CHAPTER LVI.--Retrospection. Apostolic Mission of the Mormon Women. How they have Used the Suffrage. Their Petition to Mrs. Grant. Twenty-seven Thousand Mormon Women Memorialize Congress. CHAPTER LVII.--Sarah the Mother of the Covenant. In Her the Expounding of the Polygamic Relations of the Mormon Women. Fulfilment of God's Promise to Her. The Mormon Parallel. Sarah and Hagar divide the Religious Domination of the World. CHAPTER LVIII.--Womanhood the Regenerating Influence in the World. From Eve, the First, to Mary, the Second Eve. God and Woman the Hope of Man. Woman's Apostleship. Joseph _vs_. Paul. The Woman Nature a Predicate of the World's Future. CHAPTER LIX.--Zion, a Type of "The Woman's Age." The Culminating Theme of the Poets of Israel. The Ideal Personification of the Church. The Bride. The Coming Eve. CHAPTER LX.--Terrible as an Army with Banners. Fifty Thousand Women with the Ballot. Their Grand Mission to the Nation. A Foreshadowing of the Future of the Women of Mormondom. CHAPTER I. A STRANGE RELIGIOUS EPIC--AN ISRAELITISH TYPE OF WOMAN IN THE AGE. AN epic of woman! Not in all the ages has there been one like unto it. Fuller of romance than works of fiction are the lives of the Mormon women. So strange and thrilling is their story,--so rare in its elements of experience,--that neither history nor fable affords a perfect example; yet is it a reality of our own times. Women with new types of character, antique rather than modern; themes ancient, but transposed to our latter-day experience. Women with their eyes open, and the prophecy of their work and mission in their own utterances, who have dared to enter upon the path of religious empire-founding with as much divine enthusiasm as had the apostles who founded Christendom. Such are the Mormon women,--religious empire-founders, in faith and fact. Never till now did woman essay such an extraordinary character; never before did woman rise to the conception of so supreme a mission in her own person and life. We can only understand the Mormon sisterhood by introducing them in this cast at the very outset; only comprehend the wonderful story of their lives by viewing them as apostles, who have heard the voices of the invisibles commanding them to build the temples of a new faith. Let us forget, then, thus early in their story, all reference to polygamy or monogamy. Rather let us think of them as apostolic mediums of a new revelation, who at first saw only a dispensation of divine innovations and manifestations for the age. Let us view them purely as prophetic women, who undertook to found their half of a new Christian empire, and we have exactly the conception with which to start the epic story of the Women of Mormondom.