# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S126
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

126 Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

person who is one flesh with a person with whom he who wishes to marry
that person is likewise already one flesh. But parents and children are
called one flesh, further, spouses, and finally siblings. Because near
kinship or affinity is thereby taken into consideration, this rule
already implicitly contains within it the prohibition of the still
nearer blood relation.
For example: if a man may not marry his daughter-in-law, still less may
he marry his own daughter; or if he may not marry his mother's sister,
still less may he marry his mother.

The narration of the cases does indeed illustrate the rule; but in the
mouth of the lawgiver the narrated cases are more than illustration —
they are authentic interpretation. Hence one may, in certain cases, go
beyond the rule, or, in certain cases, authentically restrict what the
rule would otherwise imply; and this is indeed found to be so. Since
nothing can be presumed to have been set down idly and in vain, close
attention must be paid to every word of the lawgiver, whether they
constitute an extension or a restriction, or whether they constitute an
explanation of the point to which God wished attention to be given, or
whether they state a reason for the prohibition, or consist in the
emphatic intimation that God simply willed it to be so — which latter is
contained in the words: For I am the LORD.

In order that one may also apply this to equivalent cases of such laws
where additions are attached, and to which accordingly regard must
likewise be had —

all of them, without exception, true duties. Hence one may indeed with
certainty take as something conflicting with the divine order or with
the present condition of the human race whatever is expressly or tacitly
represented in Scripture as being of that kind — that is, as contrary to
natural right or natural law. These two expressions, moreover, carry the
same meaning among people who are not led, by any deliberate seeking of
excuses to justify harmful errors and to mutilate the doctrine of
natural virtue. I say, whatever is stated in Scripture as being contrary
to the natural moral law may certainly be assumed to be of that
character, even when one is not yet able to explain the ground of it in
nature. For perhaps that ground is only difficult to perceive, or is
liable to easy misinterpretation among unfair and untrained minds, so
that the decisive judgment of it may not even be left to the discretion
of such people — I mean, it is not open to them to acknowledge and
follow the duty only in proportion to the reasons which they themselves
can grasp. The Israelites, for this reason, were held merely to the
divine will: I am the LORD, or to the divine pronouncement: it is an
abomination, an infamy, and the like. But it does not yet follow from
this that a thing must belong to the absolutely necessary and
unchangeable laws of nature, or that it has, in all the circumstances in
which peoples or individual persons may find themselves, one and the
same kind and degree of obligation. For example: marriage between father
and daughter, and between brother and sister, are both contrary to
natural law, yet with a difference. Because love of one's fellow man is
certainly a natural duty, it obliges every individual to the observance
of what the common welfare and security require. And as soon as nations
and organized states are established, the rulers are bound, in
particular, to see to this and to make provision for it. In this way
natural laws are once again derived from what the common welfare of
mankind requires, so far as the ground extends by which they are to be
held to be such."