Search results
Helen Mar Kimball was sealed to Joseph Smith when she was 14. The marriage was arranged by her father and was apparently not consummated. As an adult, Helen was a fierce defender of both Joseph Smith and plural marriage.
Some Saints also saw plural marriage as a redemptive process of sacrifice and spiritual refinement. According to Helen Mar Kimball, Joseph Smith stated that “the practice of this principle would be the hardest trial the Saints would ever have to test their faith.”
She agreed to the sealing and later characterized it as being “for eternity alone,” suggesting that the relationship did not involve sexual relations. 4 Helen considered the marriage a sacrifice that could eternally link the Kimball and Smith families in heavenly society. 5 After Joseph’s death in 1844, Helen courted and married Horace ...
Helen’s father would eventually marry thirty-nine wives. She wrote, “I had, in hours of temptation when seeing the trials of my mother, felt to rebel. I hated polygamy in my heart.”
“My purpose in publishing another pamphlet on the subject of plural marriage is to throw more light upon it, and to show forth the foolishness and inconsistency of those who hold it up as a “foul stain that pollutes the very soil where it exists.”
Helen Mar Kimball testifies that God commanded plural marriage. A revelation upon the eternity of the marriage covenant was given to the Prophet long before the year 1843, as he asserted, and I am pleased to be able to testify to his son that on a certain Sabbath morning, previous to the return of the Apostles from Europe, in 1841, he ...
In Kimball's own defense of the practice, she argues that entering into plural marriage was an act of supreme faith in Mormon doctrine: "a life-sacrifice for the sake of an everlasting glory and exaltation." [26]
