But in other directions there shall be freedom.  Mr. Chambers’ admirable Bill for enabling a woman to marry her sister’s husband will doubtless pass triumphantly through Committee to-night, amidst the cheers of the Ladies’ Gallery.  The Liberal Party must supplement that Bill by two others:  one enabling people to marry their brothers’ and sisters’ children, the other enabling a man to marry his brother’s wife.”

There is perhaps no social mischief which Arnold attacked so persistently as the proposal to legalize marriage with a wife’s sister.  The most passionate advocates of that “enfranchising measure” will scarcely think that his hostility was due to what John Bright so gracefully called “ecclesiastical rubbish.”  Councils and Synods, Decrees and Canons, were held by him in the lightest esteem.  The formal side of Religion—­the side of dogma and doctrine and rule and definition—­had no attractions for him, and no terrors.  He never dreamed that the Table of Kindred and Affinity was a Third Table of the Divine Law.  His appeal in these matters was neither to Moses nor to Tertullian, but to “the genius of the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the Madonna.”  And yet he disliked the “enfranchising measure” quite as keenly as the clergyman who wrote to the Guardian about incest, though indeed he expressed his dislike in a very different form.  Here, as always and everywhere, he betook himself to his “sinuous, easy, unpolemical” method, and thereby made his repugnance to the proposed change felt and understood in quarters which would never have listened to arguments from Leviticus, or fine distinctions between malum per se and malum prohibitum.  The ground of his repugnance was primarily his strong sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life.  To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy.  His keen sense of moral virtue—­that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson said, comes not of contact with evil but of repulsion from it, assured him that the “great sexual insurrection” was not merely a grotesque phrase, but a movement of the time which threatened national disaster, and to which, in its most plausible manifestations, the stoutest resistance must be offered.  Here again his love of coherence and logical symmetry, his born hatred of an anomaly, his belief in Reason as the true guide of life, made him intolerant of all the palpably insincere attempts to say Thus far and no farther.  He knew that all the laws of Affinity must stand or fall together, and that no ground in reason can be alleged against marriage with a husband’s brother which does not tell against marriage with a wife’s sister.  Yet again he regarded the proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the more full-blooded Philistines—­