[Footnote 3: For treatment of Celestial Marraige and other Temple ordinances, see "The House of the Lord," by the present author, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1912.]
There is no sect nor people that sets a higher value on virtue and chastity than do the Latter-day Saints, nor a people that visits surer retribution upon the heads of offenders against the laws of sexual purity. To them marriage is not, can never be, a civil compact alone; its significance reaches beyond the grave; its obligations are eternal; and the Latter-day Saints are notable for the sanctity with which they invest the marital state. It has been my privilege to tread the soil of many lands, to observe the customs and study the habits of more nations than one; and I have yet to find the place and meet the people, where and with whom the purity of man and woman is held more precious than among the maligned "Mormons" in the mountain valleys of the west. There I find this measure of just equality of the sexes— that the sins of man shall not be visited upon the head of woman.
At the inception of plural marriage among the Latter-day Saints, there was no law, national or state, against its practise. This statement assumes, as granted, a distinction between bigamy and the "Mormon" institution of plural marriage. In 1862, a law was enacted with the purpose of suppressing plural marriage, and, as had been predicted in the national Senate prior to its passage, it lay for many years a dead letter. Federal judges and United States attorneys in Utah, who were not "Mormons" nor lovers of "Mormonism," refused to entertain complaints or prosecute cases under the law, because of its manifest injustice and inadequacy. But other laws followed, most of which, as the Latter-day Saints believe, were aimed directly at their religious conception of the marriage contract, and not at social impropriety nor sexual offense.
At last the Edmunds-Tucker act took effect, making not the marriage alone but the subsequent acknowledging of the contract an offense punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. Under the spell of unrighteous zeal, the federal judiciary of Utah announced and practised that most infamous doctrine of segregation of offenses with accumulating penalties.
I who write have listened to judges instructing grand juries in such terms as these: that although the law of Congress designated as an offense the acknowledging of more living wives than one by any man, and prescribed a penalty therefor, as Congress had not specified the length of time during which this unlawful acknowledging must continue to constitute the offense, grand juries might indict separately for every day of the period during which the forbidden relationship existed. This meant that for an alleged misdemeanor—for which Congress prescribed a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment and a fine of three hundred dollars—a man might be imprisoned for life, aye, for many terms of a man's natural life did the court's power to enforce its sentences extend so far, and might be fined millions of dollars. Before this travesty on the administration of law could be brought before the court of last resort, and there meet with the reversal and rebuke it deserved, men were imprisoned under sentences of many years' duration.
The people contested these measures one by one in the courts; presenting in case after case the different phases of the subject, and urging the unconstitutionality of the measure. Then the Church was disincorporated, and its property both real and personal confiscated and escheated to the government of the United States; and although the personal property was soon restored, real estate of great value long lay in the hands of the court's receiver, and the "Mormon" Church had to pay the national government high rental on its own property. But the people have suspended the practise of plural marriage; and the testimony of the governors, judges, and district attorneys of the territory, and later that of the officers of the state, have declared the sincerity of the renunciation.
As the people had adopted the practise under what was believed to be divine approval, they suspended it when they were justified in so doing. In whatever light this practise has been regarded in the past, it is today a dead issue, forbidden by ecclesiastical rule as it is prohibited by legal statute. And the world is learning, to its manifest surprise, that plural marriage and "Mormonism" are not synonymous terms.
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And so the story of "Mormonism" runs on; its finale has not yet been written; the current press presents continuously new stages of its progress, new developments of its plan. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is stronger than ever before; and the people are confident that it is at its weakest stage for all time to come. It lives and thrives because within it are the elements of thrift and the forces of life. It embraces a boundless liberality of belief and practise; true toleration is one of its essential features; it makes love for mankind second only to love for Deity. Its creed provides for the protection of all men in their rights of worship according to the dictates of conscience. It contemplates a millennium of peace, when every man shall love his neighbor and respect his neighbor's opinion as he regards himself and his own—a day when the voice of the people shall be in unison with the voice of God.