DISCUSSION Bttwecn Profe6iior Orson Pralt nnd Dr. J. P. Newman, Chaplain of (be United Stutev Senate. SUBJECT :u Docs the Bible sanction sanc-tion Polygamy ?" Affirmative, - Professor Pratt. Negative, ... Dr. Newman. THIRD AND CLOSING DAY. PROFESSOR PRATT. The learned gentleman said , they had reached the last session of the discussion, and one hour was allowed to each to close the debate. Polygamy, he claimed, was an institution of the Bible, established by divine authority, by law, by command, and, of course, must be sanctioned by the Divine Law given. He was challenged yesterday to prove there were more than two polygamic polyg-amic families in Israel during their sojourn in the wilderness. Taking up a table of statistics, he entered largely into figures to prove that there must have been polygamy in Israel during the time that elapsed from their departure de-parture from Egypt until their emer-ing emer-ing iuto the promised land. Taking the account in the book of Numbers as a basis, 1st chapter and 46th verse, there were, he said, 603,550 males in Israel, over twenty years of age. His opponent had admitted that there were two and a half millions of people in Israel. By reference to a carefully prepared table of figures he proceeded from one deduction to another, an-other, until the result was that, accepting accept-ing the number of the entire people as given by his opponent, ajid a ratio admitted ad-mitted by all statisticians, if Israel had been a monogamie nation, or had had only the two families of pslygauiists referred to, he said there would have been an average of eighty-one children to the family, which uo single wile could have born. Proceeding on the same basis of calculation, cal-culation, widen was strongly laid, he tJaimed that . an average of seven wives to the husband would give an averags of ten children and a half to each woman, which was more than a proper average ; and the result he claimed was that there was not only froof that polygamy was practised in arael during the time that elapsed from their being brought out of Egypt until they entered into the promised land, but that it was largely practised, " and that monogamy was the exception. From this reasoning and these data he held that the law recited by him in the first day's debate with , regard to the rights of the first-born, was given to regulate this matter in a nation where there were over 22,000 first-born tpns, whose fathers were polygamists. As great, he said, as was the desire of Dr. Newman to establish monogamy, he could not say that oue wife could be the mother of 81 children; and if this could not be shown, let him .how how the results could be other than tho.-e produced. Having thus, he claimed, established that I.-rac! was a polygamic nation, he held that if iod gave laws to a people of mixed tonus of marriage He would adapt then; to tbe condition of botii. As for the laws regulating the social evil, referred to by hi. opponent, these, he said, carried upon their face a con demnauon of the evil they were designed de-signed to regulate. ' When the Parisians Parisi-ans jiassjd laws to regulate the social evil, they pronounced it a crime. And i;o it was in this country with the excise ex-cise law-; they declared intemperance ira evil; and so with the laws which , God had given to regulate and puni.-h the murderer, the .Sabbath-breaker, tee thief or. the adulterer. But because be-cause God has regulated matiy abominable abomin-able crimes, does it follow that He has no right to regulate that which is good? God instituted the law of circumcision, circumci-sion, and gave laws regulating it; but shall we say circumcuiou was condemned condemn-ed because laws were given to regulate it? Closer still; God had given laws to regulate monogamy, but does that condemn con-demn it? Such logic as that, lie claimed, would never do. He came then to Leviticus xviii., 18, as a passage so often referred to by his opponent. He was glad to have this passage referred re-ferred to. The law according to King James translation reads : '' Neither tnalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, besides be-sides the other in her lifetime." His opponent, with Dr. Dwight, Dr. Edwards, Ed-wards, and several other commentators disagreed with that; and Homebody had "inserted different words in the inanrin. it wte-argued (hat the interpretation inter-pretation in the margin was correct, and that KiiiL' James' translators were wrong. But all who had so sorted were monogamist-:. Tin: speaker then g:ive a learned exposition ex-position of tin: original Hebrew, to show Ji'it the corp'i-t interpretation of the pa aye was that sisters, the ehild-1 ehild-1 'i i;!' the Same parents, were meant. 'll -uP!,ll;od that blond relate;;,, re-late;;,, WuuM he tv.ro to agree in the ?-'u ' ' "siiy. But On ea.-;t;K of Cain !' -'fl.-if.J.jsepli rtnd his brethren, fjl th:: 'veritj ss oHMdcon killed by t!.e:r lio'V:r, of David's sen Ab,alom havm eau.-.rl ir.ux dome -.tie trouble, .-.nd of Jaoo'. 'M family whore it. was Ruche! and Lc,, who quarrelled, and nether of'ihe li;.,.,.liiaiiJcns nor Rachel and Leah wi'h It., showed that relative rel-ative were as apt. quarrel as tho-,o not allied by blood; a,J t. Iir,r,l h;l j.'ive On law to r-gijtj.i,. described. IIr.;e tew i! 0,,. 