The Women of Mormondom

by Edward W. Tullidge

In their councils they said, let us make man in our own image. So, in the likeness of the Fathers, and the Mothers—the Gods—created they man—male and female.

When this earth was prepared for mankind, Michael, as Adam, came down. He brought with him one of his wives, and he called her name Eve.

Adam and Eve are the names of the fathers and mothers of worlds.

Adam was not made out of a lump of clay, as we make a brick, nor was Eve taken as a rib—a bone—from his side. They came by generation. But woman, as the wife or mate of man, was a rib of man. She was taken from his side, in their glorified world, and brought by him to earth to be the mother of a race.

These were father and mother of a world of spirits who had been born to them in heaven. These spirits had been waiting for the grand period of their probation, when they should have bodies or tabernacles, so that they might become, in the resurrection, like Gods.

When this earth had become an abode for mankind, with its Garden of Eden, then it was that the morning stars sang together, and the sons and daughters of God shouted for joy. They were coming down to earth.

The children of the sun, at least, knew what the grand scheme of the everlasting Fathers and the everlasting Mothers meant, and they, both sons and daughters, shouted for joy. The temple of the eternities shook with their hosannas, and trembled with divine emotions.

The father and mother were at length in their Garden of Eden. They came on purpose to fall. They fell "that man might be; and man is, that he might have joy." They ate of the tree of mortal life, partook of the elements of this earth that they might again become mortal for their children's sake. They fell that another world might have a probation, redemption and resurrection.

The grand patriarchal economy, with Adam, as a resurrected being, who brought his wife Eve from another world, has been very finely elaborated, by Brigham, from the patriarchal genesis which Joseph conceived.

Perchance the scientist might hesitate to accept the Mormon ideals of the genesis of mortals and immortals, but Joseph and Brigham have very much improved on the Mosaic genesis of man. It is certainly not scientific to make Adam as a model adobe; the race has come by generation. The genesis of a hundred worlds of his family, since his day, does not suggest brickyards of mortality. The patriarchal economy of Mormonism is at least an improvement, and is decidedly epic in all its constructions and ideals.