you can see it.” 

 He gazed a moment into the fire of hickory logs before which they sat, and then went on, more confidentially: 

 “Now you take that promise to Abraham—‘Lift up your eyes and behold the stars. So shall thy seed be as numberless as the stars. Go to the seashore and look at the sand, and behold the smallness of the particles thereof’—I am giving you the gist of the Lord’s words, you understand—‘and then realise that your seed shall be as numberless as those sands.’ Now think for a minute how many particles there are, say in a cubit foot of sand—about one thousand million particles. Think of that! In eight thousand years, if the inhabitants of earth increased one trillion a century, three cubic yards of sand would still contain more particles than there would be people on the whole globe. Yet there you got the promise of the Lord in black and white. Now how was Abraham to manage to get a foundation laid for this mighty kingdom? Was he to get it all through one wife? Don’t you see how ridiculous that is? Sarah saw it, and Sarah knew that unless seed was raised to Abraham he would come short of his glory. So what did Sarah do? She gave Abraham a certain woman whose name was Hagar, and by her a seed was to be raised up unto him. And was that all? No. We read of his wife Keturah, and also of a plurality of wives which he had in the sight and favour of God, and from whom he raised up many sons. There, then, was a foundation laid for the fulfilment of that grand promise concerning his seed.” 

 He peered again into the fire, and added, by way of clenching his argument: “I guess it would have been rather slow-going, if the Lord had confined Abraham to one wife, like some of these narrow, contracted nations of modern Christianity. You see, they don’t know that a man’s posterity in this world is to constitute his glory and kingdom and dominion in the world to come, and they don’t know, either, that there are thousands of choice spirits in the spirit world waiting to tabernacle in the flesh. Of course, there are lots of these things that you ain’t ready to hear yet, but now you know that polygamy is necessary for our exaltation to the fulness of the Lord’s glory in the eternal world, and after you study it you’ll like the doctrine. I do; I can swallow it without greasing my mouth!” 

 He prayed that night to be made “holy as Thy servant Brigham is holy; to hear Thy voice as he hears it; to be made as wise as he, as true as he, even as another Lion of the Lord, so that I may be a rod and staff and comforter to these buffeted children of Thine.” 

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