# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

54 Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

intercourse among them is not only abhorred like other fornication, but is punished by the authorities as incest. Only at the beginning of the human race did this ground not yet apply; but God, for certain hidden reasons to be discovered only by degrees (for Christ's sake, the one spiritual progenitor and second Adam), willed that all men should be of one origin, so that the first woman too was taken from the first man and became the mother of all mankind. Part of the plan of the work that God carried out was also, after the Flood, the ordering of separate tribes, so that from individual persons peoples should arise who could be named after their tribal ancestor. Until this purpose was achieved, closer marriages (in the collateral line) had to take place. It was achieved, however, when, by God's covenant with Abraham through his son Isaac, within 400 years, Gen. 15:13, the holy people to be set apart from the peoples of the world had come into being and been solemnly received into the appointed divine covenant. For this reason such laws concerning forbidden degrees in marriage were given to the Israelites from that time on, in which not only were the shameful marriages in the descending line forbidden, but also, in the collateral line, the forbidden marriages were now determined otherwise than had been the case until then — even though among their own forefathers instances occur where, for example, Abraham had his stepsister as wife, Gen. 20:12, and Moses's father Amram had his father's sister, a daughter of Levi, as wife, Exod. 6:20, Num. 26:59.

Marriages between siblings are, then, entirely inadmissible today. But the two aforementioned moral causes bring with them that one goes one degree further still, and that also in the next-following degree of the collateral line persons may not marry one another who are equivalent to siblings, namely a sibling's spouse, or a spouse's sibling. I mean that a person, through the marriage which, according to God's ordinance, makes her one flesh with her spouse, becomes a person equivalent to a sibling with respect to the actual siblings of the spouse. Beyond this now-mentioned next-following degree of kinship, however, the prohibition of marriage in the collateral line cannot properly be extended, so long as no special ground for doing so can be given in a particular case. Such a ground is the regard for the deference which children owe their parents, in which the siblings of the parents, and further also the spouses of the same (of the parents' siblings), in some measure share (respectus parentelae). Yet the application of this must not be made incorrectly either. For example, marriage becomes improper on this ground when the party owed the deference is, in that very marriage, the one placed in subjection — for instance, when someone takes his father's brother's wife; but it