In the year 1844, before his death, a large company was organized to come and search out a location, west of the Rocky Mountains. We have been fulfilling and carrying out his predictions in coming here and since our arrival. The course pursued by this woman shows what apostates can do, and how wicked they can become in their hearts. When they apostatize from the truth they can come out and swear before God and the heavens that such and such things never existed, when they know, as well as they know they exist themselves, that they are swearing falsely. Why do they do this? Because they have no fear of God before their eyes; because they have apostatized from the truth; because they have taken it upon themselves to destroy the revelations of the Most High, and to banish them from the face of the earth, and the Spirit of God withdraws from them. We have come here to these mountains, and have continued to practise the principle of Celestial Marriage from the day the revelation was given until the present time; and we are a polygamic people, and a great people, comparatively speaking, considering the difficult circumstances under which we came to this land. Let us speak for a few moments upon another point connected with this subject--that is, the reason why God has established polygamy under the present circumstances among this people. If all the inhabitants of the earth, at the present time, were righteous before God, and both males and females were faithful in keeping His commandments, and the numbers of the sexes of a marriageable age were exactly equal, there would be no necessity for any such institution. Every righteous man could have his wife and there would be no overplus of females. But what are the facts in relation to this matter? Since old Pagan Rome and Greece--worshippers of idols--passed a law confining a man to one wife, there has been a great surplus of females, who have had no possible chance of getting married. You may think this a strange statement, but it is a fact that those nations were the founders of what is termed monogamy. All other nations, with few exceptions, had followed the scriptural plan of having more wives than one. These nations, however, were very powerful, and when Christianity came to them, especially the Roman nation, it had to bow to their mandates and customs, hence the Christians gradually adopted the monogamic system. The consequence was that a great many marriageable ladies of those days, and of all generations from that time to the present have not had the privilege of husbands, as the one-wife system has been established by law among the nations descended from the great Roman Empire--namely the nations of modern Europe and the American States. This law of monogamy, or the monogamic system, laid the foundation for prostitution and evils and diseases of the most revolting nature and character, under which modern Christendom groans, for as God has implanted, for a wise