Chapter XVI: Front Matter (16)

Instructed by John the Baptist, Smith and Cowdery now went into the river and baptized each other by immersion. Joseph then ordained Oliver to the Aaronic priesthood, and Oliver ordained Joseph. In April, 1830, the “Church of Christ” was organized at the house of Peter Whitmer in Fayette, Seneca County, New York, the company of the faithful consisting only of the prophet, his two brothers, his scribe, and two Whitmers; but in the course of the summer several other converts appeared, and Joseph became associated with three men of some ability and education, who gave the Mormon creed a doctrinal development which the founder himself was quite incapable of devising. These three were Sidney Rigdon, Orson Pratt, and Parley P. Pratt. They were devotees of the sensational and inspirational school, ready for any new form of spiritual extravagance, believers in visions, crack-brained students of the prophecies. Rigdon had been a preacher among the Campbellites—a sect whose fundamental doctrine it is that no precise doctrines are necessary. Read your Bible, say they, select your opinions from it, don’t allow infant baptism, but get yourselves baptized by immersion as often as you commit sin. Upon this broad foundation they can erect as many different systems of theology as they have congregations. Rigdon had outgrown the latitudinarianism and bibliolatry of the Campbellites, and at the time of Joseph Smith’s appearance he was preaching a religion of his own, rousing his little Ohio congregation with apocalyptic dreams and interpretations, and bidding them look for the instant coming of the Lord. Although his name does not appear in the roll of the first converts and apostles, it is certain that he was intimately associated with Smith from the beginning; it is certain that he embodied his peculiar views in the Mormon creed; it is suspected that he had more than a half-share in arranging the original machinery of imposture. Parley P. Pratt was likewise a Campbellite preacher, a man of ardent and passionate temperament, restless, eloquent, a brilliant albeit somewhat rude orator. Orson Pratt, inclining rather towards metaphysical speculations than prophecy and spiritual excitement, became the Mormon philosopher and controversialist, and to him are attributable the extraordinary materialistic doctrines which form so important a part of the new system.[49] When Smith and his companions began to preach it does not appear that they had any scheme of theology ready at hand. Moroni and the golden plates made up the sum of their first teachings. There was comparatively little doctrine of any kind in the Book of Mormon; but, as Joseph’s prophetic pretensions found acceptance, it became necessary for the prophet to announce some positive creed. In setting it forth, point after point, he appealed neither to history nor to reason; “revelation” taught him from day to day all that he wished to know; and so, little by little, he built up a mass of dogma in which it is impossible to discover any regular plan. The authoritative handbook of Mormon theology as it existed in Smith’s time is a small volume first published in 1835, entitled _The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, carefully selected from the revelations of God_, by Joseph Smith, President of said Church. It comprises two parts. The first consists of seven Lectures on Faith,[50] which need not detain us; the second and more important contains about one hundred “revelations,” addressed sometimes to Smith, sometimes to one or another of the disciples, sometimes to the church, and occasionally to sceptical Mormons who showed signs of becoming troublesome. They embrace counsels and instructions of all kinds, for the organization of the hierarchy, the preaching of the new gospel, the regulation of private business affairs, and the management of congregations. Here is a sample of a “revelation given in Kirtland, August, 1831”: “Let my servant Newel K. Whitney retain his store—or, in other words, the store yet for a little season. Nevertheless, let him impart all the money which he can impart, to be sent up unto the land of Sion.” A few days later the voice of heaven spoke through Joseph Smith again:

“And now verily I say that it is expedient in me that my servant
Sidney Gilbert, after a few weeks, should return upon his
business, and to his agency in the land of Sion; and that which
he hath seen and heard may be made known unto my disciples, that
they perish not. And for this cause have I spoken these things.
And again, I say unto you, that my servant Isaac Morley may not
be tempted above that which he is able to bear, and counsel
wrongfully to your hurt, I gave commandment that his farm should
be sold. I willeth not that my servant Frederick G. Williams
should sell his farm, for I the Lord willeth to retain a
stronghold in the land of Kirtland for the space of five years,
in the which I will not overthrow the wicked, that thereby I may
save some.”

There was a special revelation to the prophet’s wife, Emma, who never quite relished Joseph’s proceedings:

“Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God while I speak unto
you, Emma Smith, my daughter; for verily I say unto you all
those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my
kingdom. A revelation I give unto you concerning my will, and if
thou art faithful and walk in the paths of virtue before me, I
will preserve thy life and thou shalt receive an inheritance in
Sion. Behold, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect
lady whom I have called. Murmur not because of the things which
thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the
world, which is wisdom in me in a time to come. And the office
of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant, Joseph
Smith, Jr., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling
words in the spirit of meekness.”

