anointed whom I have appointed on the earth to hold this power, (and I have appointed unto my servant Joseph to hold this power in the last days, and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred) are of no efficacy, virtue or force in and after the resurrection from the dead; for all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead."
It may be well to take this document by sections, that we may when we reach the end, have an understanding of the whole; and enjoy the fulness thereof! It is evident that the world never would have been favored with such a revelation had not Joseph been directly concerned, and hence importuned the Lord that he might know just how polygamy could be justified! Mormons talk of a new and everlasting covenant, and of Mormonism affording the fulness of the gospel. They have been challenged many times to give one idea pertaining to the gospel of Christ that is not found in the New Testament, and to show in what the fulness of the gospel consisted, as exhibited in Mormonism. They will never be enabled to comply with this request, nor to point to a law that embodies a new covenant until they endorse this polygamous document! It does claim to give a new and everlasting covenant to give the law embodying that covenant. It is, however, a law governing and justifying a plurality of wives! They are wont to say that the fulness of which the religious world had been deprived consists in the miraculous endowments that have been restored by the introduction of Mormonism. They argue that the true saints of God are not found where these miraculous endowments are wanting. In this, however, they show the Book of Mormon to be false. It is a fact that is conceded by all intelligent students of ecclesiastical history that miraculous gifts disappeared with the ending of the apostles' ministry. Mormons have asserted, and yet say, that they disappeared because of apostasy, and because, hence, the saints had ceased to exist. The quotation, however, from the Book of Mormon, with which we began this article, says that the Roman ecclesia,
