parents; and would it be safe to rely on their interpretation of a law that laid a restraint on their animal passions?
4. Here it may be proper to correct a quotation of the Puritan, on page 10, from Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium. There he has fallen into a strange mistake. He cites indeed the words of Taylor; but, by an unfortunate application of them to a wrong period of time, he represents him as testifying in opposition to his own written testimony. Jeremy Taylor does not say, that, in the reign of Henry VIII. "there was almost a general consent upon this proposition, that the Levitical degrees do not, by any law of God, bind Christians to their observance." He says the contrary, as will appear from his own words. On page 222 he thus speaks: "For all those degrees in which Moses's law hath forbidden marriages, are supposed, by very many now-a-days, that they are still to be observed with the same distance and sacredness; affirming, because it was a law of God, with the appendage of severe penalties to transgressors, it does still oblige us Christians." Subsequently he adds: "For though Christen-