She was afterwards styled by the saints the Elect Lady, or “Cyria Electa,” and was “ordained” by Joseph as his scribe in the place of Oliver Cowdery. The dogmas to be found in this book are few and simple. The saints were taught to believe in “God the Eternal Father, and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost”; to believe that men will not be punished for original sin; that the four saving ordinances of the Gospel are faith, repentance, baptism, and the laying-on of hands for the Holy Ghost; that the church enjoys still, as it did in primitive times, “the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, etc.”; that the Bible, “as far as it is translated correctly,” and the Book of Mormon are both the word of God; that “the organization of the primitive church—viz., apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, etc.”—ought to be revived; and that Israel will be literally gathered and the ten tribes restored, Sion built on this continent, the personal reign of Christ established on earth, and the earth renewed in paradisaic glory. Finally, the book contains elaborate instructions for the establishment of a double priesthood; that of Melchisedech is the higher, and embraces the offices of apostle, Seventy, patriarch, high-priest, and elder; the other is that of Aaron, and includes bishop, priest, teacher, and deacon; it can only be held by the lineal descendants of Aaron, who are designated by revelation.

It will be seen how artfully this plan of a church was adapted to the purposes of Smith and Rigdon, supposing them to have been, as we have no doubt they were, arrant and conscious cheats. There was novelty and mystery enough in it to attract the fanatical, and there was not so very much after all to shock their common sense; while the doctrine of continuous revelation and the prophetic office left a door wide open for the introduction of other inventions as fast as they were found desirable. We shall see, further on, what monstrous blasphemies and absurdities were in reality adopted as the saints became strong enough to bear them.

Noyes, in his _History of American Socialisms_, speaks of Western New York as “the volcanic region” of spiritual and intellectual disturbance. Here sprang up Mormonism; here were first heard the ghostly rappers; here raged Millerism and Second-Adventism; here John Collins founded the Skaneateles community on the basis of “no God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat”; here arose the “inspired” Ebenezer colony, since removed to Iowa; here flourished all manner of Fourierite phalanxes, wild social experiments, and extravagant beliefs; here at the present day are found the Brocton community, with their doctrine of “divine respiration,” and the Perfectionists of Oneida, perhaps the worst of all the professors of free-love. In this region of satanic activity the Mormon preachers made disciples so fast that Smith was soon encouraged to undertake the “gathering of the tribes.” He had visited Sidney Rigdon at Kirtland, Ohio, early in 1831, and had a revelation commanding the saints in New York to follow him. But in June the town of Independence, in Jackson County, Missouri, was revealed as the site of the American Sion, and there some hundreds of the faithful, selling all that they had in the East, assembled and laid the foundation of a temple. With this event begins a phase of Mormonism—the political separation of the Latter-Day Saints from the Gentiles—which at once illustrates most forcibly its fanaticism and accounts for its temporal success. Henceforth the leaders had only to give the word of command, and the people went wherever the finger of the prophet pointed, sacrificed their lands and houses, broke off domestic ties, and marched through pain, starvation, and death into the parched wilderness. The settlement at Kirtland, however, was retained; a revelation even commanded the saints to build there a house for Joseph Smith “to live and translate in,” and another great temple for the Lord. This was fortunate, because the Mormons were soon expelled from Independence by a mob; and when Joseph, in obedience to revelation, raised an army of two hundred men, and, with the title of “commander-in-chief of the armies of Israel,” marched twelve hundred miles on foot to reinstate them, his expedition was dispersed by cholera and thunder-storms as soon as it reached the scene of action. The saints were never restored to the homes from which they had been driven out; yet to this day they look for a restoration. They refused all offers to sell their estates; they hold the Missouri title-deeds as the most precious of their inheritances; the city of the Great Salt Lake is only the temporary home of their exile; and Brigham Young, in his will, which was published the other day, after giving instructions for his funeral, says: “But if I should live to get back to the church in Jackson County, Missouri, I wish to be buried there.”

It is not our purpose to follow the persecuted fanatics in all their early migrations. Driven from place to place, they came, in 1840, to Hancock County, Illinois, where the owner of a large tract of wild land gave Smith a portion of it, in order to create a market for the rest. The prophet sold it in lots to his followers, at high prices, and there, on the bank of the Mississippi, the Mormons built the city of Nauvoo. It was revealed to them that they should build a goodly and holy “boarding-house,” and give Joseph Smith and his posterity a place in it for ever, and those who had money were commanded by name to put it into the enterprise (“Revelation given to Joseph Smith, Jan. 19, 1841”). They were to build a magnificent temple also; they were to organize a military force, known as the Nauvoo Legion; they were to create, in short, within the limits of Illinois, a theocratic state, with Joseph Smith at its head as mayor, general, prophet, church president, and inspired mouthpiece of the divine will. The city grew as if by magic. The legislature of Illinois granted it a charter of such extraordinary liberality that its officers became practically independent of all other authority. The apostles, sent all over America and England, preached with such zeal that in the course of six years no fewer than fifteen thousand believers were numbered in the Nauvoo community. Arrested several times for treason, for instigating an attempt at murder, and for other crimes, Joseph Smith was released by Mormon courts and set all “Gentile” laws at defiance. He was absolute in everything, organizing the government upon the most despotic principles, yet copying in some things the system and the phraseology of the Hebrew nation. His aides and counsellors received names and titles imitated from the Bible. Brigham Young was “the Lion of the Lord,” Parley P. Pratt was “the Archer of Paradise,” Orson Pratt was “the Gauge of Philosophy,” John Taylor was “the Champion of Right,” Lyman Wight was “the Wild Ram of the Mountains.” No one could deal in land or liquor except Joseph Smith. No one could aspire to political office or to church preferment without his permission. No one could travel abroad or remain quiet at home except by his consent. In Kirtland, with the assistance of Rigdon, he had started a bank and flooded the country with notes that were never redeemed. In Nauvoo he amassed what was, for that time and that region, the great fortune of $1,000,000. From the first gathering of the saints into communities he had made it a practice to use them in politics. He had given their votes to one party or another as interest dictated, and in 1844 he went so far as to offer himself for the Presidency of the United States, and sent two or three thousand elders through the States to electioneer for him.

