THE TWO PROPHETS OF MORMONISM.
Mr. T. B. H. Stenhouse, one of the Scottish converts to Mormonism, was for a quarter of a century an elder and missionary of the church of the Latter-Day Saints. He is the author of the most complete and careful history of the Mormons in the English language. Although he has “outgrown” the faith of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and disbelieves the doctrines which he once preached, he writes of his former associates in a tone of moderation and good sense, and gives them more credit for sincerity than the rest of the world will be likely to concede them. In the introduction to his Rocky Mountain Saints he says:
“Whatever judgment may be passed upon the faith and personal lives of the Mormon Prophet and his successor, there will be a general recognition of a divine purpose in their history. Under their leadership the Mormon people have aided to conquer the western desert, and to transform a barren and desolate region of a hitherto ‘unknown country’ into a land that seems destined at no distant day to teem with millions of human beings, and which promises to stand pre-eminent among the conquests of the republic. It is doubtful whether any collective body of other citizens, unmoved by religious impulses, would ever have traversed the sandy desert and sage-plains, and have lived an age of martyrdom in reclaiming them, as the Mormons have in Utah. But this has been accomplished, and it was accomplished by faith. That was the Providence of the saints, and it must be conceded that, as a means subservient to an end, the Mormon element has been used in the Rocky Mountain region by the Almighty Ruler for developing the best interests of the nation, and for the benefit of the world at large.”
The fallacies hidden in these reflections will not escape the notice of any thoughtful Catholic reader. Mr. Stenhouse has got a feeble hold of a great truth, but, embarrassed by the materialistic ideas which form so important a part of the Mormon philosophy, he does not know how to apply it. We quote the passage as a striking illustration of the spirit in which too many of our countrymen are inclined to judge the history and character of the saints of the Great Salt Lake. Americans have a profound veneration for material prosperity, and hardly find it in their hearts to condemn a community which has built cities in the remote wilderness, planted gardens in the midst of the desert, taught brooks to run across the arid plains, and “developed the resources” of one of the least promising territories in our national domain. Any man, according to the popular theories of the emancipation of conscience, has a right to make a religion to suit himself; and whatever he may profess—unless, indeed, he should chance to concur with about 160,000,000 other persons in professing the doctrines of the holy Catholic Church, in which case there would be a fair presumption that he was dangerous to society—his fellow-citizens are bound to treat his creed respectfully and admit the purity of his motives.[[42]] Hence the world honors the founder of a new state, even though he may be also the founder of a false religion. There are 80,000 Mormons in Utah, and as a community they are rich and thrifty. It is not surprising that we have heard of late so much admiring comment upon the genius of Brigham Young, so many predictions that he will be reckoned hereafter among the great men in American history.
It may be worth while to clear our minds by a brief sketch of the rise and development of Mormonism. It is a phenomenon too important to be passed over, and it has a closer connection with the moral and intellectual tendencies of the time than most of us suspect. The general direction of Protestant theology has always been towards rationalism and materialism. Founded upon the denial of everything that man cannot perceive by his unaided natural powers, it leads irresistibly to the rejection of divine interposition in worldly affairs and of all manner of heavenly revelation. But the human mind can no more rest without belief in the supernatural than the human body can rest upon air. Superstition is consequently the offspring of infidelity. The extremes of negation produce a reaction of credulity; the worship of Baal alternates with the worship of God; we see Protestantism swaying perpetually to and fro between a cold philosophical scepticism and the wildest extravagances of fanaticism and imposture. A time of general negation and intellectual pride is followed by an epidemic of rhapsodies and convulsions. Prophets arise; spirits are seen in clouds of light; conventicles resound with the ravings of frenzied sinners and the shouting of excited saints; Swedenborg makes excursions in the body into heaven and into hell; the Shakers place Mother Ann on the throne of the Almighty; the Peculiar People look for the direct interference of God in the pettiest affairs of life, and demand a miracle every hour of the day. Mormonism was the product of such a season of spiritual riot. Fifty years ago animal magnetism and clairvoyance were at