“Polygamy, then, as practiced under the patriarchal law of God, tends directly to the chastity of women, and to sound health and morals in the constitutions of their offspring.
“You can read in the law of God, in your Bible, the times and circumstances under which a woman should remain apart from her husband, during which times she is considered unclean; and should her husband come to her bed under such circumstances, he would commit a gross sin both against the laws of nature and the wise provisions of God’s law, as revealed in his word; in short, he would commit an abomination; he would sin both against his own body, against the body of his wife, and against the laws of procreation, in which the health and morals of his offspring are directly concerned.
“The polygamic law of God opens to all vigorous, healthy, and virtuous females a door by which they may become honorable wives of virtuous men, and mothers of faithful, virtuous, healthy, and vigorous children.
“And here let me ask you, my dear sister, what female in all New Hampshire would marry a drunkard, a man of hereditary disease, a debauchee, an idler, or a spendthrift; or what woman would become a prostitute, or, on the other hand, live and die single, or without forming those inexpressibly dear relationships of wife and mother, if the Abrahamic covenant, or patriarchal laws of God, were extended over your State, and held sacred and honorable by all?
“Dear sister, in your thoughtlessness you inquire, ‘Why not a plurality of husbands as well as a plurality of wives?’ To which I reply, 1st. God has never commanded or sanctioned a plurality of husbands; 2d. ‘Man is the head of the woman,’ and no woman can serve two lords; 3d. Such an order of things would work death and not life, or, in plain language, it would multiply disease instead of children. In fact, the experiment of a plurality of husbands, or rather of one woman for many men, is in active operation, and has been for centuries, in all the principal towns and cities of ‘Christendom!’ It is the genius of ‘Christian institutions,’ falsely so called. It is the result of ‘Mystery Babylon, the great whore of all the earth.’ Or, in other words, it is the result of making void the holy ordinances of God in relation to matrimony, and introducing the laws of Rome, in which the clergy and nuns are forbidden to marry, and other members only permitted to have one wife. This law leaves females exposed to a life of single ‘blessedness,’ without husband, child, or friend to provide for or comfort them; or to a life of poverty and loneliness, exposed to temptation, to perverted affections, to unlawful means to gratify them, or to the necessity of selling themselves for lucre. While the man who has abundance of means is tempted to spend it on a mistress in secret, and in a lawless way, the law of God would have given her to him as an honorable wife. These circumstances give rise to murder, infanticide, suicide, disease, remorse, despair, wretchedness, poverty, untimely death, with all the attendant train of jealousies, heartrending miseries, want of confidence in families, contaminating disease, etc.; and, finally, to the horrible license system, in which governments called Christian license their fair daughters, I will not say to play the beast, but to a degradation far beneath them; for every species of the animal creation, except man, refrain from such abominable excesses, and observe in a great measure the laws of nature in procreation.
“I again repeat that Nature has constituted the female differently from the male, and for a different purpose. The strength of the female constitution is designed to flow in a stream of life, to nourish and sustain the embryo, to bring it forth, and to nurse it on her bosom. When Nature is not in operation within her in these particulars and for these heavenly ends, it has wisely provided relief at regular periods, in order that her system may be kept pure and healthy, without exhausting the fountain of life on the one hand, or drying up its river of life on the other, till mature age and an approaching change of worlds render it necessary for her to cease to be fruitful, and give her to rest a while, and enjoy a tranquil life in the midst of that family circle, endeared to her by so many ties, and which may be supposed, at this period of her life, to be approaching the vigor of manhood, and therefore able to comfort and sustain her.
“Not so with man. He has no such drawback upon his strength. It is his to move in a wider sphere. If God shall count him worthy of a hundred fold in this life of wives and children, and houses, and lands, and kindreds, he may even aspire to patriarchal sovereignty, to empire; to be the prince or head of a tribe or tribes; and, like Abraham of old, be able to send forth, for the defense of his country, hundreds and thousands of his own warriors, born in his own house.
“A noble man of God, who is full of the Spirit of the Most High, and is counted worthy to converse with Jehovah or with the Son of God, and to associate with angels and the spirits of just men made perfect—one who will teach his children, and bring them up in the light of unadulterated and eternal truth—is more worthy of a hundred wives and children than the ignorant slave of passion, or of vice and folly, is to have one wife and one child. Indeed, the God of Abraham is so much better pleased with one than with the other, that he would even take away the one talent, which is habitually abused, neglected, or put to an improper use, and give it to him who has ten talents.
“In the patriarchal order of family government the wife is bound to the law of her husband. She honors, ‘calls him lord,’ even as Sarah obeyed and honored Abraham. She lives for him, and to increase his glory, his greatness, his kingdom, or family. Her affections are centred in her God, her husband, and her children.
“The children are also under his government worlds without end. ‘While life, or thought, or being lasts, or immortality endures,’ they are bound to obey him as their father and king.