Lord Chief Justice Denman.

"If the Act (of 1835) has notoriously failed in its operation; if these marriages, though discountenanced by the legislature, have become more numerous, not only among the lower classes, a large proportion of whom must ever remain ignorant of the existence of this and similar interferences by law with freedom, but among the cultivated, the thoughtful, the conscientious, the exemplary; if the stigma set by the law is not stamped by the public opinion; if the offenders are as well received as before, and are even respected for acting on a just view of scriptural text, perverted by erroneous interpretations; in such case it will surely be more politic to make the law consistent with reason, than in a fruitless endeavour to bend reason to arbitrary law, to vex and persecute where we cannot prevent, to 'curse whom the Lord hath not cursed, and defy whom he hath not defied.' "