The First Command was to 'Multiply' and the Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great Future would be Comensurate with the no [number] of 'Wives Childin & Friends' that we inheret here and that our great mission to earth was to Organize a Neculi of Heaven to take with us. To the increase of which there would be no end.
In 1835 at Kirtland I learned from my Sisters Husband Lyman R. Shirman, who was close to the Prophet and Received it from him. That the ancient order of plural marriage was again to be practiced by the Church.
And there was some trouble with Oliver Cowdery, and whisper said it was relating to a girl then living in his family; and I was afterwards told by Warren Parish, that he himself and Oliver Cowdery did not that Joseph had Fannie Alger as wife, for they were spied upon and found together. And I can now see that at Nauvoo, so at Kirtland, that the suspicion or knowledge of the Prophet's plural relation was one of the causes of apostasy and disruption at Kirtland, although at the time there was little said publicly on the subject.
![The First Command was to 'Multiply' and the Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great Future would be Comensurate with the no [number] of 'Wives Childin & Friends' that we inheret here and that our great](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/benjamin-f-johnson/the-first-command-was-to-multiply-and-the-prophet-taught-us-that-dominion--powr-in-the-great-future-would.jpg)
