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Show 204 gained in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was taught, and received, by the faithful in the nineteenth century. By the faithful is the qualifying consideration here. Popular attributions by the world then and now which place lust as a basic consideration or perceive plural marriage as a purely sociological experiment can never do it justice. True-for some it simply did not work, and the result was sometimes bitterness and recrimination not only toward the people involved but toward the Church as well. But for those who were able to practically implement it with the zeal which the Shipp families and the Roberts families and others brought to it, the result was a spiritual alloy of surpassing strength forged through a deep and abiding commitment to the Gospel. An interesting and rather humorous sidelight is found in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake where there is a heavy table, a relic from a home established by the state for escapees from polygamy. The project is said to have failed because no one came. It has not been our purpose to make a formal examination of plural marriage, and we shall end our discussion of it with the concluding remarks from Ivins' essay: Although plurality of wives was taught as a tenet of the church, it was not one of the fundamental principles of the Mormon faith, and its abandonment was accomplished with less disturbance than that cause by its introduction. The Saints accepted plurality in theory, but most of them were loath to put it into practice, despite the continaul urging of leaders in whose divine authoritiy they had the utmost faith.... Left to itself, undistrubed by pressure from |