their height. The pride which refused to worship God stooped to amuse itself with ghosts and witches. The soul, emancipated from religion, became the slave of magic; and superstition, rejecting the revelations of a loving Creator, was almost ripe for the instructions of dancing tables and flying tambourines. Mesmer had excited the learned world with his mystic tubs; throngs of prophetic somnambulists had prepared the way for the oracles of Andrew Jackson Davis. In England there was even a more chaotic disturbance of minds than here. Multitudes on the one hand, disbelieving in a personal deity altogether, took refuge in pure scepticism. Multitudes on the other looked for the advent of the Lord in power and glory, to establish on earth in visible form the kingdom foretold by the inspired writers. The study of the prophecies became an absorbing passion of sectaries and enthusiasts. They muddled their brains with much reading of Isaias and the Apocalypse. They made it their mission to explain dark sayings; and having placed their own interpretation upon the divine predictions, they watched the sky for signs of their immediate fulfilment, and found in contemporary events a thousand confirmations of their crazy fancies, a thousand portents of the speedy coming of the Lord. There was no conceivable theological vagary for which they did not seek authority among the prophets. There was a wide-spread revival of the ancient belief in a terrestrial millennium, with a faith that it was close at hand. Edward Irving was setting England and Scotland aflame with fiery announcements of the Second Advent; fashionable society left its bed at five o’clock in the morning to hear him preach, for three hours at a stretch, on the impending accomplishment of what had been foretold; and although it was not until a few years later that William Miller organized in this country the first regular congregations of those who expected the speedy end of the world, and who sat in white robes listening for the judgment trump, there is no doubt that the general religious ferment which preceded this particular hallucination was felt simultaneously on both sides of the ocean, and presented on both sides the same essential characteristics.
Naturally this exciting period was also a season of powerful Methodistic revivals. These sensational experiences belong, like spiritualism and the other delusions which we have mentioned, to what has been called “inspirational” as distinguished from rationalistic Protestantism, and they are apt to run their course together. Between 1825 and 1830 the revival movement was carried to great lengths, and its excesses seem to have been most marked in Central and Western New York just at the time when Mormonism arose there. We speak of the revivals as Methodistic only by way of defining their character; they were by no means restricted to the Methodist denomination. The most famous revival preacher of the day was the Rev. Charles G. Finney, a Presbyterian; and any one who is curious about the spiritual uproar which he carried through the State with him is referred to the chapter on “Fanaticism in Revivals” in the Personal Reminiscences of Dr. Gardiner Spring, of the Brick (Presbyterian) Church in New York City.[[43]]
It was in such a time, equally favorable to delusions and impostures, that Joseph Smith, the inventor of Mormonism, made his appearance. The accounts of his early life are not satisfactory. His origin was obscure. His neighbors were ignorant. Little is on record except his Autobiography and a sketch by his mother, neither of which productions is entitled to much credit. It is evident, however, that he was caught up by the religious excitement which raged all around him. We are assured that on at least two special occasions during his boyhood he was “powerfully awakened” by Methodist revivalists. His writings abound with revival phraseology; his pretended revelations are full of the cant-terms of the camp-meeting; his code of doctrines bears traces of the denominational controversies which were most active in Western New York when he emerged upon the stage of history. In 1827 he was an illiterate and idle rustic of twenty-two years, living at Palmyra, in Wayne County, New York. His parents were shiftless and visionary people, who got drunk, and used the divining-rod, and dug for hidden treasures, and, according to their neighbors, stole sheep. Joseph was no better than the rest of the family. By natural disposition he was a dreamer and an adventurer. According to his own account, he began to see miraculous appearances in the air and to hear the voices of spiritual messengers as early as his fifteenth year. It was in one of his seasons of “awakening,” when, perplexed by the contradictions of rival sects, he went into a grove and asked the Lord which he should follow, in the firm persuasion that his question would be answered by some physical manifestation. We give the Mormon account of the result of his experiment:
