# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S325
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Matters of Marriage. 325

...adultery, and after the murder of her husband she was nonetheless taken in marriage by David, that holiest of men? If God's law permitted this, what then are tyrannical men doing to their fellow servants?" Without any doubt the principle is correct on which such a judgment is rendered, and which he sets forth in the treatise "On Married Life," 1522, vol. XXII, p. 199, where he comes to speak of the same subject: "Vice and sin are to be punished, but with a different punishment — not by forbidding marriage. Therefore no vice or sin bars marriage. David committed adultery with Bathsheba, Uriah's wife, and moreover had her husband killed, so that he was guilty of both vices; yet he did not pay the pope any money for it, but afterward took her in marriage and begot with her King Solomon — —. Let marriage remain free, as God has ordained it, and punish sin and vice with other punishments, not with marriage and new sins." Similarly decide, as Joh. Gerhard cites on p. 566, Melanchthon, Chytraeus, Bidenbach, Tarnovius, and others. Opposed to them, following Mentzer's precedent, is the first-named himself.

2. Thus much is certain: a copulation already consummated between adulterers cannot again be dissolved. Nevertheless, the offense that follows from this is one of the gravest. So it is said also of the whole affair between David and Bathsheba, at its close, 2 Samuel 11:27: "And when she (Uriah's wife) had finished mourning, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son; but the thing (including the marriage) that David had done displeased the LORD." Here it should be noted, first, that Bathsheba was wholly innocent of her husband's death; and second, that David committed the murder not so much in order to gain possession of Bathsheba, but rather so that the consequence of his adultery, the pregnancy, might find no discoverer. But in order to counsel consciences, so that the fallen are not entangled in deeper snares and filth of Satan, and so that the children begotten in adultery do not carry the shame of their parents through their whole lives, one should not declare the marriage impermissible, but should insist that the guilty parties, if they are otherwise penitent and give room to admonition, emigrate to some more distant region, where, it may be presumed, the offense will remain unknown. And it would not even be absolutely necessary to insist on this last point, in the case of a married man who has dishonored a girl, if, after due penance, he remained faithful and affectionate to his wedded wife until her death, and then, after her passing, extended his hand in lawful union to the wronged person — thereby rendering, as it were, some satisfaction to the seduced and adulterously defiled woman who would otherwise have become the object of no other man's marital affection.