As he grew in pride and prosperity the revelations multiplied, the faith became more and more extravagant, the ceremonies and ordinances of the church more cumbrous and more mystical. Moroni and Raphael, Peter and John, visited and conversed with him. He healed the possessed; he wrestled with the devil. The brethren began to prophesy in the temple; mysterious impulses stirred the congregations; “a mighty rushing wind filled the place”; “many began to speak in tongues; others saw glorious visions, and Joseph beheld that the temple was filled with angels, and told the congregation so. The people of the neighborhood, hearing an unusual sound within the temple, and seeing a bright light like a pillar of fire resting upon it, came running together and were astonished at what was transpiring.”[51] This diabolic manifestation, or alleged manifestation, reminds us of the scenes in the Irvingite congregations in London six years previously, when those brethren likewise prophesied in an unknown language. But the specimens of the Mormon “gift of tongues” which have been preserved for us are not calculated to inspire awe. “Eli, ele, elo, ela—come, coma, como—reli, rele, rela, relo—sela, selo, sele, selum—vavo, vava, vavum—sero, sera, seri, serum”—such was the style of the rhapsodies which inflamed the zeal of the Mormon saints.[52]

It was discovered that there was no salvation in the next world without Mormon baptism, and, to provide for the generations which preceded Joseph Smith, every saint was told to be immersed vicariously for his dead ancestors. There was incessant dipping and sputtering; the whole church for a season was in a chronic state of cold and dampness; and the recorders worked their hardest, laying up in the temple the lists of the regenerated for the information of the angels. The double hierarchy became so complicated that long study was needed to comprehend it. The church offices were multiplied. The authority of the president and the apostles grew more and more despotic. A travelling showman visited the West with some Egyptian mummies. Joseph Smith bought them, and, finding in the wrappings a roll of papyrus, he produced a miraculous translation of the hieroglyphics as the “Book of Abraham.” A fac-simile of the papyrus was taken to Paris in 1855 by M. Rémy and submitted to the Egyptologist Devéria, who found it to consist of a representation of the resurrection of Osiris, together with a funerary manuscript of comparatively recent date.

All who have studied the manufacture of American religions and social philosophies are aware how characteristic of these moral and intellectual rebellions is an attack upon the Christian law of marriage.[53] The inventions of Joseph Smith soon took the usual course, although it was probably not until near the end of his career that he became bold enough to contemplate the general establishment of polygamy. It appears that as early as 1838 he had a number of “spiritual wives” who cohabited with him, and Mr. Stenhouse asserts that “many women” have boasted to him that they sustained such relations with the prophet. This sort of license, however, was an esoteric doctrine, for the advanced believers only, not for the common people. Indeed, in 1842, although a practical plurality had been for some time enjoined by the illuminated, the doctrine was formally repudiated by a number of elders, apostles, and women, who declared that they knew of no other marriage than that of one wife to one husband. In 1845 an appendix on “Marriage” was added to the book of _Doctrine and Covenants_, in which occurs the following passage: “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.” Yet it is beyond all question that Joseph long before this had been involved in serious domestic difficulties on account of the jealousy of his true wife, Emma, and he was obliged to resort to “revelation” to pacify her. The “Revelation on Celestial Marriage,” which enjoins a plurality of wives as a service especially acceptable to God, purports to have been given at Nauvoo in 1843. It contains these sentences:

“And let mine handmaid Emma Smith receive all those that have
been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure
before me. And I command mine handmaid Emma Smith to abide and
cleave unto my servant Joseph and to none else. And again verily
I say, let mine handmaid forgive my servant Joseph his
trespasses, and then shall she be forgiven her trespasses.”

The revelation, however, was kept secret until long after Joseph’s death. Emma, if not satisfied, was quieted. The spiritual marriages went on, and even the initiated continued to deny them. John Taylor, the present head of the church, held a public discussion of Mormonism in the English colony at Boulogne in 1850, and stoutly denied the doctrine of polygamy, although he had at the time five wives in Utah.

It was polygamy that brought Joseph to his violent end. He had attempted to take the wife of a disciple named Law. The husband rebelled, and with one or two other malcontents established a paper called the _Nauvoo Expositor_, for the purpose of exposing the secret corruptions of the prophet and his chief associates. Only one number was printed. Joseph ordered the press to be destroyed and the type scattered. Law and his party appealed to the authorities of the county for redress. Writs of arrest were issued, and set aside by the Mormon courts. The government called out the militia to enforce the process. An armed conflict appeared inevitable, when the Mormon leaders surrendered, and Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, John Taylor, and Willard Richards were lodged in the county jail at Carthage. There, on the 27th of June, 1844, they were attacked by an armed mob. Hyrum was shot down at the first volley and almost instantly expired. Joseph, after defending himself with a revolver, attempted to escape by the window, and was killed by a discharge of musketry from the yard below.