“At first he was severely tempted by the powers of darkness, which endeavored to overcome him; but he continued to seek for deliverance, until darkness gave way from his mind. He at length saw a very bright and glorious light in the heavens above, which at first seemed to be at a considerable distance. He continued praying, while the light appeared to be gradually descending towards him; and as it drew nearer it increased in brightness and magnitude, so that by the time that it reached the tops of the trees the whole wilderness for some distance around was illuminated in the most glorious and brilliant manner. He expected to have seen the leaves and boughs of the trees consumed as soon as the light came in contact with them; but perceiving that it did not produce that effect, he was encouraged with the hopes of being able to endure its presence. It continued descending slowly, until it rested upon the earth and he was enveloped in the midst of it. When it first came upon him it produced a peculiar sensation throughout his whole system; and immediately his mind was caught away from the natural objects with which he was surrounded, and he was enwrapped in a heavenly vision, and saw two glorious personages, who exactly resembled each other in their features or likeness. He was informed that his sins were forgiven. He was also informed upon the subjects which had for some time previously agitated his mind—namely, that all the religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines, and consequently that none of them was acknowledged of God as his church and kingdom. And he was expressly commanded to go not after them; and he received a promise that the true doctrine, the fulness of the gospel, should at some future time be made known to him; after which the vision withdrew.”[[44]]
Joseph, upon whose word alone this narrative rests, relates that when he came to himself he was lying on his back looking up into the clouds. He seems to have accepted cheerfully the condemnation of all existing religions, but the vision had no other practical effect upon him; as Orson Pratt confesses, his life continued to be unedifying, and his story of the celestial apparition was received with stubborn incredulity by those who knew his character and habits. It was three years before he professed to be favored with a second visit. Then, he says, a white and lustrous angel came into his room while he was at prayer, and told him that Heaven designed him for a great work. There was hidden in a certain place, to be revealed hereafter, a book written upon gold plates, which contained “the fulness of the everlasting gospel as delivered by the Saviour to the ancient inhabitants” of the American continent. This was the Mormon Bible, commonly known now as the Book of Mormon from the title of one of its divisions. In his Autobiography Joseph Smith states that the angel was Nephi, author of the First and Second Books of Nephi, which stand at the head of the Mormon scriptures; but in his Doctrine and Covenants he speaks of his visitant as Moroni, who wrote the last book in the collection and placed the gold plates where they were afterwards to be found. We do not know what explanation the Mormons offer of this singular discrepancy. The vision was repeated during the night, and Joseph was directed to search for the buried treasure in a hill near Manchester, a village about four miles from Palmyra, in the adjoining county of Ontario. He saw, as if in a dream, the exact spot in which he was to dig. He went to Manchester and found the plates, enclosed in a sort of box formed of stones set in cement. With them “there were two stones in silver bows (and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim), and the possession and use of these stones was what constituted seers in ancient or former times, and God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book”—an idea which Joseph borrowed, of course, from the Jewish high-priest’s “rational of judgment,” described in Exodus, chap. xxviii. Moroni (or was it Nephi?) would not allow the plates to be removed yet; but he gave Joseph a great many interesting and comfortable, though rather vague, instructions. He opened the heavens and caused him to see the glory of the Lord. He made the devil and his hosts pass by in procession, so that Smith might know them when he met them. Once a year Joseph was to return to the same spot and receive a new revelation. On the fourth anniversary of the discovery—that is, in September, 1827—the angel placed the plates and the Urim and Thummim in his hands, with a caution that he should let nobody see them. But he seems to have talked freely about his experiences; for, according to his own story, the whole country-side was up in arms to get the plates away from him. He was waylaid and chased by ruffians with clubs. He was shot at. His house was repeatedly mobbed; and when at last he removed to Pennsylvania in search of peace, carrying the plates in a barrel of beans, he was twice overtaken by a constable armed with a search-warrant, who failed, however, to find what he was looking for. Possibly the plates and the constable were equally fictions of Joseph Smith’s imagination.
