cosmogony of heaven and earth, which Young has
strictly warned us not to receive as truth. Once, if
not more than once, Pratt s writings have been for
mally condemned by the First Presidency and by
the Twelve ; though he still continues to hold rank
as an apostle. " But for me," said Brigham, smiling,
" he would have been thrust out of the church long
ago." When we put the doctrine of spirit and
matter inculcated by Pratt before the President
for his opinion, he said, impatiently, "We know
nothing about it ; it may be all true, it may be all
false ; we have no light as to those things yet."
What has been stated above in the numbered
paragraphs is official doctrine taught in the Mor
mon schools, from the catechism written by Elder
Jacques, and formally adopted by Young.

These propositions would seem to have been



266 NEW AMERICA.

drawn by the Saints from the oldest and newest
mythologies under heaven.

The Mormon God appears to be the same in nature
and in shape as Homer s Zeus. Their Angels are not
unlike the beni-elohim of St. Paul; not angels and
spirits in the old English sense, but rather bodiless
and unseen beings, as of fine air and invisible flame.
Their Men, as beings which are uncreated, inde
structible, are the creations of Pythagoras ; and as
beings born without sin, accountable only for their
own evil deeds, are the fancies of Swedenborg.

Some confusion has arisen, in Utah and else
where, as to the Mormon doctrine of angels
a confusion caused by the reveries and speculations
of Orson Pratt. Young has been good enough to
teach us the true and official belief of his church
on this curious subject. Angels, he says, are
imperfect beings, incapable of rising into the
higher grade of gods, to whom they are now,
and will be for ever, the messengers, ministers,
and servants. They are immortal beings who have
passed through the stage of spirits in space,
and of men on earth, but who have not fulfilled
the law of life, not spent their strength in perfect
obedience to the will of God. Hence they have
been arrested in their growth towards the higher



MORMON LIGHT. 267

state. On my asking in what they had failed to
observe the law, Young answered, " In not living
the patriarchal life in not marrying many wives,
like Abraham and Jacob, David and Solomon ;
like all those men who are called in Scripture the
friends of God." In fact, according to Young, angels
are the souls of bachelors and monogamists ; beings
incapable of issue, unblessed with female companions,
unfitted to reign and rule in the celestial spheres.
In the next world, my friend and myself he being
unmarried as yet, and I having only one wife may
only aspire to the rank of bachelor angels, while
Young and Kimball are to sit, surrounded by their
queens, on celestial thrones !

These notes of the faith, as it is held in Salt
Lake City as it is taught in our own midst in
the Welsh mountains, in the Midland shires, among
the Mersey dockmen, in the Whitechapel slums
mystical though they read in the main, exert a
mighty spell over the imagination and a mighty
power upon the actual life of their people. Nothing
is useless in the Mormon system ; Nanak himself
was not more practical in his reforms than Young.
Faith is their principle of action ; what they believe
they do ; and those who would comprehend the
position taken up by these Saints on earth defended



268 NEW AMERICA.

by twenty thousand rifles must try to understand
what they think of heaven.

Like the Moslems, the Mormons are a praying
people. Eeligion being their life, every action of
the day, whether social or commercial, is considered
by them in reference to what may be conceived as
the will of God. Hence, they have little respect
for policy, caution, compromise ; they seem to live
without fear ; they take no account of the mor
row ; but trust for safety, succour, and success, to
Heaven, and to Heaven alone. Kefer, in speaking
with them, to the Chicago platform, one of the
planks of which is the suppression of polygamy
by force, and they only smile at your worldly
wisdom, and tell you they are living the divine
life, and that God will know how to protect His
own. Hint to them that Young is mortal, and
will one day need a successor ; again they smile at
your want of understanding, saying they have
nothing to do with such things ; that God is wise
and strong, capable of raising up servants to guide
His church. Their whole dependence seems to be
on God. It is right to add as a point within my
knowledge that they also take good care to keep
their powder dry.

