in Utah. If the question were put to a vote to-morrow, nine-tenths of the women of Utah would vote to perpetuate polygamy.
The Mormons claim that polygamy is countenanced by the New Testament as well as by the Old. They interpret Paul's teaching in regard to bishops, while commanding them to marry one wife, as also not prohibiting them from marrying more than one; their interpretation of this passage slightly varying from that of Rev. Mr. Madan.
Rev. C. P. Lyford, of the Methodist Church, long a resident of Utah, in a letter of February 19, 1881, to The Northern Christian Advocate, a Methodist paper published in Syracuse, says:
We read of the stories of India and China, and the wonder of their existence is lost in their antiquity. Mohammedanism, with its 1,200 years of existence, amazes us that it should have obtained such a footing. But here, in our day, surrounded with all the advantages of the nineteenth century, that a people should have come up from nothing; that a man of low family, himself a worthless character, should have come up with a lie in his mouth and a stolen manuscript in his hand, and be found dictating terms to a strong government, and become an absolute despot in a republic, is the most amazing fact of history. It took the Methodist Church forty years to get a membership of 138,000. Mormonism in forty-four years counted 250,000. It seems incredible, nevertheless it is a fact. In this brief space of time it has also been able to nullify our laws, oppose our institutions, openly perpetrate crimes, be represented in Congress, boast of the helplessness of the nation to prevent these things, and give the Church supremacy over the State and the people. Bills introduced in Congress adequate to their overthrow have been year after year allowed to fall to the ground without action upon them.
Our public men can only pronounce against the crime of polygamy; the press can see only polygamy in Utah; the public mind is impressed with only the heinousness of polygamy. Back of polygamy is the tree that produces it and many kindred evils more dear to the Mormon rulers. They do not care for all the sentiment or law against this one fruit of the tree, if the tree itself is left to stand. The tree—the prolific cause of so many and so great evils in Utah, the greatest curse of the territory, the strength of Mormonism, and its impregnable wall of defence against Christianity and civilization, is that arbitrary, despotic, and absolute hierarchy known as the Mormon Priesthood.
Mr. Lyford has partial insight into the truth when he says "back of polygamy is the tree that produces it and many kindred evils"; but in defining that tree as the hierarchy—the priesthood—he has not reached the entire truth. He does not touch the ground which supports the tree. Polygamy is but one development of the doctrine of woman's created inferiority, the constant tendency of
