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Show NEW ENGLAND DIVORCE LAWS. The anti-"Mormon" agitation is leading a few of the thinking men of the country to compare the alleged evil of polygamy with some of the real evils at home. From a copy of a Providence, R. I. [Rhode Island] paper, sent to us by an unknown friend, we learn of the proceedings of an anti-"Mormon" meeting recently held there. In the course of his remarks one of the speakers, Rev. Dr. Behrend, said: The other matter to which I wish to call your attention is the radical nature of the agitation upon which we have entered. I may be mistaken, but cannot convince myself that I am far out of the way. People will say, what are you having your meetings here in New England for? You are drawing your swords to strike off the head of a monster that is not here in these States. Well, when I follow this monster polygamy, of which Mormonism is the head, I see it drag its slimy length through many States. And I find there is another form of it in New England. If, as you have been told, polygamy is only bigamy writ large, I tell you our own ?? legislation is nothing more or less than polygamy writ small. (Applause.) And I do believe from the depths of my heart that there is no such foul idol upon the civilization of the Nineteenth Century as the divorce legislation of New England. (Applause.) Perhaps I am out of the way. Perhaps my logic is jumped ("No."), but it seems to me that I have only probed this matter to the head, and I confess that with me one explanation of the lamentable weakness of our protest against the evils of polygamy in Utah has been the consciousness that many people have hardly dared to express themselves on that account, and that people who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones. Consistency is a jewel, and no man is strong unless he is straight-grained all the way through. What is true of men is true of nations. If our protest is to have any power, we ought to see that the evils that are with us at home, and for which we ought to blush, are first done away with. Only this afternoon I joined in the holy hands of matrimony a young man and a young woman, and as I pronounced, "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder," this thought came home to me - should't [shouldn't] I rather say, "What Rhode Island has joined together let nobody put asunder until the judge does it?" And practicably there is an omnibus clause in your law which gives him all the authority in the matter. I am ready to say that there are many whom the law joins together whose union God accounts to be ??. (Applause.) There are plenty of polygamists among us in New England and in the State of Rhode Island, although the law does not touch them. The difference between the evil in Utah and in New England is that in Utah they have synchonous [synchronous] polygamy. That is the difference. There they have four or five wives at the same time. I do not say these things because I am in the mood of denuciation [denunciation]. God knows that I am not. I am glad, deep down in my heart, that this agitation has begun; and we have got to be through with it, just as we were with slavery. |