# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry. 55

but not exactly this, when the party who receives the deference remains the party receiving deference in the marriage as well — for example, when someone marries his wife's sister's daughter, and so the wife remains the subordinate party in the marriage, in that she marries her mother's sister's husband. The reason why the prohibition of marriage cannot fairly be extended beyond the degree of kinship next following the siblings, in the collateral line, is this: that in that case more harm than benefit would result, and far too many marriages would be hindered or made burdensome.

If one rightly considers what I have set forth thus far, the degrees forbidden in the Mosaic law, Lev. 18:6–18, are thereby traced back to the commandment of love of neighbor, as it ought to be according to the nature of the New Testament, and as Paul expressly attests, Rom. 13:9: "That which is said — and if there be any other commandment — is summarily comprehended in this: love thy neighbor as thyself." One need only bear in mind that the application here, so far as it concerns the marriage laws, is made not with respect to duties toward individuals, but toward all our neighbors together, namely with respect to what serves the common good. One creates difficulties for oneself needlessly if one wishes to represent these laws as purely positive; for then the question first arises whether they are still binding in the New Testament. Just as little is it enough if one wishes them to be recognized as natural laws merely because one supposes that they bound the Canaanites as well, and that verses 24 and 27 say these were rooted out for transgressing them. For the words could also refer only to the classes of the wickedness there recounted, or to the vices and unnatural abominations immediately preceding, v. 20–23. History, too, argues against it, if one wished to regard all the marriages within the degrees forbidden in verses 6–18 as being just such abominations. For from the examples of Abraham and Amram cited above, it is evident that positive laws had not, at any rate, previously existed for all the degrees that were from then on to be forbidden, and that what the sanctified patriarchs did without reproof cannot be the sort of crime for which the Canaanites were destroyed. In the manner in which I have thus far set forth the matter, it becomes clear how, and also how far, the degrees forbidden in the Mosaic marriage laws stand opposed to the law of nature; for the law of love of neighbor is a law of nature.

(In what follows, Crusius proceeds to a closer examination of the individual marriage laws, Lev. 18 and 20.)
(To be continued.)