25) PURITY: Why does the Lord place immorality in seriousness next to murder? What are the effects of immorality on home and posterity?

Prophetic Statements

Brigham Young

1#

Any man who humbles a daughter of Eve to rob her of her virtue, and cast her off dishonored and defiled, is her destroyer, and is responsible to God for the deed. If the refined Christian society of the nineteenth century will tolerate such a crime, God will not; but he will call the perpetrator to an account. He will be damned; in hell he will lift up his eyes, being in torment, until he has paid the uttermost farthing, and made a full atonement for his sins. ¹

2#

The defiler of the innocent is the one who should be branded with infamy and cast out from respectable society, and shunned as a pest, or, as a contagious disease, is shunned. The doors of respectable families should be closed against him, and he should be frowned upon by all high-minded and virtuous persons. Wealth, influence and position should not screen him from their righteous indignation. His sin is one of the blackest in the calendar of crime, and he should be cast down from the high pinnacle of respectability and consideration, to find his place among the worst of felons.  ²

3#

I would rather follow her to the grave, and send her home pure, than suffer my daughter to be prostituted. I will not suffer any female member of my family to be polluted through the corruptions of wicked men.  ³

David O. McKay

#1:

Womanhood should be intelligent and pure, because it is the living life-fountain from which flows the stream of humanity.  She who would pollute that stream is untrue to her sex and an enemy to the strength and perpetuity of the race.  ⁴ 

1. Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, selected and arranged by John A. Widtsoe [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1954], p. 194; also Journal of Discourses  11:268
2. Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, selected and arranged by John A. Widtsoe [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1954], p. 194; also Journal of Discourses  11:267
3. Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, selected and arranged by John A. Widtsoe [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1954], p. 194; Journal of Discourses 2:322
4. David O. McKay, Secrets of a Happy Life, p. 8