In his lifetime the prophet was often denounced and resisted by his own followers; “revelation” repeatedly put down revolts; apostates in great numbers, including the very founders of the church, were cut off and given over to Satan for questioning the truth of Joseph’s inspired utterances. But his death healed all such quarrels. He became in the eyes of his fanatical followers the first of saints, the most glorious of martyrs. To this day even those who do not believe in Mormonism argue that Joseph must have believed in it, because for its sake he lived a life of persecution and submitted to a cruel death. The narrative which we have briefly sketched is enough to show the fallacy of this reasoning. Mormonism gave Joseph Smith wealth, power, flattery, and sensual delights. It found him a miserable, penniless country boy; it made him the ruler of a state, the autocrat of a thriving community, the head of a harem. There never was a time when the choice was offered him between worldly advantage on the one hand and fidelity to his creed on the other. To renounce his pretensions would have been the ruin of his fortunes. Having once entered upon the career of imposture, he had every temptation to persevere to the end. He was mobbed and exiled and imprisoned, not because he believed in the Book of Mormon, but because he warred upon existing social and political institutions; and there was nothing to make his death more sacred than that of any other cheat and libertine who is murdered by masked ruffians in a frontier settlement. After his death the twelve apostles ruled the church, waiting for the will of Heaven to designate by inspiration a new leader.[54] Sidney Rigdon claimed the prophetic office, but was rejected and driven forth. The prime mover in his excommunication was the senior apostle, to whom the accident of rank gave a practical precedence in all the affairs of the church. He taught the saints to be patient and expectant, to reverence Joseph as their chief for all eternity, to be governed by Joseph’s voice, to cease vexing themselves about Joseph’s successor. This was Brigham Young.

At length the time was ripe and the minds of the people were prepared. On the 24th of December, 1847, Brigham ascended the pulpit to preach. The Gentiles assert that he arranged his face and dress, modulated his voice, regulated his gestures, to imitate the departed prophet. The effect was electrical. The people believed that Joseph stood before them. Women screamed and fainted; men wept; cries resounded through the temple. Here was the successor of Joseph at last, and Brigham Young was made president of the church, and recognized as “prophet, seer, and revelator.” He was a man greatly inferior in education to some of the other leaders, and he had done little as yet to justify the preference now shown him. He was a native of Vermont, and one of the early converts. Before joining the church he had been a painter and glazier. In the church he was noted as a stanch, shrewd, hard-working, useful brother, not much troubled with visions or theological theories, rarely caught up by those tempests of spiritual madness which used to sweep through the congregations. He could not have devised the imposture which Joseph and Rigdon created. He could not have built up the elaborate system which they constructed out of Old-World religions and modern politics. He was fierce, and perhaps fanatical, but he had little imagination and little inventiveness. In the case of other early Mormons it was sometimes doubtful whether they were not occasionally deceived by their own impostures, hurried along by a spirit which they had raised and knew not how to control; but Brigham offered no cause for such suspicion. He left Mormonism a very different thing from what it was in 1840, yet he added nothing to it. A change had been going on insensibly ever since the saints gathered at Nauvoo; a further change had been begun by the preaching of Orson Pratt; and Joseph Smith had originated two great movements—the introduction of polygamy and the removal into the heart of the wilderness—which Brigham was to bring to their term. He is the developer, therefore, of other men’s ideas.