Incredulous historians of Mormonism offer various explanations of the story which we have thus far recounted. They detect in Joseph Smith’s alleged visions a close resemblance to the trance state sometimes brought on by spiritual excitement among the Methodists and other sects who make strong appeals to the emotional nature; or they refer his supernatural exaltation to mesmeric clairvoyance; or they see in him merely a “spiritual medium,” a precursor of the rappers and table-tippers who became so common a few years later. Others, again, account for the whole case upon the theory of demoniac possession; while still others suppose that, having really discovered some sort of metallic tablets, the dreams of a disordered mind supplied him with the interpretation and the dramatis personæ.[[45]] It seems to us hardly necessary to discuss these various explanations, for there is no proof of the alleged facts. The whole narrative rests upon nothing but Joseph Smith’s word. It is the story told by him in after-years to account for the new gospel. There is none who shared with him the privilege of angelic visitations. There is none who saw the great light, who heard the mysterious voices, who even beheld Joseph himself at the moment of the alleged revelations. No one knows what became of the golden plates. The angel, said Joseph, came and took them away again. While they remained in the prophet’s hands they were kept from curious eyes. Prefixed to the Book of Mormon in the current editions is the “Testimony of Three Witnesses”—Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris—that they were permitted to see the plates, and that a heavenly voice assured them of the faithfulness of Smith’s translation; but all these three witnesses afterwards confessed that their testimony was a lie. To their certificate is appended the testimony of eight other witnesses—namely, Joseph’s father and two brothers, four of the Whitmer family, and a disciple named Page—who also profess to have seen the plates; but their connection with the beginnings of the Mormon Church makes it impossible to put confidence in their statement. We do not know the circumstances under which the sight may have been vouchsafed to them, and we certainly have no sufficient reason to believe their word.[[46]]
Thus far, then, Mormonism is a mere legend. In 1828 it becomes historical fact; and whatever may be thought of the prophet’s good faith in the matter of his early dreams and visions, we find it impossible to resist the conviction that henceforth he was only a conscious and daring impostor. From this time to the day of his death, in his acts and his writings, in his shrewdness, his ambition, and his reckless courage—planning new settlements, fabricating new Bibles, uttering forged revelations, nominating himself for President of the United States, assuming to command armies, running a wild-cat bank, debauching women—we can see nothing but a career of vulgar fraud. There was wild fanaticism in the foundation of the Mormon Church; but it was not on the part of Joseph Smith.
There is proof that about fifteen years before this pretended revelation an ex-preacher, named Solomon Spalding, a graduate of Dartmouth College, and a resident of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, offered for publication at a Pittsburgh printing-office a book called the Manuscript Found, in which he attempted to account for the peopling of America by deriving the Indians from the lost tribes of Israel. It was a sort of Scriptural romance, written in clumsy imitation of the historical books of the Old Testament, and it contained, among its other divisions, a Book of Mormon. Although announced for publication, it never appeared. The manuscript remained in the printing-office for a number of years. Spalding died in 1816. The bookseller died in 1826. Sidney Rigdon, one of the first disciples of Mormonism, was a compositor in the printing-office, and it seems to be pretty well established that he made a copy of the book and afterwards gave it to Smith. At any rate the Book of Mormon, when it came from the press in 1830, was immediately recognized as an adaptation of Solomon Spalding’s romance. A great many people had read parts of it during Spalding’s lifetime, and remembered not only the principal incidents which it narrated, but the names of the leading characters—Nephi, Lehi, Moroni, Mormon, and the rest—which Smith boldly appropriated. Spalding’s only object was literary amusement, with perhaps a little harmless mystification. The theological teachings incorporated with his pretended history were the additions of Smith and Rigdon. As it now stands the Mormon Bible purports to relate the wanderings of a Hebrew named Lehi, who went out from Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ, and, after travelling eastward eight years “through a wilderness,” came to the sea-coast, built a ship, got a mariner’s compass somewhere, set sail with his wife Sariah, his sons Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Joseph, and Jacob, the wives of the four elder sons, and six other persons, and in due time reached America. After the death of Lehi the Lord appointed Nephi to rule over the settlers, but Laman and Lemuel, heading a revolt, were cursed, and became the ancestors of the Indians. We shall not waste much time over this absurd and wearisome farrago, a mixture of Scriptural parodies, stupid