Topics: marriage, dating, timing, polygamy, church policy, missionary force
-“If I were a lady I should be careful whom I married: I should want to be pretty sure that the man tried to live his religion as revealed to us. Young folks generally marry because they love, sometimes because they are pretty. It is said that beauty is “only skin deep,” and I believe it is so, it will shortly fade away. We should be reasonable on this subject, as well as on others; but when a person is love struck, there is no reason in them. We should never be struck very bad. We should love so that we could throw him off at any time if he does not do right.” (John Taylor, JD 19:167)
-“A great many women are more nice than wise. If they can get a man with a pretty face, they think it is all there is about it. Some men think if they can get a woman that has a handsome face, that is all there is of it. But it is that woman that has a head and sensibility,- I do not care if her head is three feet long,- it has nothing to do with the character that lives in the body. It is the character that is in the man’s house, the spirit that is in the man; it is the spirit that is in the woman and in the house that makes the woman and that makes the man.” (Brigham Young JD 5:92)
-LDS prophets teach we date after age 16 in our day in age, even though in a different culture, that of Christ’s day, the men often married at 16, not usually later than 20, and the women usually slightly younger. It was not uncommon for them to marry at age 14. *We live in a unique era, which needs unique instruction.
-“When it’s the right person, and the right place, the temple, it’s the right time.” -LDS Ensign (I’ll get the reference).
-For the Strength of Youth pamphlets are kept in the pockets of most of the 12 Apostles, we never outgrow those standards.
-Long as Jehovah instructed his people to marry inside the covenant.
-Trans-racial marriage was a positive result of the gathering of the saints in the early days of the church. It helped them embrace more cultures (see LDS Newsroom of race and the church).
-Moses (a Hebrew man) married an Ethiopian woman. One thought this wrong, and was cursed with leprosy to show that “white skin” isn’t all that.
-Joseph married Asenath a woman of Egypt.
-Thomas S. Monson says were he to go back and live his youth again, he would have married at an earlier age. (See “To The Rescue” by Heidi Swinton, his biography)
-When and how many children to have are between the couple and the Lord, and the command to multiply and replenish the earth (to have children) remains in force to God’s people. (Elder Anderson recent General Conference Address) (Church Priesthood Handbook)
-Polygamy has been practiced by God’s people at times when he needed them to do so to raise up seed to him (Jacob 2 from the Book of Mormon); this currently is not legal in the LDS church. Elder Holland suggests that polygamy is more of an acceptation to the rule rather than a norm in heaven (I am getting the reference for this). The Book of Jacob also speaks of having only 1 wife. *When I was in the Missionary Training Center, our leader had those of us in a congregation of hundreds of missionaries stand up if they had polygamist ancestry. Almost a majority stood. This may be an insight as to why the Lord directed such for his early saints, to get more missionaries to bring his saving gospel truths to cover the earth in preparation for his Millennial reign, to send the voice of warning to the ends of the earth.
