1880-09-29-New York Sun-The Decalogue at the Cannons Mouth
The Decalogue at the Cannon's Mouth
- New York Sun, 29 September 1880, p. 2
The Decalogue at the Cannon's Mouth
Not long ago TALMAGE was impatient for the death of a dozen or more politicians at the North and at the South. He was sure that if those men could only be got rid of, if their lives could forthwith be brought to an end, sectional animosity would cease in the republic, and the rest of us would be much happier.
He was not content to wait for their taking off by the ordinary operation of disease, or for their dropping away when the fulness of years had come upon them. He wanted them dead at once. The inference, of course, was that the proper, wise, and patriotic thing to do would be to waylay and kill these unhappy but troublesome individuals. Providence seemed disposed to let them live longer than was desirable in TALMAGE'S view and therefore their assassination was really necessary if TALMAGE was right. Happily, however, none of his applauding hearers undertook this bloody job of remedying the defects of GOD'S government of the universe as pointed out by this Christian minister.
TALMAGE now calls loudly on the President about to be elected to blow up a great community because their ideas of marriage differ from his. He does not propose to set about the work of converting them to better ways but would march an army against them, and "with cannon of the biggest bore thunder into them the seventh commandment.
The people he would treat in this bloodthirsty fashion are the Mormons of Utah. If they insist on having more than one wife they should be blown to pieces and he invokes the spirit of ANDREW JACKSON to descend on our next President and command him to proclaim that at such a day and hour each Mormon shall have no more than one wife or shall go to jail, or leave the country." If they refuse to submit, he "would send out troops and let them make the Mormon Tabernacle their headquarters, and with cannon of the biggest bore thunder into them the seventh commandment."
Inasmuch as the biggest cannon nowadays carry a shot weighing about a ton, and must be discharged with several hundred pounds of powder, both the noise and the execution would be terrible if we sent out even a few dozen of them to Salt Lake City. According to TALMAGE we must have the cannon anyway. "Arbitration by all means," says TALMAGE, "if that will do; a proclamation, if that will do; but I am sure that bullets and cannon would be necessary at the back of it all."
He can't give up the shooting. The seventh commandment must be fired into the Mormons. But what good can even the whole Decalogue do a polygamist when he has to be blown to pieces in order to have it fired into him?
The Gospel was first preached among polygamists. Did its Founder direct that men should give up all their wives except one or take the alternative of being cut to pieces? Even the seventh commandment, which TALMAGE would blow into the Mormons with the biggest guns, was uttered amid the thunders of Sinai to a polygamous people. And from that day to this the world has gone on in the practice, the spread of purer and higher ideas of marriage coming only as a slow development and affecting only a part of the great races on the globe.
Moreover, if we accept TALMAGE'S bloody and violent method in lieu of the benign method of persuasion and example of love, kindness, and charity, preached by CHRIST, we must lay in guns of the biggest bore by the hundred gross. While we are sending a battery to the Mormon Tabernacle we must be getting ready one for TALMAGES Tabernacle also and there will be thunder all around.
We imagine therefore that President HANCOCK will hesitate about adopting this Christian preacher's plan for blowing the Decalogue into our citizens from the cannons mouth.
