But his “hedge of the law” had other thorns besides those with which he pierced the Divorce Court and its hideous literature.  He had shrewd sarcasms for all who, by whatever method, sought to gratify “that double craving so characteristic of our Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth—­the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.”  He poured scorn on the newspapers which glorified “the great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race,” and the author who extolled the domestic life of Mormonism.  “Mr. Hepworth Dixon may almost be called the Colenso of Love and Marriage—­such a revolution does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does in our ideas on religion.”  He thus forecasts the doings of a Philistine House of Commons in 1871.  “Mr. T. Chambers will again introduce that enfranchising measure, against which I have had some prejudices—­the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister.  The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life.”  All these various attempts to break down the “hedge of the law” received in turn their merited condemnation; but always we are brought back from the consideration of kindred evils, to the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister.  Thus the imaginary leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph summarizes the controversy:  “Why, I ask, is Mr. Job Bottles’ liberty, his Christian liberty, as our reverend friend would say, to be abridged in this manner?  And why is Protestant Dissent to be diverted from its great task of abolishing State Churches for the purpose of removing obstacles to the ‘sexual insurrection’ of our race?  Why are its poor devoted ministers to be driven to contract, in the interests of Christian liberty, illegal unions of this kind themselves, pour encourager les autres?  Why is the earnest Liberalism and Nonconformity of Lancashire and Yorkshire to be agitated on this question by hope deferred?  Why is it to be put incessantly to the inconvenience of going to be married in Germany or in the United States, that greater and better Britain—­

    Which gives us manners, freedom, virtue, power?

Why must ideas on this topic have to be incubated for years in that ‘nest of spicery,’ as the divine Shakespeare says, the mind of Mr. T. Chambers, before they can rule the world?  For my own part, my resolve is formed.  This great question shall henceforth be seriously taken up in Fleet Street.  As a sop to those toothless old Cerberuses the bishops, who impotently exhibit still the passions of another age, we will accord the continuance of the prohibition which forbids a man to marry his grandmother.