Show POLYGAMOUS INSTRUCTION An Earnest Appeal to Emmeline B Wells Communicated You are the editress of the Womans Exponent of Utah You are the known advocate of polygamy You are the exponent yourself in your life of this crime against womanhood By your tongue and by your pen you have advocated advo-cated this institution in all parts of the country where it has been your fortune to be You have claimed it to be a divine institution You said it was sent of God through Joseph Smith the chaste prophet You have lived in it You have taught it to your daughters and this day the curses that you have generated gen-erated have come home to roost The seeds of sorrow and crime that you have taught that you have practiced have borne fruit this day in the lives of your daughters and now the double disgrace that should cause you to bury your head in sack cloth and ashes overshadows the city and the people and the country which you live You have sown the wind and reaped a whirlwind Your daughters you trained to go into polygamy and they followed the example you set them and the instructions you gave them One of them stands an outcast out-cast by the selfconfession of her husband Two others go weeping and lamenting this day and no doubt cursing their fate and this accursed institution Where is your womens hear where is your mothers ihstinct How can it be that you a woman of intelligence should stoop from your womanhood to teach such a doctrine and to furnish such examples ex-amples to your own children and the children of others who live about you The records of the court the name of John Q Cannon the confessed adulterer the wreck and ruin of your daughters pollutes the very air of religious life and sends horror to every thinking soul that has breathed or felt the true insniration of divine life and holy worship Verily it must be that you have been permitted to live in order that by your example by your instruction instruc-tion and by the very ruin of your family the people of this Territory may he taught to see and know how great the crime of polygamy is against the home against womanhood and motherhood and against all holy chastity Is it true that the heavens are opening that the wrath of God is Descending in order that this moral cancer may be burnt out of existencethat the chains of religious tyranny and the bonds of superstition may be melted yea burnt upthat the women and children of this Territory may go free from the damnable bondage that has held them and the superstition that has blinded them Verily the wrath of man shall praise the Lord But Madam you are to be pitied and not to be despised you must be in such torture that the grace of God only can relieve your perturbed soul Horrors upon horrors hor-rors may accumulate and now this seems to be the culmination of horrorunless it be true that all finer feelings that are womanly and mark a mothers life have been blunted and withered by this all damnable institution of polygamy which has enslaved your life for lo I these many years Better far that you should curse God and die than that you should persist in maintaining that this institution of polygamy is divine Why not let me beseech you turn your intelligence into your own heart yea into the fibers of the hearts of your daughters that are now prostrate and Buffering in torture and then turn your soul and theirs to God and in repentance for the rest of life denounce this institutiondenounce this false and hellborn religionif it is not a misnomer to call it a religion and come out before vrmr follow women and do work meet for repentance and try for the rest of your life to undo the great wrong you have done to woman hood to yourself and to your own chil dren Do not longer deceive yourself Rise to the voice of reason to the cry of outraged womanhood to the call of Almighty God in the very woes that beset you and in the days and years that may be left you in this life by tongue and pen denounce this polygamous curse curseHYMEN |