"If none but Gods will be permitted to multiply immortal children, it follows that each God must have one or more wives. God, the father of our spirits, became the father of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh. The fleshy body of Jesus required a mother as well as a father. Therefore, the father and mother of Jesus according to the flesh must have been associated together in the capacity of husband and wife; hence the Virgin Mary must have been for the time being, the lawful wife of God the Father. "As God the Father begat the fleshly body of Jesus, so he, before the world began, begat his spirit; as the body required an earthly mother, so his spirit required a heavenly mother. As God associated in the capacity of a husband with the earthly mother, so likewise he associated in the same capacity with the heavenly one; earthly things being in the likeness of heavenly things, and that which is temporal being the likeness of that which is eternal. Or, in other words, the laws of generation upon the earth are after the order of the laws of generation in heaven."--Orson Pratt in The Seer, page 159. Eliza R. Snow, the Mormon high priestess and poetess, gives voice to these doctrines in her famous "Invocation; or, the Eternal Mother and Father." Most of us have heard it in the Tabernacle; many, however, have not understood its teachings. We quote two stanzas: "In the Heavens are parents single? No; the thought makes reason stare; Truth is reason; truth eternal Tells me I've a mother there." "When I leave this frail existence-- When I lay this mortal by; Father, mother, may I meet you In your royal court on high." --Latter-day Saints Hymnal. "Obedience will the same bright garland weave As it has done for your great mother Eve, For all her daughters on the earth, who will All my requirements sacredly fulfill. And what to Eve, though in her mortal life She'd been the first, or tenth, or fifteenth wife? What did she care, when in her lowest state Whether by fools considered small, or great? 'Twas all the same to her--she proved her worth; She's now the Goddess and the Queen of the earth." --Eliza R. Snow's Poems. "If the men and women are the children of God, sons and daughters of heavenly parents, fashioned in their image, endowed with their attributes and destined to become like them in perfection, why should it startle the world to be told that there is a mother as well as a father in heaven. It is reasonable, philosophical and, like all truth, invulnerable."--Address in Tabernacle, summer of 1906, Apostle Whitney