Confidence in the divine power to help and



MORMON LIGHT. 269

save them is not so much the effect of weakness
and humility, as of strength and pride. Young
puts man much higher in the scale of being than
any Christian priest has ever done; higher, per
haps, than any Moslem mollah ; though the Koran
makes the angels dwelling in Paradise servants of
the faithful who are gathered to their rest. Bab
in Persia, Nanak in the Punjaub, go beyond
Mohammed ; teaching their scholars that man is
part of the personality of God ; but Young
describes man as an uncreated, indestructible
portion of the Highest ; a being with the faculty
of raising an order of immortal and unbodied
spirits into the exalted rank of gods. How much
a high belief in man s rights and powers, as a
son of God, and a special favourite of Heaven,
can steady the soul in danger, and nerve the arm
in battle, was seen in every conflict of the Jews,
and is written in every history of the Sikhs.

The secular notes of the Mormon Society may
be gathered into three large groups: (1), Those
which define its relations to man as a member and
as a stranger ; (2), Those which define the method
and the principle of its government; (3), Those
which define the condition of its family life.



270 NEW AMERICA.



CHAPTEE XXV.

SECULAR NOTES.

THE first group of secular notes embraces two
leading ideas.

1. The new church, established in Utah, though
it is called the Church of America, is free, and (with
one passing exception) open to all the world ; to
men of every race, clime, creed, and colour ;
taking into its bosom the Jew from New York,
the Buddhist from San Francisco, the Parsee from
Calcutta, the Wesleyan from Liverpool, the Moslem
from Cairo, the Cheyenne from Smoky Hill river.

The one passing exception is the Negro. " The
Negro," Brigham said to me this morning, "is a
descendant of Cain, the first murderer, and his
darkness is a curse put on his skin by God." Only
one Negro has ever yet been admitted into
brotherhood with the Saints : the act of Joseph,
done at Nauvoo. Until God shall have removed



SECULAR NOTES. 271

this curse, Young will have none of these Cainites
in his church.

2. The new church not only receives all comers,
but tolerates all dissenters ; asking no question,
putting no test, demanding no sacrifice. Thus,
a man of any other creed may be enrolled among
the Saints without losing his identity ; without
breaking his idols, without rooting up his faith,
without shedding his habits ; in a word, without
that spiritual change which Christians understand
as being born to a new life. The convert to Mor-
monism accepts a new truth, in addition to the
truths which he may have held beforetime. Joseph
is proposed to him as a reconciler, not as a sepa
rator ; the Saints insisting that there is some good
in every form of religion, and that no sect on earth
enjoys a monopoly in the love of God.

Let us look into these two leading ideas, not in
their dogmatical, but in their political aspects.

The church is free and open. In its first
appeals, a new creed has commonly been proposed
to a particular race, its ritual adapted to a special
zone. We see in history so many examples of
such appeals succeeding on the spot, and failing
everywhere beyond it, that students are apt to
deny the possibility of a common faith, and to treat



272 NEW AMEEICA.

religion as an affair of climate and of race. The law
of Moses made few converts beyond the Hebrew
tribes. Confucius finds no followers out of China.
The Great Spirit only reigns in the American
woods. The Guebres have never carried their wor
ship out of Persia and India. Dagon was a local
god, the symbol of a people fond of the sea, Thor
is a denizen of the frozen north. Brahma is only
known to Hindoos, who make no converts ; and so
strictly is this law of living apart, for themselves
only, fixed in the Hindoo s habits of thought, that
a man of one caste can never pass into another ; a
Brahman born must remain a Brahman ; a Sudra
born must remain a Sudra all his life. Buddhism
has, in some respects, the character of a universal
church, having drawn to itself many tribes and
nations, and become the chief religion of the
world, if the mere number of its temples and
congregations could confer that rank ; yet among
the four hundred millions of men who worship
Buddha, there is no instance of a people having
ever been converted to the faith in whom the
reception of his creed had not been prepared by a
natural inclination towards the Oriental belief in
transmigration of souls ; so that Buddhism itself,
however widely it may be diffused throughout the



SECULAR NOTES. 273

earth, is but the religion of a particular race. Islam
is the creed of Arabia and the Arabs. When carried
eastward to the Ganges, westward to the Guadal-
quiver, it was borne forward on the points of a
myriad lances, not received by the people of India
and of Spain on its merits as a saving faith ; and,
being neither a natural growth nor a free adoption
in those countries, it wore itself out in Spain,
while in Persia and India it has rooted itself
chiefly among men of Semitic race.* Nanak in the
Punjab, Bab in Persia, may be said to have founded
sects on a wider plan than most other religious
leaders : for the Sikhs and Babees are both mis
sionary churches, taking their own from among
Moslem, Buddhist, and Hindoo flocks ; yet the
notion of having one free and open church, which
should make the brown man and the white man,
the black man and the red man, brothers and
equals, has scarcely ever yet dawned upon these
fiery advocates of faith.

