In all these vexatious prosecutions Elder Taylor stood very near the Prophet, and ably defended him through the editorial columns of the _Times and Seasons_ and the _Neighbor_. In the meantime the phenomenal growth of the Church, the prosperity of the Saints in Nauvoo, and the rapid progress of the city, while very gratifying to the founders of both Church and city, attracted to the body religious and municipal a class of men that were very undesirable. Adventurers seeking for place and power and wealth; demagogues who by fulsome flattery of the people hoped to attain through their political influence a realization of their ambitious dreams; knaves who by falsely professing conversion, thought to cover up corrupt, licentious lives, and thrive by villainy; thieves and counterfeiters who saw their opportunity to live by roguery, and steal on the credit of the Mormons, of whom the people of Illinois were too ready to believe anything that savored of evil, because prejudiced against their religion--all these characters were attracted to Nauvoo by the prosperity that reigned there; and their ungodly conduct hastened the evil day of the city's destruction. Chief among these reckless adventurers was John C. Bennett, a man of learning and intellectual ability but a moral leper. He was guilty of the most infamous, licentious practices, and seduced several women by representing that promiscuous intercourse of the sexes was a doctrine believed in by the Latter-day Saints and that there was no harm in it. He also said that Joseph Smith and other Church leaders both sanctioned and practiced such wickedness; that Joseph only denounced such things in public so vehemently because of the prejudice of the people, and the trouble that might arise in his own house. For this conduct he was excommunicated from the Church, compelled to resign the Mayorship of the city, expelled from the Masonic Lodge, chastised by the Legion, and his infamy published to the world and denounced. This filled him with bitterness against the Saints, and especially against the Prophet. He at once set on foot measures that he hoped would bring him a terrible revenge. He succeeded in getting the Missourians to issue a new warrant for his arrest on the old charge of "theft, arson and murder," and a new requisition for his arrest was granted by Governor Ford, of Illinois. The warrants were served on the Prophet in Lee County, some two hundred miles from Nauvoo. The officers who arrested him sought to drag him immediately into Missouri, but in this they failed, as Joseph through some friends obtained a writ of _habeas corpus_, and the legality of the warrant was enquired into by the municipal court of Nauvoo. The court also went behind the writ and tried the case _exparte_ on its merits, and discharged the accused for want of subsistence in the warrant on which he was arrested, as well as upon the merits of the case.