The notion that the Mormons were a chosen and inspired people, blessed with revelations not given to the rest of the world, and governed by the direct and special commands of Heaven, necessarily implied the establishment of an independent political community, and it was their disloyalty to the state rather than their immoralities which roused against them so often in the early times the anger of mobs and the animosity of the civil authorities. The experiment of creating a state within a state had failed, and Joseph Smith before his death had taken the first steps towards beginning a new settlement in the far West, and removing the whole body of his disciples to some remote and solitary region where neither the United States nor any other government would be likely to interfere with them. It was Brigham’s part to lead this extraordinary exodus. It began more than a year before his formal appointment as head of the church; it was hastened by the fact that warrants had been issued in Illinois for the arrest of a large number of prominent saints on a charge of manufacturing counterfeit money, and that, partly on this account, partly by reason of the prevalence of murders, thefts, arsons, and various other outrages in which the Mormons and their opponents were about equally implicated, Nauvoo appeared likely soon to be the theatre of a civil war. An exploring party had been sent to the Pacific coast in 1844. Early in February, 1846, the general migration began. Rarely has the world witnessed such a scene. The great temple at Nauvoo had just been completed with extravagant splendor. The city contained 17,000 inhabitants, and only a small fraction of their valuable property could be disposed of at any price. They abandoned all that they could not carry, sacrificed their lands and houses, collected about twelve hundred wagons, and, under the command of captains of fifties and captains of hundreds, crossed the Mississippi on the ice and moved into the wintry wilderness. We shrink from repeating the narrative of that horrible march. For more than two years they toiled westward, strewing the path with their dead. In winter they camped near Council Bluffs, and thence Brigham and a body of pioneers made their way across the Rocky Mountains. The first detachment reached the Great Salt Lake in July, 1847; the rest followed in the summer of 1848. It was a parched, desolate, rainless valley, but the wanderers hailed it as a haven of rest; they encamped on the bank of a small stream, rested their weary animals, and without loss of an hour began to plough the ground, sow the autumn crops, and build a dam and a system of irrigating canals. They had escaped from the United States, as they fondly believed, and were on the soil of Mexico, where they had no doubt they could maintain themselves against the feeble Mexican government. But “manifest destiny” was pursuing them. The boundaries of the United States were soon extended beyond this region by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; the discovery of gold in California destroyed the isolation of the new Sion; it was no longer a city hid in the desert, but a resting-place on a great route of travel; and the irrepressible conflict between the federal republic and the absolute theocracy has been steadily growing sharper and sharper ever since. Of the great multitude which set out from Nauvoo barely four thousand ever reached the Great Salt Lake, the rest having deserted or dropped by the way; but thousands of converts soon arrived from England, and in a very short time the community was again strong and prosperous. In 1849, just a year after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons formally declared themselves “free and independent,” and decreed the erection of the “State of Deseret,” whose imaginary boundaries enclosed the whole of Nevada and Utah, and large parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Wyoming. To this political fiction they have resolutely adhered; and even while recognizing, as a matter of prudence, the _de facto_ organization of the United States Territory of Utah, they have always maintained the _de jure_ existence of their free and independent state.[55] Brigham, of course, was chosen governor of Deseret, and he held that title to the day of his death, although, with his usual worldly shrewdness, he also accepted from Presidents Fillmore and Pierce the title of governor of Utah.

To understand, however, the opposition which soon developed into such alarming hostility between Deseret and the United States, we must look at the changes which had been taking place in Mormonism itself. Possibly the early disciples of Joseph Smith were in the main ignorant, peaceable, and well-meaning fanatics, but in twenty years their character had undergone a transformation. They first became quarrelsome, then dishonest, next licentious, and afterwards unspeakably cruel and bloodthirsty. Joseph Smith lived long enough to see the beginning even of this last stage of corruption, but it was Brigham Young who brought the budding immoralities into full flower. The “Revelation on Celestial Marriage” was brought forth at a public meeting in Salt Lake City on the 29th of August, 1852, and Brigham Young gave a history and explanation of it. The original manuscript was burned up by Joseph’s real wife, Emma; but Brigham had a copy.

“This revelation,” said he, “has been in my possession many
years, and who has known it? None but those who should know it.
I keep a patent lock on my desk, and there does not anything
leak out that should not.... The principle spoken of by Brother
Pratt this morning we believe in. Many others are of the same
mind. They are not ignorant of what we are doing in our social
capacity. They have cried out, Proclaim it; but it would not do
a few years ago; everything must come in its time, as there is a
time to all things. I am now ready to proclaim it.”

We do not read that any particular sensation was created by the announcement. Indeed, the practice had already become so common that a federal judge, a year before this date, had denounced it in a Mormon assembly, and made a somewhat remarkable appeal to the women to put a stop to the horrible practice:

“The women were excited; the most of them were in tears before
he had spoken many minutes. The men were astonished and enraged,
and one word of encouragement from their leader would have
brought on a collision. Brigham saw this, and was equal to the
occasion. When the judge sat down, he rose, and, by one of those
strong, nervous appeals for which he is so famous among the
brethren, restored the equilibrium of the audience. Those who
but a moment before were bathed in tears now responded to his
broad sarcasm and keen wit in screams of laughter; and having
fully restored the spirits of the audience he turned to the
judge and administered the following rebuke: ‘I will kick you,’
he said, ‘or any other Gentile judge from this stand, if you or
they again attempt to interfere with the affairs of our
Sion.’”[56]

Judge Brocchus, finding his life in danger, resigned his office and left the Territory. Once avowed, a belief in the doctrine was pronounced essential to salvation, and the practice of it was carried to a depth of bestiality which would horrify a Turk. All degrees of relationship were practically ignored. Incest and vicarious marriage became every-day affairs. The saints were taught that “when our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden he came into it with a celestial body and brought Eve, _one of his wives_, with him”;[57] and such blasphemies were coupled with the holiest of all names that the Christian shudders to think of them.

The formal adoption of the doctrine of polygamy, no longer as the personal peculiarity of a few leaders, but as the corner-stone of Mormon society, had a result which Brigham doubtless anticipated when he established it. The separation of the saints from the rest of Christendom was made complete and final. Gentile civilization had forced itself upon their mountain retreat, and in the daily contact with Christianity and common sense the Mormon imposture was not likely long to survive. But the institution of plural marriage placed between the Gentile and the Latter-Day Saint a barrier more formidable than snow-crowned sierras and alkali deserts. Social intercourse became impossible between the followers of the two rival systems. Contempt and horror on the one side bred hatred on the other. For the polygamous saint, moreover, judging after the manner of men, there was no repentance. He was tied for ever to the church, an outlaw from all Christendom, liable to a long imprisonment if he re-entered the pale of society, safe even in Utah only so long as he enabled the “Governor of Deseret” to defy the authority of the United States. The polygamist learned to place in the prophet all his hopes for this world and the next, and to accept all his utterances with the docility of a child. So Brigham became not only a more powerful man than Joseph Smith, but beyond doubt the most absolute ruler in the entire world.

