The other perverts the order of nature; prostitutes the most holy principles and affections to the vilest of purposes; checks the reproduction of our species; spreads disease and death as a sweeping pest through the world; degenerates the race; and if it fills the world fills it with a mean, grovelling, sickly, puny, lustful, deformed and miserable race of beings, whose misfortune is that they were born at all.
Such were the people of the flood; the people of Sodom and the Canaanites, who were so far degenerated that the Lord in mercy interfered, and doomed them to utter destruction, that nations and races degenerate should no longer propagate their species: and then, by his own holy laws of marriage, repeopled those same countries with a better race.
As polygamists Abraham and Jacob were the friends of God; worthy to converse with Him, and to receive His blessing on themselves and their wives and children; worthy of associating with angels from Heaven, and of being filled with the holy and pure spirit of prophecy and of revelation; while, for their sakes, kings were reproved, saying, "touch not mine own anointed, and do my prophets no harm."
As a polygamist Jacob gave twelve tribes to the world instead of two, which was the number born by his first intended, his beloved Rachel. While, on the other hand, his sons visited a whole city with the sword, because its ruler had seduced their sister Dinah.
As a polygamist Moses beheld the face of God, and was filled with His glory to that degree that his face shone like that of an angel.
As an adulterist, a prince of Israel, named Ziniri, was killed in the very act by Phineas the priest, the grandson of Aaron; which act of justice so pleased the Lord that he stayed the plague which was consuming the camp on account of their whoredoms.
The law of God regulating and sanctioning Polygamy was thundered from Mount Sinai in awful majesty, from the mouth of the God of Israel, although it had existed before, and also among the eternal and unchangeable principles of morality, virtue and purity.
While, on the other hand, the same God, in a voice of thunder, proclaimed, "Thou shalt not commit adultery, nor covet thy neighbor's wife, or anything that is thy neighbor's."
As a bigamist, Elkanah, who had two wives, became the father of Samuel, the Prophet; he being a child of promise, obtained by the fervent prayer of Hannah, his mother, in the Holy Temple, and by her vows devoted to the service of the Temple from his childhood. While, on the other hand, had he been a child of whoredoms, instead of a child of bigamy, he would have been excluded from the house of the Lord, and his children after him, for ten generations.
The first revelation ever given to this child of bigamy rebuked the priests, the sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas, for their whoredoms and other sins, and revealed their dooms. In fulfillment of his words these two fornicators fell in battle while bearing the very Ark of God.