not surprise us

*) Note. Cf. Luther's opinion, in the same year, to M. Spalatin, in Porta, P. L., p. 242.