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Chap. IX.

POLYGAMY EXPLAINED.

383

that if this institution be entered into now, under the same principles which governed the holy prophets and patriarchs, that God will approbate it now as much as he did then; and that the persons who do thus practice it conscientiously and sincerely are just as honorable in the sight of God as those who have but one wife. And that which is honorable before God should be honorable before men; and no one should be despised when he acts in all good conscience upon any principle of doctrine; neither should there be laws in any of these States or Territories to compel any individual to act in violation to the dictates of his own conscience; but every one should be left in all matters of religion to his own choice, and thus become accountable to God, and not to his fellow-man. If the people of this country have generally formed different conclusions from us upon this subject, and if they have embraced religions which are more congenial to their minds than the religion of the Saints, we say to them that they are welcome to their own religious views; the laws should not interfere with the exercise of their religious rights. If we can not convince you by reason nor by the Word of God that your religion is wrong, we will not persecute you, but will sustain you in the privileges guaranteed in the great Charter of American Liberty: we ask from you the same generosity—protect us in the exercise of our religious rights—convince us of our errors of doctrine, if we have any, by reason, by logical arguments, or by the Word of God, and we will be ever grateful for the information, and you will ever have the pleasing reflection that you have been the instruments in the hands of God of redeeming your fellow-beings from the darkness which you may see enveloping their minds. Come, then, let us reason together, and try to discover the true light upon all subjects connected with our temporal or eternal happiness; and if we disagree in our judgments, let us impute it to the weakness and imperfections of our fallen natures, and let us pity each other, and endeavor with patience and meekness to reclaim from error, and save the immortal soul from an endless death.

Mormonism, it will be observed, claims at once to be, like Christianity, a progressive faith, with that development of spiritualism which the "Tracts for the Times" exemplified, and, like El Islam, to be a restoration by revelation of the pure and primeval religion of the world. Convinced that plurality was unforbidden by the founders of the former faiths, the Mormons, as well as the followers of the Arabian Prophet, have obeyed the command of their God to restore it, and that, too, although the Anglo-Scandinavian race every where agrees, after the fashion of pagan and monogamic Rome, to make it a common-law crime. Politically considered, the Mormons deem it necessary to their existence as a people. Contrary to the scientific modern economist, from Mr. Malthus to Mr. Mill, they hold population, not wealth, learning, civilization, nor virtue, to be the strength of a nation; they believe that numbers decide the rise and fall of empires, and that, as Nature works the extinction of her doomed races by infecundity, and as the decline of a people's destiny is first detected in the

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