It was impossible to obliterate utterly the education and influences of a whole life’s experience. That wall of partition—Polygamy—which separated my husband from me for so many years, is now for ever broken down. But the effects of Mormonism will, no doubt, though unconsciously to ourselves, tinge the whole of our future life. We can never forget the past. The mournful sympathy which, according to the poet, the Peri at the gate of Paradise expressed over the sins and sorrows of humanity, might, with a slight variation, be applied to our own lives:—
“‘Poor race of men!’ said the pitying spirit,
‘Dearly ye pay for your primal fall;
Some traces of Eden ye still inherit,
But the trail of the serpent is over them all.’”
L’ENVOI.
In the preceding pages I have endeavoured to present to the reader the story of my life’s experience in Mormonism and Polygamy, and to place before him a truthful picture of the doctrines and practices of the Saints.
Two objects influenced my mind when I first proposed to write this volume. In the first place, I earnestly desired to stir up my Mormon sisters to a just sense of their own position. I longed to make them feel, as I do, the cruel degradation, the humiliating tyranny, which Polygamy inflicts. I wanted to arouse them to a sense of their own womanhood, and a just appreciation of those rights and duties which, as women, God has conferred upon them. I was anxious that they should understand and know the inconsistency and folly of that superstitious faith by which they have been so egregiously deluded; that they might learn to hate and loathe the falsely-named “Celestial” system of marriage; and rising in honest indignation and disgust against the tyranny of the oppressor, break asunder the yoke of bondage, cast from them for ever the moral, religious, and social fetters wherewith they are bound, and, walking in the light of truth, assert their perfect equality with their sons, their husbands, their fathers, and their brethren, and henceforth claim and occupy that position which God assigned them, and which by right is theirs!