[Metropolitan Ishoʿyahb letter #12]
I received and read what you wrote and thanked our Lord for your health. Because in time of needing counsel you summoned me to assent to the decrees, which your Holiness had long ago arranged in the law of fathers in the affairs of those who broke the laws; But what your Holiness has placed in doubt, in which the manifestation of your activity is praised by canons, books, and nature, does not seem to me to have been done beautifully.
For it is fair to say the truth at all times. It is a beautiful thing to execute the truth at all times. It is especially beautiful for the priests of God, first to claim the quality of the priest's canons, then to examine the interpretations of the priests, as it is also written, and to go so far: "Whatever the eyes of the priest see, let the priest see." And if he is deprived of such a sight, and therefore errs in the divine laws, and therefore deserves the pardon of his incapacitated, what blindness can they, however, be overwhelmed by the rules, which, in name and sense, are clearly fixed in eternal institutions and of course in writing? It is one of them which your paternity has rejected according to the canon, but some, like unjust praisers, have raised it in a deceitful hope.
Without a doubt, then, let the experience of your Paternity be always guarded, which is fixed in writing by you and has been sent to my weakness: to reject the illegitimate marriage of a man with the wife of his maternal uncle, and especially to deprive a husband of such an inheritance as this woman, who was unjustly united with him and died in guilt. I say the inheritance of women not be that which a perverse custom has given, contrary to the intention of the Book of God and against the doctrine that has hitherto prevailed in this government, that is, to give wives the inheritance of their husbands without the will or the gift of their husbands; this, God has commanded to be received by sons, or daughters, or brothers, or uncles, or near-relative. But I say that the inheritance of women is just, namely, that the dowry which was given by her father's house, or from the house of her husband at the time of the tradition of the woman himself, or her husband at the time of her death, or of her own free will by her children, or by the leaders of the Church as an equal and right alms, according to the good manners of the woman and her domestic attitude toward her husband and her children. In fact, the law takes away from them this legitimate inheritance of women, when they themselves defile their marriage with the illegitimacy, and deliver it to their just heirs, that is, to their sons. These are the laws of Christianity which we hold and execute in our province.
But if among you, the traditions of the elders are now being brought forward against ecclesiastical law by some men, which abolish the decree lawfully sanctioned by your Paternity, so that those men not only permit the marriage of an uncle's wife - as your Holiness wrote to me - but they also take the inheritance of the sons of these women, and hand them over to their illegitimate husbands, and by the reproach and insult of outsiders object to the holy doctrine of Christians: let your care be that they may be excused from common injury, and that the judgment be brought before the dreadful tribunal of the heavenly King.
The space of a brief letter and the hurriedness of the journey prevent me from doing everything to write the business which your Holiness requires, and moreover, I am persuaded that you know them better than my weakness, and again what I encourage is the hope that, when God will please you, we will meet one another when the Catholicos comes into our province. I have written these things to your Fatherhood to respond to the request of a friend asked by you; Let your Father therefore pray that, when we, who are worthy to go out to meet one another, having fulfilled our vows, may undertake those affairs with the help of God in perfect rectitude. Pray also for me that I will spend the rest of my days in life pleasing to the will of God.
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