Thus, nearly all our creeds have either some
open or some latent reference to condition. An
ancient legend says that the Arabian prophet told
his followers they would prevail in arms and plant
the true faith wherever the pahns bore fruit ; a
legend which has been almost verified in fact for a
VOL. I. T



274 NEW AMERICA.

thousand years ; but Mohammed never dreamt of
offering his half-tropical system of social life to the
white barbarians of the north ; to hungry hunters
beyond the Euxine, to frozen woodsmen of the
Helvetic Alps. His rule of rejecting wine and
pork, wise enough on the Nile and on the Jordan,
would have been wasteful of nature on the Danube
and the Elbe. His code was written for the palm-
bearing zones, and within those zones it has always
thriven. No Babee is found settled out of Persia,
no Sikh out of Upper India; in each case a man
finds his religious rites adapted to the country in
which he dwells.

Christianity itself, though nobler in spirit,
tougher in framework, than any of these geogra
phical creeds, has yet very much the appearance
of being mainly the religion of the Gothic race.
Although our creed sprang up in Palestine, and
flourished for some years in Egypt and Syria, it
never took hold of the Semitic mind, never rooted
itself in the Semitic soil. No Arab tribe has been
finally won to the Cross, just as no Gothic tribe
has been finally gained to the Crescent. The
half-Oriental churches which remain in Africa and
Asia the Abyssinian, the Coptic, the Armenian
have no connexion with the great Arabian family



SECULAR NOTES. 275

of man. In fact, no branch of the Christian society
has ever yet clearly put forth the pretension of
offering itself to all nations as a free and open
church ; we pride ourselves on being local and
exclusive Greeks, Latins, Anglicans, Lutherans
rather than branches of one living, universal church.
The largest Christian community on earth defines its
Catholicity as Eoman and Apostolic, instead of aiming
to include the world and owning no founder except
Jesus Christ.

How much power is lost by the existence of
this parish spirit in our churches, a statesman feels
the instant that some object, common to the whole
Christian society, comes into view ; such as that
question of the Holy Sepulchre which, only a dozen
years ago, drove the Euss and Frank into fraternal
strife.

The new church is tolerant of differences in
belief and habits of life. Laymen like More and
Locke have written most eloquently on the policy
of tolerating all kinds of opinion ; but no large
branch of the Christian Church has ever yet
entered on the practice of their liberal views. On
DO better ground than a difference of opinion as
to points which only the highest intellects can
master, Greek, Eoman, Lutheran, Dutch, Genevan,

T 2



276 NEW AMERICA.

are at deadly feud ; mocking each other s rites,
impugning each other s motives, condemning each
other s actions ; saying evil things, doing evil
works, to their brethren, with a bitterness of hate
increasing with the narrowness of their dividing
lines. To wit, the prelates of Eome and England
go on damning each other from fast to feast
with a ferocity which they would shrink from
displaying towards an Imam in Egypt, a Gosain
in Bengal, a Prophet at Salt Lake. We make
watch- words and warn- words to prevent people
from coming near us who might otherwise share
in our gospel of love and peace. With as little
ruth as the Gileadite swordsmen felt towards the
flying bands on the Jordan, we slay all brethren
who either can not or will not pronounce our
shibboleth.

As our Founder left it, the Church was loving
and merciful ; as men have made it, it is hard and
cruel as a Hindoo caste. A Brahman does not
stand aloof from a Sudra with fiercer pride than a
Greek Christian shows towards a Copt. Even at
the cradle arid at the tomb of Christ, we fight for
our parish creeds, until the very Bedaween, who have
to part the quarrelling disciples, blush for shame.
Is it better in London, Eome, and Moscow, than