It was now that the Mormon theology began to assume its most repulsive shape. Cut off from its early connection with a form of Christianity which, however corrupt, contained at least a remnant of the ancient faith, it sank with startling rapidity into the most dismal abysses of polytheism. To the materialistic doctrines which constituted the foundation and chief characteristic of the philosophy of Orson Pratt and other primitive expounders of Mormonism, was added an immense mass of crude and incongruous beliefs, not developed by any process of logic, but simply heaped on by agglomeration. Daily “revelations” brought forth daily inconsistencies and absurdities, under the weight of which the truths once professed by Smith were gradually buried and forgotten. Hence it is impossible to construct for Mormonism anything like a theological system. We can only state the isolated and often contradictory principles which are held by the saints at the present day, premising that although many of them can be traced more or less distinctly in the early literature of the sect, the most shocking of them were little, if at all, known until under Brigham Young the separation of the saints was completed. The most startling of Mormon dogmas, relieved of extraneous complications, is that God is only a good man, and that men advance by evolution until they become gods. There is no Creator, there is no creature, there is no immaterial spirit. What we call God, says one authority, is nothing but the truth abiding in man. What we call God, says Orson Pratt, is “a material intelligent personage, possessing both body and parts,” like an ordinary man. He has legs, which he uses in walking, though he can move up and down in the air without them. He cannot be in more than one place at a time. He dwells in a planet called Kolob. He was formed by the union of certain elementary particles of matter, self-moving, intelligent, and existing from all eternity. All matter is eternal. All substances are material. The souls of men were not created; they are from eternity, like God himself. God eats, drinks, loves, hates; his relations with mankind are purely human; he begets existences in the natural way.[58] Before he became God he was an ordinary man. He differs from other men now only in power. He is not omnipotent; he still increases and may continue to increase infinitely. As God is only an improved man, so man may come by gradual progress to know as much as God. _Indeed, there are already innumerable gods._ The first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” ought to read: “The Head God brought forth the gods, with the heavens and the earth.”[59] Each god rules over a world which he has peopled by generation, and the god of our world is Adam, who is only another form of the archangel Michael; “he is our father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.” The Mormons believe in a vague way in the Trinity—nay, in two Trinities, one composed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the other, and older, of “Elohim, Jehovah, and Adam.” The Father and Son have bodies of flesh and blood; they occupy space; they require time to move from place to place; but the Holy Spirit (which is the mind of the Father and the Son), although his substance is material, has no flesh and blood and permeates everything. After death the souls of the wicked will be imprisoned in the brutes. The saints will inhabit the planets, where they will have houses, farms, gardens, plantations of manna, and plenty of wives, and they will go on marrying and multiplying for all eternity. When this planetary system is filled up, new worlds will be called into existence, and in them the faithful, gradually developing into gods, will revel in the sensual delights of a Moslem paradise.

Surely no such mixture of pantheism, polytheism, and rank atheism was ever devised before; but we have not yet reached the worst. It was in 1852 that Brigham proclaimed the doctrine that Adam is God, and to be honored and revered as such. To this soon followed the announcement that Joseph Smith was God. In a year or two more the doctrine was taught, at first cautiously, but after 1856 publicly and officially, that the only God to whom this generation is amenable is BRIGHAM YOUNG!

The declaration of this appalling impiety was made in the midst of a tempestuous “Reformation” which historians will probably regard as the culminating point of Mormon fanaticism. In the autumn of 1856 one Jedediah Grant, who stood high in the Mormon priesthood, began to preach a revival in which the most remarkable practices were public “accusations of the brethren” and public “confessions of sin.” An uncontrollable madness seized upon the whole community. Preachers and penitents vied with one another in disgusting disclosures. The meetings resounded with wails and curses and slanderous charges. Men, women, and children, not satisfied with laying bare their hidden sins, accused themselves of crimes they had never committed, and called upon the church to punish and disgrace them. “Go to President Young,” was the cry of the preachers. “Give up all that you have to President Young—your money, your lands, your wives, your children, your blood.” “Brigham Young,” exclaimed Heber Kimball, “is my God, is your God, is the only God we shall ever see, if we do not obey him. Joseph Smith was our God when he was amongst us; Brigham Young is our God now.” The church authorities fanned the flame of excitement. They sent preachers into every ward and every settlement. Thousands of the saints placed all their property in Brigham’s hands.[60] Then they became inflamed with persecuting zeal. They sacked the houses of offenders, whipped and mutilated those who spoke evil of the church. From such outrages it was but a step to murder. At Brigham’s instigation the step was taken. In a discourse in the Tabernacle in February, 1857, he laid down a new law of love. We must love our neighbors as ourselves. But if we love ourselves, we must consent to the shedding of our own blood in order to atone for our sins and exalt us among the gods; so also it is true love to shed our neighbor’s blood for his eternal salvation. “I could refer you to a plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain in order to atone for their sins. The wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle being in full force, and the time will come when the law of God will be in full force. This is loving our neighbor as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; if he wants salvation, and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, _spill it_!” “There are sins,” said he on another occasion while the “Reformation” was at its height, “that must be atoned for by the blood of the man. That is the reason why men talk to you as they do from this stand; they understand the doctrine and throw out a few words about it. You have been taught that doctrine, but you do not understand it.” Alas! understanding came soon enough. The Springville murders in March, 1857, were followed that summer by the appalling massacre at the Mountain Meadows of one hundred and twenty peaceable emigrants, men, women, and children, on their way to California. The midnight assassin went his rounds. The church executioners were despatched upon their awful missions. Sinners were sent on errands from which they never returned. Apostasy was punished by the knife or the bullet. A Welshman named Morris set up as a rival prophet, and was shot down in cold blood with a number of his deluded followers. Gentiles were put to death for presuming to dispute with Mormons over the title to property. A husband took his wife upon his knee and calmly cut her throat to atone for her sins.

