Professor Pratt admits, mark you, admits that none of these passages, nor all of them together, can afford in this day a warrant for the practice of polygamy. Gives it up! Turns the Bible aside! I will read to you from his own words:
Supposing that we should prove by a thousand evidences from the Bible that polygamy was practised by ancient Israel, and was sanctioned by God in ancient days, would that be any reason that you and I should practise it? By no means. We must get a command independent of that, which we have received. God frequently repeats His commands, and His servants are required to obey His commands when they are given. The Latter-day Saints in this Territory practise polygamy not because the law of Moses commands it; not because it was extensively practised by the best of men we know of, mentioned in the Bible, the old patriarchs, Abraham and Jacob and others, who are saved in the kingdom of God. We have no right to practise it because they did it.
Then he yields the point! I respectfully ask him, if this is his position, why does he attempt, in all his writings, and to establish it in that clever book the Seer? Why did he, in his controversy with me in the New York Herald? Why has he from this stand attempted to prove that the practice of polygamy was right from the Bible? Why not, like a man, come out and say that we practise this system here, not because the Jews did it; not because the Divine law sanctioned it years ago; but because a certain man of the name of Smith received a revelation that this form of marriage was to be practised? You, my friends, can see the logical conclusion, or in other words the illogical bearing.
Now, I come to the assumptions by the gentleman. First, that there is no law condemning or forbidding polygamy. Has he proved that? Second, that the Hebrew nation, as it was in the wilderness, when the Mosaic code was given, was polygamous. Has he proved that? Can he find in the whole history of the Jewish nation, from the time they left Egypt to the time they entered the land of Canaan, can he find more than one instance of polygamy? Perhaps he may find two. I will be glad to receive that information, for I am a man seeking light, and to-day I throw down a challenge to your eminent defender of the faith, to produce more than two instances of polygamy, from the time the Jews left the land of Egypt to the time they entered Canaan. I will assist him in his research and tell him one, and that was Caleb. Now supposing that a murder should be committed in your city, would it be fair for Eastern papers to say that the Mormons are a murderous people? No, I would rise up in defence of you; I would say that that is a crime and an injury to the people here! Yet, during a period of forty years we find one man out of two millions and a half of people practising polygamy, and my friend comes forward and assumes that the Israelites were polygamists.
Third, that these laws were given to regulate among them an institution already existing. Has he proved that? Supposing he could prove that Moses attempted, or did legislate for the regulation of polygamy, as it did exist in Egypt and elsewhere, would such legislation establish a sanction? Why in Paris they have laws regulating the social evil; is that an approval of the social evil? There are laws in most of the States regulating and controling intemperance. Do excise laws sanction intemperance? Nothing of the kind. For argument's sake I would be willing to concede that Moses did legislate in regard to polygamy, that is to regulate it, to confine its evils; and yet my friend is too much of a legislator to stand here and assert that laws regulating and defining were an approval of a system.
Fourth, that these laws were general, applying to all men, married and unmarried. Has he proved that? I have proved to the contrary to-day, showing that in the passages which he quoted there is not a solitary or remote intimation that the men were married.
Now let us, in opposition to these assumptions, remember that monogamy was established by God in the innocence of the human race, and that polygamy, like idolatry, and slavery, blood revenge, drunkenness and murder came into existence after the apostasy of the human family, and that neither of these evils have any other origin so far as appears from the Bible than in the wickedness of man. We admit that polygamy existed among the corrupt nations, just as any other evil, or vice, or crime existed, and now when God had chosen the Hebrews for His own people, to separate them from the heathen, He gives them for the first time a code of laws, and especially on the subject of the commerce of the sexes. And what is the central principle of that code on this subject? Read Leviticus xviii, 18—"Neither shall a man take one wife unto another."
In this code the following things are forbidden: Incest, polygamy, fornication, idolatry, beastliness, &c.; we therefore deny that the nation was polygamous at that time, deny it definitely, deny it distinctly, and on another occasion I will give you the character of the monogamists and polygamists of Bible times. The Jews had been four hundred years in slavery, and they were brought out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.
We, to-day, then challenge for the proof that as a nation the Jews were polygamous. One or two instances, as I have already remarked, can be adduced. We may say again that if, as he assumes, these laws were given to regulate the existing system, this does not sanction it any more than the same thing sanctions sheep-stealing or homicide. He said these laws were general, applying to all men, married or unmarried. Has he proved it? This is wholly gratuitous. There is no word in either of these passages which permits or directs a married man to take more than one wife at a time. I challenge the gentleman for the proof. It is no evidence of the sanction of polygamy to bring passage after passage, which he knows, if construed in favor of polygamy, polygamy must be in direct conflict with the great organic law recorded in Leviticus xviii, 18.
[At this point the umpires announced that the time was up.]