SECTLAR NOTES. 277

in Bethlehem and Zion? Do the hundred Hindoo
sects revile each other in a darker spirit than our
own congregations? Who will say it? A wor
shipper of Vishna may live in the same convent a*
a worshipper of Siva, and the two Hindoo hermits
will dwell in their narrow den in peace. How
would it fere in the same shed with a Calvinist
and a Catholic? Qiaitariya taught the fine truth
that faith abolishes and replaces caste ; so that
Brahman, Kshatrya, Vaisya, and Sudra, whatever
their rank and state may be on earth, are equals
and brothers in the sight of God. Some Christians
preach the same ; but where is the national
church that has adopted this beneficent truth ?
Why, a Greek will not allow that a Latin can be
saved from hell, and every Armenian monk be
lieves that his Coptic rival will be burnt in ever
lasting fire. Our churches, even on our parish
greens, are worn and torn by internal feuds. Ol
all races on the earth, the Anglo-Saxon is, in
matter of thought and speech, the most liberal,
the most tolerant ; yet we have had our lurid
Smithfield fires, and our list of martyrs lengthens
into a mighty host. Within the existing pale we
have a High Church faction fighting a Low Church
faction, much as Hanafees strive against Malikees



278 NEW AMERICA.

in the orthodox Arab mosque. Some writers see
a spiritual good in this wide separation of sect
from sect ; but the political results of it are not to
be concealed ; and these results are, in England
strife, in Europe bloodshed, in Palestine the oc
cupation of our Holy Places by the Turk. A
tolerant church would save society from enormous
waste of power.



279



CHAPTEE XXVI.

HIGH POLITICS.

THE second group of secular notes those notes
which define the method and the principle of
Mormon government ascend into the highest
region of politics. Three points may be mentioned
as of supreme importance for the understanding of
this peculiar people.

(1.) The new church assumes that God is in
personal contact with his Saints ; guiding them
now, as He did in past times, and as He will do in
future times, by a revelation of His will through a
chosen seer; not in their great affairs only, their
battles, famines, and migrations, but also in their
rural and domestic troubles, such as the planting
of a field, the building of a store, and the sealing of
a wife.

(2.) The new church asserts that true worship
is true enjoyment ; a blessing from on high, boun-



280 NEW AMEKICA.

tifully given by a father to his children ; not a
tribute levied by a prince, not a penance exacted
by a priest ; but a light and innocent play, a
gladness in the spirit and in the flesh ; a sense of
duty being done, of service accepted, and of life
refreshed.

(3.) In the new church work is honourable, the
recovery of barren places noble, the production of
corn and oil, of fruit and flowers, of gum and spices,
of herbs and trees, a saving act ; the whole earth
being regarded by the Saints as a waste to be
redeemed by labour into the future heaven.

These notes deserve a close attention from those
who would comprehend the political growth of the
Mormon church.

The new church is divinely ruled. The notion
of God being always present among his people,
making known his wishes from day to day, through
one selected and unfailing channel, though it may
appear to reverential persons very profane, is one
that must strike a ruler and thinker, bent on
governing men through their hopes and fears, as
offering him a vast reserve of strength. Upon a
certain class of minds, it is known that the mere
sense of distance serves to dim all light, to deaden
all fear ; so that, with persons having such minds



HIGH POLITICS. 281

the authority of right and truth is apt to grow
faint, in exact proportion to the remoteness of
their vouchers. For men of this feeble stamp,
everything must be new and near. To them old
edicts are of doubtful force ; to them ancient tra
ditions are out of date. Indeed, for every one
save the highly trained, to whom Euclid is the
same as De Morgan, laws have a tendency to
become obsolete. A church that takes a particular
year as its point of departure, and stands to it for
ever, must always reckon on coming into conflict
with this weakness of the human heart. To say
that a thing is a long way offi that it happened
a long time ago, is to express a kind of moral
despair. Men wish to get nearer to the sources ; if
the grace could be given to them, they would like to
see God face to face. Moses cannot speak for them;
Sinai is but a name. They never felt the waves of
Galilee stilled beneath them. They were not stand
ing in the Gentile court when the Temple vail was
rent in twain.

