Manifesto (1890)

Wilford Woodruff’s 1890 declaration ending the practice of plural marriage in the LDS Church, and the dramatic spine of Saints — No Unhallowed Hand (Volume 2 of the Church’s narrative history). In Kyle’s reading, the Manifesto is the climax of a “temporal–spiritual calculus”: Woodruff weighs the loss of the temples — and the ordinances for the living and dead they house — against holding the line on Polygamy under the federal antipolygamy crusade, and chooses “to act for the temporal salvation of the Church.”

The Manifesto is also the book’s most live theological case study of Living Revelation. Woodruff’s defense — “inspiration is revelation… a man is not always required to say ‘Thus saith the Lord’” — raises the recurring questions Kyle probes in the margins: why is Woodruff’s medium of revelatory reception different from Joseph Smith’s, and can a commandment ever be said to be irrevocable? It connects to Line upon line, precept upon precept. The human cost is rendered through Lorena Larsen’s Abraham-and-Isaac “dark night” and B. H. Roberts’s inability to raise his hand to sustain it.

Context: The 1890 Manifesto (Official Declaration 1) was issued by LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff, publicly disavowing new plural marriages amid federal anti-polygamy legislation that had seized Church property and threatened its temples.

Where this appears

• Saints — No Unhallowed Hand — Woodruff’s Manifesto as the volume’s climax; the temporal-vs-spiritual calculus and the living-revelation questions it raises.