“Men are murdered here,” said a federal judge to the grand
jury—“coolly, deliberately, premeditatedly murdered. Their
murder is deliberated and determined upon by church-council
meetings, and that, too, for no other reason than that they had
apostatized from your church and were striving to leave the
Territory. You are the tools, the dupes, the instruments of a
tyrannical church despotism. The heads of your church order and
direct you. You are taught to obey their orders and commit these
horrid murders. Deprived of your liberty, you have lost your
manhood and become the willing instruments of bad men.”

Close upon the reign of terror established by the “Reformation” came the great Mormon rebellion, and the march of an army to Utah to install the territorial officers appointed by President Buchanan. Brigham thundered defiance from the pulpit; but on the approach of the troops he ordered the whole community to leave their homes and once more move out into the wilderness to build a new Sion. It is a wonderful illustration of the fanaticism and abject submission to which he had brought the people that this order was promptly obeyed. Before the “war” was settled by negotiation no fewer than 30,000 poor creatures took flight, and many of them, being utterly destitute, were never able to return. The frenzy of the Reformation era died out; the rebellion was quelled; but the doctrine of blood-atonement has not been abandoned, and to this day the soil of Utah is red with human sacrifices.

With such a savage and brutal paganism as the Mormon religion thus became under Brigham Young’s influence it is impossible that Christian civilization should ever be at peace. The steady resistance which it has offered to the authority of the United States needs no further explanation than we find in the constitution of the Mormon Church and the fundamental doctrines of the Mormon creed. There are chapters in the history of the Latter-Day Saints upon which we have not thought it necessary to linger. The organization of the Danites, and the long list of murders and other outrages preceding the open inculcation of human sacrifices, are among the most important of the events which we have thus passed over. They might be considered excrescences which time would perhaps remove. We have confined ourselves to the natural and logical consequences of the preaching of the two prophets; to the circumstances which throw light upon their personal characters; to the facts which may enable people to place a juster valuation than now seems to be current upon the elements which they have introduced into American society and the work which they have accomplished in the Rocky Mountain desert. Accepting even the most extravagant estimates of the material prosperity of the Mormon settlements, we think it must be admitted that their thrift is a curse to the world. And as for Brigham himself, cold, calculating, avaricious, sensual, violent, cruel, rolling in luxury, stretching out his hands on every side to grasp the property of his dupes, and pushing them on from crime to crime, from horror to horror, that he might the better amass money, he will take his place in history not only as a worse man than Joseph Smith, but as one of the most dangerous monsters ever let loose upon the world.

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TO THE WOOD-THRUSH.

How shall I put in words that song of thine?
How tell it in this struggling phrase of mine?
That strange, sweet wonder of full-throated bliss,
The wild-wood freedom of its perfectness,
Faint scent of flowers frail, strong breath of pine,
The west wind’s music, and the still sunshine.

Could I weave sunshine into words, hold fast
Day’s sunset glow that it might ever last,
That clothes as with immortal robe each height,
Rugged and stern ‘mid glare of noonday light,
Softened beneath eve’s gracious glory cast—
Like soul released, from strife to sweetness passed—

Were such power mine, so might I hope, perchance,
In fitting speech to rhyme thy song’s romance,
To sing its sweetness with a note as sweet
As thine that makes this sunset hour complete—
As voice beloved doth richest joy enhance,
As swelling organ yearning soul doth trance.

There is no sorrow set in thy pure song;
Thy notes to realms where all is joy belong.
Thou callest—woods grow greener through thy voice,
The stainless skies in deeper peace rejoice,
All their best glories through thy singing throng—
Voice of a life that ne’er knew thought of wrong!

No martyr life of conquered grief is thine,
Whose happiness but through old tears can shine;
So, sure, didst thou in Eden sing ere Eve,
Our eldest mother, learned for life to grieve,
When thought was fresh, and knowledge still divine,
And in love’s light no shade of death did twine.

