coming when justice will be laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet; when we shall take the old broadsword and ask, Are you for God? And if you are not heartily on the Lord's side, you will be hewn down." The most vocal proponent of the blood atonement doctrine was Jedediah M. Grant, Young's second counselor in the First Presidency from 1854 to 1856. Grant, a firebrand preacher, rose to the First Presidency after the death of Willard Richards in 1854 and became the main force behind the Mormon Reformation . His teachings in 1854 related to "covenant breakers," people who had broken their covenants made in the Endowment or Celestial marriage. At a meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on March 12, 1854, Grant asked, "What disposition ought the people of God to make of covenant breakers?" In answer to his question, he stated that they should be put to death . He lamented on the difficulty in applying this in a secular democracy, stating, "I wish we were in a situation favorable to our doing that which is justifiable before God, without any contaminating influences of Gentile amalgamation, laws, and traditions." Arguing for a purer theocracy, he stated that it is the right of the church "to kill a sinner to save him, when he commits those crimes that can only be atoned for by shedding his blood.... We would not kill a man, of course, unless we killed him to save him." Parley P. Pratt, a prominent member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, was also a proponent of the blood atonement doctrine. On December 31, 1855, Pratt pressed the Utah Territory legislature to "[m]ake death the penalty for fornication and adultery." He cited 1 Cor. 5:5, calling on early Christians "[t]o deliver [an adulterer] unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus," as a Biblical justification for the blood atonement doctrine . Pratt stated, "This destruction of the flesh must have had reference to the death of the body; the man having justly forfeited his life in accordance with the law of God." On March 16, 1856, Young acknowledged that it might seem, based on rhetoric from the pulpit, that "every one who did not walk to the line was at once going to be destroyed," but thus far, he