We have seen that love, and therefore marriage, naturally contains the sense of permanence. There is also a sense of distaste towards incest, and of the apparently natural evils arising therefrom. No-one will deny that the State and the Catholic Church are scientifically justified in insisting upon some table of prohibited degrees. How far this distaste is essentially natural I do not know. I imagine that a sister who had been separated from her brother since birth, and who did not know that he was her brother, might fall in love with him. But the scientific dangers of such marriages would remain.[14] The Church of England some years ago found herself immersed in a storm of controversy over the Deceased Wife's Sister Act. To most men her attitude seemed pedantic and unworthy of serious attention. The English Church is unfortunate: her apparently narrow ecclesiasticism was really the result of a liberal policy at the time of the Reformation. During the Middle Ages the Church had extended her prohibited degrees to such an extent that it must have been difficult to know whom one could marry without a dispensation.[15] Only a person more than four degrees removed from the other party was an eligible partner without dispensation, the degrees so being reckoned as to include even second cousins. The English Church swept away these anomalies and concentrated on an irreducible minimum of prohibition up to three degrees (reckoned in direct ascending and descending generation from the common ancestor)--thus sacrificing all regulation against marriage between first cousins, who are four degrees removed. The real opposition to the ecclesiastical attitude was, however, that any affinity, as distinguished from consanguinity, should be a bar to marriage. The unhappy deceased wife's sister was merely a convenient representative. But this is a controversy which is not sufficiently imminent to engage us in these pages. Chapter 8: The Homosexual Temperament