Having made this much clear, Brigham went on in his fatherly way to impress him anew with the sinfulness of all temporal governments outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Again he learned from the lips of authority that any people presuming to govern themselves by laws of their own making and officers of their own appointing, are in wicked rebellion against the Kingdom of God; that for seventeen hundred years the nations of the Western Hemisphere have been destitute of this Kingdom and destitute of all legal government; and that the Lord was now about to rend all earthly governments, to cast down thrones, overthrow nations, and make a way for the establishment of the everlasting Kingdom, to which all others would have to yield, or be prostrated never more to rise.  Thus was the rebuff of the afternoon gracefully atoned for.

From matters of civil government the talk ranged to affairs domestic.

“Tell me,” said the young man, “the truth of this new order of celestial marriage.”  And Brigham had become animated at once.

“Yes,” he said, “when the family organisation was revealed from Heaven, and Joseph began on the right and the left to add to his family, oh, dear, what a quaking there was in Israel!  But there it was, plain enough.  When you have received your endowments, keys, blessings, all the tokens, signs, and every preparatory ordinance that can be given to a man for his entrance through the celestial gate, then you can see it.”

He gazed a moment into the fire of hickory logs before which they sat, and then went on, more confidentially: 

“Now you take that promise to Abraham—­’Lift up your eyes and behold the stars.  So shall thy seed be as numberless as the stars.  Go to the seashore and look at the sand, and behold the smallness of the particles thereof’—­I am giving you the gist of the Lord’s words, you understand—­’and then realise that your seed shall be as numberless as those sands.’  Now think for a minute how many particles there are, say in a cubit foot of sand—­about one thousand million particles.  Think of that!  In eight thousand years, if the inhabitants of earth increased one trillion a century, three cubic yards of sand would still contain more particles than there would be people on the whole globe.  Yet there you got the promise of the Lord in black and white.  Now how was Abraham to manage to get a foundation laid for this mighty kingdom?  Was he to get it all through one wife?  Don’t you see how ridiculous that is?  Sarah saw it, and Sarah knew that unless seed was raised to Abraham he would come short of his glory.  So what did Sarah do?  She gave Abraham a certain woman whose name was Hagar, and by her a seed was to be raised up unto him.  And was that all?  No.  We read of his wife Keturah, and also of a plurality of wives which he had in the sight and favour of God, and from whom he raised up many sons.  There, then, was a foundation laid for the fulfilment of that grand promise concerning his seed.”