View source for 1900-02-26-New York Tribune-Says Polygamy Prevails

==Says Polygamy Prevails==
:''New York Tribune'', 26 February 1900, p. 8, c. 4

==Says Polygamy Prevails==

:'''Dr. Sarah J. Elliott Declares that the Marriages are not Recorded.'''

Sarah J. Elliott, who was a physician in one of
the counties of Utah for a number of years and
who made a careful study of the question of Mor
monism, spoke last evening in St. Ann's Church
on the Heights. Dr. Elliott began by saying that
the Bible was not taught in the Mormon Sunday
school where she lived, as the Bishop, who is the
half priestly, half civil head of a community,
thought that it was too bad a book to place in the
hands of the young. She declared that the theology
which was taught the Mormon children was that
the boys would be gods and the girls would make
the boys gods.

The speaker asserted that since Utah had been
admitted to statehood two thousand children had
been born in polygamy. Polygamous marriages
are never recorded, she said, and Mr. Roberts was
right when he declared to Congress that there
could be found no records of such marriages.
Dr. Elliott said that obscene rites are performed
in the Tabernacle at Salt Lake City when a bride
was prepared for marriage. She said that the bride
was baptized and anointed and then passed
through various ceremonies that were nothing
more than orgies and the revival of Indian mys
teries. In one of the rites a dialogue between
Adam and Eve was the feature.

"I consider," continued Dr. Elliott, "that these
Mormon women are degenerate and abnormal, not
necessarily, I want you to understand, disreputable.
For I never knew a Mormon woman to be untrue
to her husband, even after the Edmunds-Tucker
law of 1884, which prohibited polygamy in Utah
and made some women husbandless.

Dr. Elliott declared that Mrs. Roberts had said
to her: "The Mormon religion is a higher religion
than yours. You marry a man because you love
him. We marry a man because we want to raise
children and save souls and make gods of them."
It was explained that one of the tenets of Mor
monlsm was that there are numbers of disembodied
spirits in the air which are saved only by entering
into the bodies of newborn children.

Dr. Elliott contended that polygamy was preva
lent and cited as an example that the Bishop where
she lived, had had three children born to him on
the same day among his wives.

Miss Gould, Dr. Elliott said, had furnished con
siderable money for the movement to stop polygamy.