The fact is while at Nauvoo, our missionaries abroad made converts among single women a great deal faster than among men. The consequence was that, coming into a new community where they had no homes or protectors of their own, we had to parcel them around among our different families. This, we soon found was giving rise to scandal and to possible illicit attachments, and as a matter of decency and morals we had to provide someway by which this excess of women could have some normal relations to the families where they were placed. Marrying them to their heads with all the safeguards of religion seemed to us the only possible way: And so using our common sense we took that as the will of the Lord.