inventions, and bold thefts from Shakspeare and King James’ Bible. It is intolerably verbose, dragging through fifteen books, stuffed with gross faults of grammar, anachronisms, and solecisms of every kind, and comprising as much matter as four hundred and fifty of these pages, or more than three entire numbers of The Catholic World. There are wonderful miracles and tremendous battles. Vast cities are created in North and South America. Nations wander to and fro across the continents. Priests, prophets, judges, and Antichrists, with names curiously constructed out of those in the Jewish Scriptures, appear and disappear like travesties of the persons in sacred history. The Nephites and the Lamanites hack and slay each other. A republican form of government is instituted, and is assailed by monarchical conspiracies. Nephi, Jarom, Omni, Mosaiah, Mormon, Moroni, Alma, Ether, and other leaders of the Nephites write the records of the people upon golden plates, and save them for Joseph Smith to find in due season. Seers give long-winded explanations of the divine purposes, and predict the incidents of the beginning of Mormonism, which had already taken place when Joseph Smith brought these predictions to light. The history of the Nephites is supposed to be contemporaneous with the history of the Jews, but entirely independent of it; their Scriptures are intended to supplement, not contradict, the holy Bible. The crucifixion of our Lord was announced to these American Jews by portents and prophecies, and afterwards the Saviour came to the chief city of the Nephites, showed his wounded hands and feet, healed the sick, blessed little children, and remained here forty days teaching Christianity. Gradually the Lamanites, or Indians, overcame the Nephites. In the year 384 a final battle was fought on the hill Cumorah (Ontario County, New York), where 320,000 Nephites were slain. This was the end of the pre-Columbian civilization of America, little or nothing being left of the Nephites except Mormon and his son Moroni, who completed the records on the gold plates and “hid them up” in the hill. Such, in brief outline, is the Mormon Bible. With the narrative of the descendants of Lehi, however, it contains an account of two other emigrations from Asia to America—namely, that of the Jaredites, who came here direct from the tower of Babel, and perished after they had stripped the continent of timber, and that of a party of Jews who followed Lehi at the period of the Babylonian captivity. The Jaredites came in eight small air-tight barges, shaped like a covered dish, loaded with all manner of beasts, birds, and fishes, and driven by a furious wind. The voyage lasted three hundred and forty-four days, so that, in spite of the miraculous gale astern, it was probably the slowest on record.
It would be an endless task to point out even a tithe of the huge blunders in this fraudulent volume. We read of Christians a century before Christ, of the Gospel and the churches six centuries before Christ, of three oceans lying between Asia and America, of pious Hebrews eating pork, of Jews long before the name of Jew was invented, of horses, asses, swine, etc., running wild all over the face of this continent in the time of the Jaredites, although it is certain that they were first introduced by the Spaniards. Nephi, in giving an account of the emigration of his father Lehi, says: “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying, Thou shalt construct a ship after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters. And I said, Lord, whither shall I go that I may find ore to molten, that I may make tools?... And it came to pass that I did make tools of the ore which I did molten out of the rock.” Nephi, like St. John, was unable to write down all the things that Jesus taught: “Behold, I were about to write them all, but the Lord forbid it.” Alma declares: “And it came to pass that whosoever did mingle his seed with that of the Lamanites did bring the same curse upon his seed; therefore whomsoever suffered himself to be led away by the Lamanites were called that head, and there was a mark set upon him.” Mormon is one of the most eccentric in syntax of all the scribes: “And Ammaron said unto me, I perceive that thou art a sober child, and art quick to observe; therefore when ye are about twenty-and-four years old I would that ye should remember,” etc. Nephi “saw wars and rumors of wars.” Alma writes: “And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent”! The language of the precious records is described as “reformed Egyptian,” and Nephi explains that it “consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians,” though upon what principle they are combined we are left to imagine. Pressed to exhibit a specimen of the mysterious characters, Joseph Smith gave what purported to be a fac-simile of a few lines to one of his disciples, who came to New York and submitted it to Prof. Anthon. “It consisted,” says Prof. Anthon, “of all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets, Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes; Roman letters inverted or placed sideways were arranged and placed in perpendicular columns; and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican calendar given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived.” Mormon says he would have written in Hebrew, if the plates had been large enough.
