William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

“ [201] wives, and people told me he was likely to seal two more at least. I find him living with a single wife. One lady is dead, but he has not taken a sister into her place.”

We supped last night with Elder Jennings at his new villa, where we saw his wife and daughters. Being a wealthy man, Jennings has been urged to seal a third and fourth sister to himself, according to the will of heaven; but he has held aloof from “counsel” in this matter, and in face of bishops and pontiffs, anxious for his good, he steadily refuses to add wife on wife. A man of business, dealing with men of every class and creed, Jennings has been carried into something like silent opposition to his Church. He will not bring, he says, another woman to his house. His living partner seems to me the happiest Mormon woman in the town.

“Well, in the city, you may note such cases,” says the Apostle, putting my case aside, with what appears to me a weary shrug. “ A Gentile influence has been creeping in, no doubt; and business people are the first to see things in a worldly light; but on the country farms and in the lonely sheep-runs you will find a pastoral people, eager to fulfil the ”