The Mormon Menace | Page 4

the 4th day of April, 1857, took occasion to say: "I would not be afraid to promise a man who is sixty years of age, if he will take the counsel of Brother Brigham and his brethren, that he will renew his youth. I have noticed that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh, young, and sprightly. Why is this? Because God loves that man, and because he honors his work and word. Some of you may not believe this - I not only believe it, but I also know it. For a man of God to be confined to one woman is a small business; it is as much as we can do to keep up under the burdens we have to carry, and I do not know what we should do if we only had one woman apiece."
President Heber C. Kimball used the following language in a discourse, instructing a band of missionaries about to start on their mission: "I say to those who are elected to go on missions, Go, if you never return, and commit what you have into the hands of God - your wives, your children, your brethren, and your property. Let truth and righteousness be your motto, and don't go into the world for anything else but to preach the gospel, build up the Kingdom of God, and gather the sheep into the fold. You are sent out as shepherds to gather the sheep together; and remember that they are not your sheep; they belong to Him that sends you. Then don't make a choice of any of those sheep; don't make selections before they are brought home and put into the fold. You understand that! Amen."
When the Edmunds law was passed, and punishment and confiscation and exile became the order, even dullwits among Mormons knew that the day of terror and bloodshed as a system of Church defense was over with and done. Then the Mormons made mendacity take the place of murder, and went about to do by indirection what before they had approached direct. Prophet Woodruff was conveniently given a "revelation" to the effect that polygamy might be abandoned. They none the less kept the Mormon mind in leash for its revival. The men were still taught subjection; the women were still told that wifehood and motherhood were their two great stepping-stones in crossing to the heavenly shore, missing which they would be swept away. Meanwhile, and in secret, those same heads of the Church - Smith, the President, Cluff, the head of the Mormon College, Tanner, chief of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association - took unto themselves plural wives by way of setting an example and to keep the practical fires of polygamy alive.
True, these criminals ran risks, and took what President Smith in his recent testimony, when telling of his own quintette of helpmeets, called "the chances of the law." To lower these risks, and diminish them to a point where in truth they would be no risks, the Mormon Church, under the lead of its bigamous President several years rearward, became a political machine. It looked over the future, considered its own black needs as an outlaw, and saw that its first step towards security should be the making of Utah into a State. As a territory the hand of the Federal power rested heavily upon it; the Edmunds law could be enforced whenever there dwelt a will in Washington so to do. Once a State, Utah would slip from beneath the pressure of that iron statute. The Mormons would at the worst face nothing more rigorous than the State's own laws against bigamy, enforced by judges and juries and sheriffs of their own selection, and jails whereof they themselves would weld the bars and hew the stones and forge the keys.
With that, every Mormon effort of lying promise and pretense of purity were put forward to bring statehood about. What Gentiles were then in Utah exerted themselves to a similar end, and made compacts, and went, as it were, bail for Mormon good behavior. In the end Utah was made a State; the Mormons breathed the freer as ones who had escaped that Edmunds statute which was like a sword of Damocles above their polygamous heads. To be sure, as a State Utah had her laws against plural marriages, and provided a punishment for the bigamist; the general government would consent to nothing less as the price of that statehood prayed for. But the Mormon criminals, the Smiths, the Lymans, the Tanners, and the Cluffs, were not afraid. They had gotten the reins of power into their own fingers, and made sure of