The business of
these deities in the Celestial Kingdom is the propagation of souls to
people bodies begotten on earth, and the sexual relation is made to
permeate every portion of the creed as thoroughly as it pervaded the
religions of ancient Egypt and India. In the Endowment House at Salt
Lake City, secret rites are practised of a character similar to the
mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two
Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris.
In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both
sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with
cleansed bodies and anointed hair. Since the revelation of the processes
of the Endowment, which was first fully made by a young apostate named
John Hyde, other dissenters, real and pretended, have attempted to
impose on the public exaggerated accounts of these ceremonies; but in
justice to the Mormon Church it ought to be said, that there is no
foundation for the reports that they are such as would outrage decency.
To be sure, an assemblage of members of both sexes, clad in white
shifts, with oiled and dishevelled hair, in a room fitted up in
resemblance of a garden, to witness a performance of the allegory of
Adam and Eve in Eden, which is conducted so as to be sensually symbolic,
is not suggestive of refined ideas; but it is necessary to take into
consideration the character both of performers and witnesses, which is
not distinguished in any way by delicacy.
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