Following the passage of the Edmunds–Tucker Act, the church found it difficult to operate as a viable institution. After visiting priesthood leaders in many settlements, church president Wilford Woodruff left for San Francisco on September 3, 1890, to meet with prominent businessmen and politicians. He returned to Salt Lake City on September 21, determined to obtain divine confirmation to pursue a course that seemed to be agonizingly more and more clear. As he explained to church members a year later, the choice was between, on the one hand, continuing to practice polygamy and thereby losing the temples, "stopping all the ordinances therein" and, on the other, ceasing to practice polygamy in order to continue performing the essential ordinances for the living and the dead. Woodruff hastened to add that he had acted only as the Lord directed.
Following the passage of the Edmunds–Tucker Act, the church found it difficult to operate as a viable institution. After visiting priesthood leaders in many settlements, church president Wilford Woodruff left for San Francisco on September 3, 1890, to meet with prominent businessmen and politicians. He returned to Salt Lake City on September 21, determined to obtain divine confirmation to pursue a course that seemed to be agonizingly more and more clear. As he explained to church members a year later, the choice was between, on the one hand, continuing to practice polygamy and thereby losing the temples, "stopping all the ordinances therein" and, on the other, ceasing to practice polygamy in order to continue performing the essential ordinances for the living and the dead. Woodruff hastened to add that he had acted only as the Lord directed.