Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/454

436 "And while a kind husband should nourish, sustain, and comfort the wife of his bosom by every kindness and attention consistent with her situation and with his most tender affection, still he should refrain from all those untimely associations which are forbidden in the great constitutional laws of female nature, which laws we see carried out in almost the entire animal economy, human animals excepted.

"Polygamy, then, as practiced under the patriarchal law of God, tends directly to the chastity of women, and to sound health and morals in the constitutions of their offspring.

"You can read in the law of God, in your Bible, the times and circumstances under which a woman should remain apart from her husband, during which times she is considered unclean; and should her husband come to her bed under such circumstances, he would commit a gross sin both against the laws of nature and the wise provisions of God's law, as revealed in his word; in short, he would commit an abomination; he would sin both against his own body, against the body of his wife, and against the laws of procreation, in which the health and morals of his offspring are directly concerned.

"The polygamic law of God opens to all vigorous, healthy, and virtuous females a door by which they may become honorable wives of virtuous men, and mothers of faithful, virtuous, healthy, and vigorous children.

"And here let me ask you, my dear sister, what female in all New Hampshire would marry a drunkard, a man of hereditary disease, a debauchee, an idler, or a spendthrift; or what woman would become a prostitute, or, on the other hand, live and die single, or without forming those inexpressibly dear relationships of wife and mother, if the Abrahamic covenant, or patriarchal laws of God, were extended over your State, and held sacred and honorable by all?

"Dear sister, in your thoughtlessness you inquire, 'Why not a plurality of husbands as well as a plurality of wives?' To which I reply, 1st. God has never commanded or sanctioned a plurality of husbands; 2d. Man is the head of the woman,' and no woman can serve two lords; 3d. Such an order of things would work death and not life, or, in plain language, it would multiply disease instead of children. In fact, the experiment of a plurality of husbands, or rather of one woman for many men, is in active operation, and has been for centuries, in all the principal towns and cities of Christendom! It is the genius of Christian institutions,' falsely so called. It is the result of 'Mystery Babylon, the great whore of all the earth.' Or, in other words, it is the result of making void the holy ordinances of God in relation to matrimony, and introducing the laws of Rome, in which the clergy and nuns are forbidden to marry, and other members only permitted to have one wife. This law leaves females exposed to a life of single 'blessedness,' without husband, child, or friend to provide for or comfort them; or to a life of poverty and loneliness, exposed to temptation, to perverted affections, to unlawful means to gratify them, or to the necessity of selling themselves for lucre. While the man who has abundance of means is tempted to spend it on a mistress in secret, and in a lawless way, the law of God would