flesh; it brought upon him the full force of the word of Malachi. His "seed was ungodly" because he had more than "one." He had "dealt treacherously with the wife of his youth." He had not "taken heed." To contend that God. approved polygamy because Jacob's sons were offsprings of a polygamist, is fallacious. We know that God disapproved of David's adultery with Bathsheba; and yet Solomon, whom he afterward blessed, was Bathsheba's son. As he pleased to bless the child of one marriage he condemned, he may also have condemned the marriages that produced other men whom he blessed. It is evident that "in the beginning it was not so," and either God must have changed or polygamy must be ungodly.
Mormons, however, above all, should never use this argument. Smith's Book of Mormon, page 118, says, "Behold David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord." To. say that God approved the practice, on their own faith, is to say that he approved of what to him was abominable. For them to insist on its practice because of David's example, is to destroy their own book. If this book be correct, it was abominable before God. If it was not abominable before God, their book is false. If their book be false, then Mormonism is a humbug; but if the book be correct, then David's polygamy was abominable, and to urge his example, is only to destroy the force of all the rest, by putting all the rest on the same level with his "abominations." Their book aside, however, it needed God to give the wives of Saul to David, even if we admit the illustration as of force; if, then,
