The drift of the objection considered in the Postscript may receive an
illustration from that great moral drama, in the plot and conduct of
which horror at the incestuous connection of the king with his brother’s
widow bears so prominent a part. The case of the objector who would make
the law of the Levirate a dispensation for Christians, is just as if
Claudius king of Denmark had pleaded that law, though his brother had not
died childless (for no modern legislation proposes to regard this
limitation), as a reason for taking to wife his brother’s widow;—or, as
if, yet further, had Queen Gertrude died, leaving a sister, he should
plead again that same law (for all modern legislation proposes to go to
this extent), to sanction his afterward taking her also to wife. Surely
all this, as the king says of another matter, is “absurd to reason.”