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Show Page 260 to this, Orson wrote in sober terms: "...believing my proposition to be, not only right, but a duty, I firmly concluded to follow my convictions... I have done so, with all the faith and sincerity that I ever had in receiving any religious principle... I have done my duty to other branches of my family, and have thus fulfilled the obligations, entered into with them, under the law of the marriage covenant for eternity, which I esteem as equally sacred with all other divine laws and covenants." 52 The liberals in Utah and the righteous Republicans of the East were not dealing with luxuriousness, but, ironically, with a rock-hard, almost Puritan determination to guard the divine sanctuary of conscience. The Mormons had forcefully and effectively argued their consciences in the Congress, winning a temporary reprieve when the Cullom Bill died. But the crusaders who had liberated the South were by no means diverted by this - they would liberate Utah even against her will, and they had nearly universal support of public opinion in the East. The Senate chaplain, for example, had boiled with righteous fury while listening to the arguments advanced by Utah's delegate to Congress and determined to reply with all the vigor of Protestant certitude. The Reverend John Philip Newman, chaplain of the United States Senate and pastor of the Metropolitan Church of Washington, D.C., controlled the most prestigious pulpit in the land. He counted among his congregation Presidents and Ambassadors, Justices and Congressmen, and in all the splendor of his primacy announced that he would devastate the Mormon claims once and for all that God had any hand in such a system of wholesale adultery as the "patriarchal order of marriage." His sermon, advertised two weeks in advance, drew such notables as President Ulysses S. Grant, Vice President Schuyler Colfax, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase. The Salt Lake newspapers soon picked up Newman's tirade, which had been published in the New York Herald, and everyone immediately turned to Orson |