Marriage with the Sister of a Deceased Wife.
"Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time."–Levit. xviii. 18.
Our lot is csst in times of change. Changes, deeper md broader far than the unobservsnt imagine, are passing over us—changes affecting almost every department of literature, science, philosophy, politics, religion, and life. The Church, during the last fifty years, has undergone a very considerable change in sentiment and condition. Nor are we to be surprised at changes occurring in the Church, or in the condition of man upon earth. They are necessary to his passing from evil to good, from self to God. Changes are to be looked for in the Church—and by the Church we are not to understand any one of the denominations, but the professed faiths of Christendom, or the regenerated of God on earth. By the one we are to understand the formal, by the other the true, Church of Christ.
Change is the condition of the Church on earth; the necessity of her development in time. The Church is the germ of spiritual vitality cast into the soil of the world, and, by means of the changes through which the Church is passing, God is showing “to principalities and powers in heavenly places His manifold wisdom.” And if we learn aright the history of the Church as she passes through the changes of her progressive development, we will he constrained to exclaim with Paul, “O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchahle are His designs, and His ways are past finding out: for who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counsellor, or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed to him again? for of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen.”
In such a state of things we are not, on the one hand, to “be tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the sleight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;” nor, on the other hand, to he indifferent to “the signs of the times.” Our duty is to attend to the operations of God's doings in the earth, and rest in the conviction that He who shed His blood to found His Church, and ascended to the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens that He might receive the investiture of all power in heaven and earth for the good of His Church, is more deeply interested in her progress than any individual or any