'l' "iiion of the 6 original, the speaker deGed all the Hebrew scholars of the world to find in the original the reading given in the margin. He next referred to the uncle of Ruth's dead husband, Boas, who said he was not the nearest of kin. But the nearest of kin was his brother, bro-ther, and probably his cider brother. He was a married man, but he admitted ad-mitted the right of Iluth to claim him, and he said to Boaz: "Go thou and redeem my right." This proves that married men were obliged to fulfil the law. Taking up the passages in Matthew and Malachi, with regard to the law of divorce, he said that in Malachi the Lord declares he hates a man putting away the wife of his youth ; but there was not a word in the passage about po.ygamy. In Matthew Jesus gives a law respecting re-specting divorce, and says a man should not put away his wife save for fornication. The speaker here en tered into an argument at length, quoting the words of Jesus that he who putteth away his wife unjustly commit-teth commit-teth adultery, and reasoning to show that if a man so commits adultery, by the mere divorcing his wife, he has sinned before God and rendered himself him-self unworthy to have a wife at all ; and his marriage with another is double adultery, because he takes a wife contrary con-trary to the law of God, added to his sin of unjustly divorcing the woman he had put away. But he held there was nothing in the passage, nor in the 'words of Jesus, that referred to a man who had not put away his wife at all, if he became be-came a polygamist by taking another wife. The man who divorced his wife without just cause became a partner in the sins which that divorce might lead to, and was so responsible; but there was not a word in the language referred refer-red to that in the slightest degree was directed against polygamy. Referring to the case of Hosea, he requested the audience to carefully read the second chapter of Hosea, and they would find that the statement made by his learned opponent, that Hosea had divorced his first wife before be-fore taking auother, was distinctly aud emphatically incorrect. In concluding, the speaker held that he had clearly shown that God had giveD laws regulating polygamy; had actually and directly commanded this form of marriage; that these arguments had never been overthrown; a"d the inference . was, that he had fully sustained sus-tained the affirmative of the question "Does the Bible Sanction Polygamy." DR. NEWMAN. He had heard before coming here that his opponent was great in mathematics mathe-matics and his statistics showed that he was; but the gentleman had failed to prove what he had said. He did not prove that the destruction of the male children of Israel continued for eighty years; but had merely asserted it. He had also made another blunder. The number of males over twenty years of age, which he had quoted, were those who were to go to war, and did not include all the males over that age, besides, many of the fir.-t-born children were dead. These: wcr; three blunders the gentlen.au had committed. lis opponent had denied the statement state-ment made the previous day, that there were not more than two polycami.-ts during the sojourn of the children of Israel in the wilderness, but he had only attempted to prove his position by a mathematical problem based on an error. With regard to the pas-ace in Leviticus Le-viticus xviii, 18. the very admis-iun of the gentleman knocked his own argument argu-ment to piece, lie took up the lie-brew lie-brew tonus to show that the word translated si-ter is a generic term, meaning that every Woman is a sister to every other woman; and said he challenged his opponent, who was a Hebraist, to meet him in print and dis cuss the Hebrew words under consideration conside-ration in the papers. But if the gentleman gen-tleman even were correct, the law-recorded law-recorded in Leviticus was broken here in this Territory, for there were men here who had married sisters. Where was the gentleman's denunciation of this breach of the law? For the sake of saving polygamy his opponent was willing to permit God s holy law to be set at defiance. What respect, therefore, there-fore, could be had for his arguments? The gentleman had referred to the multiplication of horses by the kings of Israel. There was no law saying how many horses a man should have, but there was a law limiting a man to one wife. lie wis sorry he had no more time, but would carry out the line of argument argu-ment he was on when his time ceased the previous day. There were only some twenty-five cases of polygamy mentioned in the Bible, and he would take up a few of these. Abraham was the Grst case cited. It had been said that Abraham was a polygamise. This he denied. Abraham never was a polygamist. Sensation. Sarah had brought Ilagar to Abraham as a' substitute sub-stitute for herself, because she had no children Abraham did not go after Ilagar. But Sarah afterwards discovered dis-covered her sin, and I Ingar was put anay. Her con Ishmael was a man whose hand was again t every man's hand; but thouyh this w;is prophesied it diif not justify it, any more than Abraham's connection with Ilagar did not justify the act. To suppose that he took Keturah to wife during the lifetime of Sarah, waJ an insult to his moral character. Coming to Jacob, he said, though brought up in the sanctity of monogamy, monog-amy, he first stole his brothei 'h birthright, birth-right, then lied to his own old, blind father, and aflerwares became a poly if -amivl, being himself deceived. Jacob wa" ei hty -even years old when he be came a polygamist, and out of the hundred and forty-seven years of his lile he was on'y twenty-seven years a polygamist. He was converted after he had married more than one wife. Moses was not a polygamist. Zip-porah, Zip-porah, the daughter of Jethro the priest of Midian, was the Ethiopian wife of Moses named in scripture, and was the only wile he had. He was a great shining light of monogamy. If the practice of polygamy by Gideon, the speaker said, was a law to us, so also was his idolatry, although he had been visited by an angel. