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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.