Our songs to-day grow sweetest through our pain;
Our Eden lost, we find it not again.
Even our truest, most enduring joy
Earth’s twilight darkens with its dusk alloy.
Soft, soft the shadow of thy heaven-dropt strain
Only our weakness dims with sorrow’s stain.

Thou singst, O hermit bird! of Paradise,
Not as lamenting its lost harmonies,
Not as still fair through perfect penitence,
But as unconscious in first innocence—
Token of time thou art when sinless eyes
Were homes for cloudless thoughts divinely wise.

All things that God found good seem yet to fill
The few sweet notes that triumph in thy trill;
All things that yet are good and purely fair
Give unto thee their happy grace to wear.
Sweet speech art thou for sunset-lighted hill;
Yet day dies gladlier when thou art still.

And I, O rare brown thrush! that idly gaze
Far down the valley’s mountain-shadowed ways—
Where bears the stream light burden of the sky,
Where day, like quiet soul, in peace doth die,
Its calm gold broken by no storm-clouds’ blaze—
Hearken, joy-hushed, thy vesper song of praise

That from yon hillside drops, strong carolling,
A living echo thereto answering,
Doubling the sweetness with the glad reply
That drifts like argosy, joy-laden, by.
Light grows my soul as thy uplifted wing;
Heart knows no sorrow when it hears thee sing!

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THE GOD OF “ADVANCED” SCIENCE.

“The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.” None but fools attempt to blind themselves to the irrefragable evidence which compels the admission of a Supreme Being; and not even these can entirely succeed in such an endeavor. For it is only in the frowardness of their heart, not in the light of their reason, that they pronounce the blasphemous phrase; their heart, not their intellect, is corrupted; so that, notwithstanding the great number of avowed atheists who at different times have disgraced the human family, one might be justified in saying that a real atheist, a man _positively convinced_ of the non-existence of God, has never existed.

What has led us to begin with this remark is an article in the _Popular Science Monthly_ (July, 1877) entitled “The Accusation of Atheism,” in which the able but unphilosophical editor undertakes to show that although modern “advanced” science may not profess to recognize the God of the Bible, yet we have no right to infer that this “advanced” science is atheistical. The God of the Bible is to be suppressed altogether; but “advanced” scientists, who have already invented so many wonderful things, are confident that they have sufficient ability to invent even a new God. Our good readers may find it a little strange; but we are not trifling. The invention of a new God is just now the great _postulatum_ of the infidel pseudo-philosophers. The less they believe in the living God who made them, the more would they be delighted to worship a mock-god made by themselves, that they might not be accused of belonging to that class of fools who have said in their heart: There is no God.

Prof. Youmans starts with the bright idea that if Dr. Draper had entitled his book “a history of the conflict between ecclesiasticism and science” instead of “between religion and science,” he would have disarmed criticism and saved himself from a great deal of philosophical abuse. We cannot see, however, how criticism could have been disarmed by the mere adoption of such a change. The whole of Dr. Draper’s work breathes infidelity; it falsifies the history of Christianity; it denounces religion as the enemy of science; and from the first page to the last it teems with slander and blasphemy; it is, therefore, a real attack upon religion. On the other hand, we must assume that Dr. Draper knew what he was about when he opposed “religion” to science; he said just what he meant; and this is, perhaps, the only merit of his production. If the title of the book were to be altered so as to “disarm criticism,” we would suggest that it should be made to read: _A malicious fabrication concerning a fabulous conflict between religion and science_.

Then Prof. Youmans proceeds to say that religious people “are alarmed at the advancement of science, and denounce it as subversive of faith.” This is not the case. Religious people are not in the least alarmed at the advancement of science, nor do they feel the least apprehension that science may prove subversive of faith; quite the contrary. They love science, do their best to promote it, accept thankfully its discoveries, and expect that it will contribute to strengthen, not to subvert, the revealed truths which form the object of theological faith. We admit, at the same time, that there is a so-called “science” for which we have no sympathy. Such a pretended “science” originated, if we do not mistake, in the Masonic lodges of Germany, whence it gradually spread through England and America by the efforts of the same secret organization. The promoters of this neoteric science boast that their cosmogony, their biology, their sociology, their physiology, etc., are “subversive” of our faith; which would be true enough, if their theories were not at the same time “subversive” of logic and common sense. But when we show that their vaunted theories cannot bear examination, when we point out the manifold absurdities and contradictions they fall into, when we lay open the sophisms by which their objectionable assertions are supported, and challenge them to make a reply, they invariably quail and dare not open their mouths, or, if they venture to speak, they ignore criticism with a convenient unconcern which is the best palliation of their defeat. As an example of this we may remind Prof. Youmans that we ourselves have given a refutation of Prof. Huxley’s lectures on evolution, and that we have yet to see the first attempt at a reply. We have also refuted a defence of Prof. Huxley written by Prof. Youmans himself in answer to Rev. Dr. W. M. Taylor, and we have shown how his own “scientific” reasoning was at fault in every point; but of course his scientific acuteness did not allow him to utter a word of reply. No, we are not afraid of a “science” which can be silenced with so little effort. Were it not that there is a prevailing ignorance so easily imposed upon by the charlatanism of false science, there would be no need whatever for denouncing it: it denounces itself sufficiently to a logical mind.