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, he was prepared to prove, was the first wife of Elkanah, and God gave her a son in answer to her prayers; not as an endorsement of polygamy, but an endorsement of monogamy. His opponent might have referred to David, who was a polygamist; but he was also oue of the most coldblooded cold-blooded of murderers, who murdered to cover up his own adultery. David was twenty-seven years of age when he took the daughter of Saul to wife, and for forty years he had the troubles and sins of polygamy to contend with. But in the last eight years of his life, he saw the evils of it, and cast it away. Referring to Solomon and the foretelling fore-telling of his future greatness, he said the future greatness and glory of Jesus were predicted, yet it did not justify his betrayal. So the foretelling of Solomon's greatness did not justify his polygamy. Referring to bastardy, he held that it was the reoult of a union of a Jew and a pagau ; and the child of a Jew and a Jewess, no matter whether born in wedlock or ont of wedlock, was not a bastard. The evils of polygamy were shown in the first three Kings of Israel. Is-rael. The reverend gentleman's roll call of polygamists were: Lamech, the murderer; mur-derer; Jacob, the liar and thief ; David, Da-vid, the adulterer and murderer ; and Solomon, the idolater. His roll of honor included Adam, Noah, Abraham, Abra-ham, Moses, Aaron, Joshua and all the prophets and apostles ; they were all monogamists. lie quoted from Paul's 2nd epistle to the Corinthians, to r-.how that every man should have his own wile aud every woman her own husband. In Corinth there existed the practice of a community of wives, and Paul gave this command that every woman should have her own special husband, and every husband his own wife ; quoting the Greek idioms to show that husband and wife were perfectly equal, the wife had as much right over the body of the husband, as the husbaud had over the body of the wife. He also quoted frou the Corinthians to prove that the husband and wife become be-come one or identical with each other, as one flesh. And the passage "A bishop must be blameless, the husband of one wife," expressing himself prepared pre-pared to prove that polygamisU were not admitted into the Church, for Paul had said "Let every man have hi own wife and eery woman her own husband." hus-band." If monogamy came from the Greeks and Romans, polygamy could not have been universal, as the speaker said it was here claimed. Referring to the words of Jesus recorded re-corded in the c aiigelist.s, he limited Hxodus with n'L'.ird to the grounds on which Mo-es permitted divorces, bringing bring-ing up different rafbiimieal opinions on the subject; and t-aid that when the point was brought up Indore Jesus, he simply pn-achcd a brief sermon on marriage, sustaining monogamy with the memorable words: "For this cause shall a man leave father an 1 mother, and el'-ave unto his wile, and the twain shall be one flesh." Taking up the terms of adultery, whoredom and fornication, he i.roeeod-'d i.roeeod-'d to argue that polygamy is adultery, lie held that adultery was committed by a married man having sexual connection con-nection with any woman oilier than his own wife The argument in brief was: That a man being permitted to have only one wife, at one time, when he took nether wife his carnal communication communi-cation with her was adultery, she he iog a woman not legally his wife. He then said special penalties were annexed annex-ed to special sexual crimes, for the purpose pur-pose of having the genealogy of Christ perfect. Under the Jewish dispensation dispensa-tion a man violating the seventh commandment com-mandment was responsible to God. And several great men mentioned in Bible were in this condition. As a Christian minister he declared thaf'poiyganiy is adultery." "Shame! shame!" from the audience, which was promptly suppressed by the umpires. J Ho had not time to follow up his written writ-ten argument, but he would prove in the daily papers here, if anyone would take him up, that there was more prostitution among polygamic than among monogamie nations. The statements made concerning prostitution prostitu-tion were greatly exaggerated. New York has only 0,000 prostitute; and in St. Louis there are hut 020. The assertions with regard to prostitution were overdrawn and were a slander on our common country. He held the law of limitation to be as universal us creation, and that it governs religious liberty, which must, be exercised within proper bounds. He referred to the Shasta of the Hindoos, and the murder of Hindoo infants by their parents, to prove that civil government gov-ernment has the right to legislate, on religious liberty and restrict (he number num-ber of wives a inun may have to onu. He would nay what he could in favor of Utah ; but civil government, he declared, de-clared, had the right to reslriet religious liberty within due bounds. In concluding he expressed himself prepared to prove that moiiogami ua tions wore long livcjl, and that polygamic- nations were short lived, till through ancient and modjiii history, referring to various nations past mid present in support of his position.