A chorus of Amens from the platform greeted this.  It was led by the Wild Ram of the Mountains.  In his chair the little bent man now cowered lower and lower, one moment praying for strength, the next for death; feeling the blood surge through him like storm waves that would beat him down.  If only Heaven would send him one last moment of power to word this truth so that it might prevail.  But Brigham was continuing.

“And what of this Elder Brother, Jesus?  Did he reject the patriarchal order—­like some poor pusillanimous cry-babies among us?  No, I say!  It will be borne in mind that once on a time there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and on a careful reading of that transaction it will be discovered that no less a person than Jesus Christ was married on that occasion.  If he was never married his intimacy with Mary and Martha, and the other Mary also, whom Jesus loved, must have been highly unbecoming and improper, to say the best of it.  I will venture to say that, if Jesus Christ was now to pass through the most pious countries in Christendom, with a train of women such as used to follow Him, fondling about Him, combing His hair, anointing Him with precious ointments, washing His feet with tears, and wiping them with the hair of their heads,—­that, unmarried or even married, He would be mobbed, tarred and feathered, and ridden, not on an ass, but on a rail.  Now did He multiply, and did He see His seed?  Others may do as they like, but I will not charge our Saviour with neglect or transgression in this or any other duty.”

He turned and went to his seat with a last threatening gesture, amid many little sounds of people relaxing from strained positions.

But then, before another could arise, a wonder came upon them.  The little man stood up and came quickly forward, a strange new life in his step, a new confidence in his bearing, a curious glow of new strength in his face.  Even his stoop had straightened for the moment.  For, as he had listened to Brigham’s last words, the picture of his vision in the desert had come back,—­the cross in the sky, the crucified Saviour upon it, the head in death-agony fallen over upon the shoulder.  And then before his eyes had come page after page of that New Testament with a wash of blood across two of them.  He felt the new life he had prayed for pouring into his veins, and with it a fierce anger.  The one on the cross who had been more than man, who had shirked no sacrifice and loved infinitely, was not thus to be assailed.  A panorama of wrong—­wrong thinking and wrong doing—­extended before his clearing gaze.  For once he seemed to see truth in a vision and to feel the power to utter it.

There was silence again as he stood in front of the little table, the faces before him frozen into wonder that he should have either the power or the temerity to answer Brigham.  He spoke, and his voice was again rough with force, and high and fearless, a voice many of them recalled from the days when he had not been weak.