To men of this class, clamorous for a sign,
Jerusalem answered by a succession of prophets,
who brought the Jewish heaven down to earth,
and served it to the people with their daily
bread; Borne answers now, as she answered of



282 NEW AMERICA.

old, with her mystery of the actual presence of
God in the bread and wine. Eome and Jerusalem
found in such means a defence against feeble
spirits ; but cities of a wider culture London,
Boston, Amsterdam, Geneva have no resources
against such craving of the spirit, excepting the
critical opinions of their learned men. But this
critical learning does not always answer. A faith
which has to find its support in logic and in history,
will always appear to some devout and unreason
ing minds as a secular sort of canon, resting on
man when it should only lean on God. Eeligious
doubt is more exacting, and more illogical, than
philosophical doubt. Perhaps the peril arising from
its presence in any society is greatest in the freest
and most educated states ; religious doubt being
one of the products of a civilisation quicker in its
physical than in its moral growth. As the mind
may be clouded with excess of light, it may also
become morbid from excess of health. Freedom
starts inquiries to which replies are not yet ready,
and the philosopher s difficulty makes the im
postor s opportunity. When men ask for a sign
and receive a date, what marvel if they should
turn away? Souls which are groping in the dark
do not ask you for controversy, for history, for



HIGH POLITICS. 283

logic ; they want a living gospel, an instant revela
tion, a personal God.

Here the Saint steps in to supply all wants.
When Young, with a peculiar emphasis, says,
" This I know," his followers take his voice for
that of God. Their eyes dilate, their faces
brighten, at his word ; new hope, fresh courage,
shoot into their hearts. Accepting the counsel,
the encouragement, as divine, life begins for them,
as it were, anew. It would be simple blindness
in our pastors not to see that in our own age,
and in the most liberal nations, many weak souls,
from lack of true imaginative insight, are falling
from a faith which they cannot any longer grasp
as they might an actualfact; on one side turning
into Eationalism, on the other side into Eomanism
here becoming Spiritualists, there inquiring about
the Mormons. To the frail who are crying out for

1 guidance, the Eeasoners say, Come to us and be
cured of creeds ; the Saints say, Come to God and be
saved from hell.

The service of God is the enjoyment of life.

i On its social side, the Mormon church may be
regarded as gay, its ritual as festive. All that
the elder creeds have nursed in the way of gloom,

1 austerity, bewilderment, despair, is banished from



284 NEW AMERICA.

the New Jerusalem. No one fears being damned ;
no one troubles his soul about fate, free-will,
election, and prevenient grace. A Mormon lives
in an atmosphere of trust ; for in his eyes, heaven
lies around him in his glowing lake, in his smiling
fields, in his snowy alps. To him, the advent
of the Saints was the Second Coming, and
the founding of their church a beginning of the
reign of God. He feels no dread, he takes no
trouble, on account of the future. What is, will
be ; to-morrow like to-day, the next year like the
past one ; heaven a continuation of the earth ;
where to each man will be meted out glory and
power according to the fulness of his obedience
in the present life. The earth, he says, is a
Paradise made for enjoyment. If it were possible
to think that Young and Pratt had ever read the
Hindoo sages, we should imagine that they had bor
rowed this part of their system from the disciples of
Vallabracha, the prophet of pleasure, the expounder
of delight.

From whatever source this idea of a festal
service may have come, Euphrosyne reigns in
Utah. Young might be described as Minister of
Mirth ; having built a great theatre, in which his
daughters play comedies and interludes ; having



HIGH POLITICS. 285

built a social hall, in which the young of both sexes
dance and sing ; and having set the example of
balls and music-parties both in the open air and
under private roofs. Concerts and operas are con
stantly being given. Water-parties, pic-nics, all the
contrivances for innocent amusement, have his
hearty sanction. Care is bestowed on the ripen
ing of grapes, on the culture of peaches, on the
cooking of food ; so that an epicure may chance
to find in the New Jerusalem dainties which he
would sigh for in vain at Washington and New
York. When dining in the houses of apostles, we
are always struck with the abundance of sweets
and fruits, with the choiceness of their quality,
and the daintiness of their preparation. A stranger
who sees the Theatre crowded and the Temple
unbuilt, might run away with the notion that
Young is less of a Saint than his people pretend
to think. It would be a mistake ; such as we
make in Bombay, when we infer that the
Maharajahs have no religion because in some of
their services they clothe themselves in purple
and begin with a feast.

The new church regards work as noble. That
work is noble is a very old phrase, known to the
Jews, held by the Essenes, sanctioned by St. Paul.



286 NEW AMERICA.

It was a legend among monks in the middle ages ;
and it lies at the root of all English, French, and
American systems for reforming and regenerating
society. But the principle that manual labour is
good in itself, and for its own sake, a blessing from
heaven, a solace to the heart, a privilege, an en-
dow T ment to the spirit, a service, an act of obe