Secret Covenants Quotes

“What do you mean by being ‘sealed’ to him?” . . . “You call it marrying . . . but we call it sealing. You are married for a time, but we are sealed for time and eternity.”40 Zina states clearly that she was married to Joseph Smith for time and eternity. She then explained that she was married to Brigham Young as a proxy wife, “for time only.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“The 1843 marriage ceremony record is the marriage of Sarah Ann Whitney to Joseph Smith, for which Sarah Ann’s father, Newel Whitney, officiated. The words that were to be spoken at the marriage were as follows: They shall take each other by the hand, and you shall say, You both mutually agree (calling them by name) to be each other’s companion so long as you both shall live, preserving yourselves for each other and from all others, and also throughout [all] eternity. . . . I then give you, S. A. Whitney, my daughter, to Joseph Smith, to be his wife, to observe all the rights between you both that belong to that condition.” [Blessings are listed.] . . . commanding, in the name of the Lord, all those powers to concentrate in you, and through you to your posterity forever. . . . Let immortality and eternal life henceforth be sealed upon your heads forever and ever.26”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“By my listing, eleven of Joseph Smith’s thirty-three plural marriages were polyandrous—if they were all for eternity only, one would expect that term to be used at some point. But that kind of language is not found. For those seeking to prove that all of Joseph Smith’s polyandrous marriages were for eternity only, this is a gaping lacuna.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“D. Michael Quinn has written, “The original records of sealings in the nineteenth century used variations of only two phrases to define each marriage: ‘for time and eternity,’ and ‘for time only,’ both of which gave the sanction of the church for sexual intercourse between the living persons thus sealed. If the phrase ‘eternity only’ ever appeared in an original record of LDS sealing in the nineteenth century, I have not discovered it while examining thousands of such manuscript entries.”22 Quinn is including not only Nauvoo polygamy, but the entire historical sweep of Mormon marriage in the nineteenth century in this statement.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“Another kind of celestial marriage seems to have been practiced in the early days of plural marriage. It has not been practiced since Nauvoo days, for it is under Church prohibition. Zealous women, married or unmarried, loving the cause of the restored gospel, considered their condition in the hereafter. Some of them asked that they might be sealed to the Prophet for eternity. They were not to be his wives on earth, in mortality, but only after death in the eternities. Such marriages led to misunderstandings by those not of the Church, and unfamiliar with its doctrines. To them marriage meant only association on earth.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“Second, Joseph Smith felt that certain spirits, male and female, were matched in the pre-existence; when they met each other in this life, that bond from the pre-existence took precedence over the civil marriages not recognized by God.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

“However, they did not publicly discuss the polyandrous aspects of his marriages, which then, as now, were puzzling.”
― Cheryl L. Bruno, Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy