as this attempt to disturb and to change the organic law upon which all society with us is constructed. If there be one exponent of Christian civilization, it is the position of woman in the domestic and social circle. For ages her melancholy doom was either to toil as a drudge for an insolent master, or, what was scarcely less repugnant to her nature, to be the passive instrument of his pleasures. During that middle age which marks the transition to modern civilization, she was sported as a toy; but the veil of seclusion was not yet drawn, nor did she walk with man, his friend and equal, in the open paths of life. But where the Bible blesses the marriage vow, it founds upon the union of a single pair the constitution of a happy family. The woman walks hand in hand with her lawful spouse, the sole mistress of his heart, sharing his sorrow and his joy; they breast together the fortunes of life, and even in death are still united in the affectionate remembrance of grateful descendants. Mormonism impudently strives to reproduce the Asiatic type of civilization. It scoffs at the deference which the Christian world pays to the female sex, and stigmatizes it as “Gentile gallantry;” it teaches that no woman can gain admission into the Heavenly Kingdom, but through the introduction of her husband; it “seals,” to use its own cant phrase, as many wives to one man as he may wish to maintain, and graduates a man’s rank in the celestial Paradise by the largeness of his retinue. Like Mohammed, the Mormon advocate pleads the example of ancient patriarchs—but more gross than he, no restriction is placed upon this secret sealing, but the ability to render a suitable provision for the multiplied households.
V. The last comparison which I shall institute relates to the union of civil and ecclesiastical power, in the two systems. 'To elaborate the proof of this in regard to the religion of Islam, would be to trifle with the patience, if not with the intelligence, of this audience. After his flight to Medina, Mohammed own his mission to be the propagation of the new faith by fire and sword. Drawing into precedent the exterminating wars of Israel with the devoted inhabitants of Canaan, “there is no God but Allah” was transformed from the peaceful symbol of religious