In giving the translation of the mysterious books to the world Joseph Smith, whose education had been sadly neglected, made use of an amanuensis. This at first was a farmer named Martin Harris. The prophet sat behind a blanket stretched across the room, and, thus screened from profane eyes, read aloud from the gold plates, by the miraculous aid of the Urim and Thummim, the sacred text, which the confiding Harris reduced to writing. The sceptical, of course, believe that what Smith held before him was no pile of metallic tablets, but merely the manuscript of Solomon Spalding, into which he emptied from time to time a great deal of rubbish of his own make. No one, however, succeeded in penetrating behind the blanket. The work had gone on for a year and a half, when Harris, tempted by his wife, embezzled the manuscript. This was a serious loss. Joseph could not reproduce it in the same words, and it would not do to risk discrepancies. “Revelation” came to his aid in this dilemma, and informed him that Harris had “altered the words” of the manuscript “in order to catch him” in the translation. The stolen pages were from the Book of Mormon; he must not attempt to replace them; he should let them go, for a narrative of the same events would be found in the Book of Nephi:
“And now verily I say unto you that an account of those things that you have written, which have gone out of your hands, are engraven upon the plates of Nephi; yea, and you remember it was said in those writings that a more particular account was given of these things upon the plates of Nephi. Behold they have only got a part or an abridgment of the account of Nephi. Behold, there are many things engraven on the plates of Nephi which do throw greater views upon my gospel; therefore it is wisdom in me that you should translate this first part of the engravings of Nephi, and send forth in this work.”[[47]]
Oliver Cowdery now became scribe, and the task was finished without further accidents, the Books of Nephi standing at the head of the volume, and the remnant of the Book of Mormon, which gives its title to the whole collection, coming near the end of the table of contents. Still, the wretched Harris was not altogether cut off for his sin. He owned a farm. When the translation was finished Heaven uttered, by the mouth of Smith, “a commandment of God, and not of man, to Martin Harris”: “I command thee that thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing of the Book of Mormon. And misery thou shalt receive if thou wilt slight these counsels—yea, even the destruction of thyself and property.” So Harris mortgaged his farm to pay the printer, and in 1830 appeared at Palmyra, New York, The Book of Mormon: an Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates taken from the Plates of Nephi. By Joseph Smith, Jr., author and proprietor.[[48]]
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.
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.
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.
Prof. Youmans pretends that the difficulty of religious people with regard to advanced science is simply that of “narrowness or ignorance inspired by a fanatical earnestness.” We are greatly obliged by the compliment! Prof. Youmans is, indeed, a model of politeness, according to the standard of modern progress; but it did not occur to him that, before speaking of the “narrowness and ignorance” of his critics, he should have endeavored to atone for his own blunders which we pointed out in our number for April. To our mind, a man whose ignorance of logic and of many other things has been demonstrated has no right to talk of the ignorance of religious people. And as to “fanatical earnestness,” we need hardly say that it is in the Popular Science Monthly and in other similar productions of “scientific” unbelievers that we find the best instances of its convulsive exertions. But let us proceed.
“Atheism,” continues the professor, “has now come to be a familiar and stereotyped charge against men of science, both on the part of the pulpit and the religious press. Not that they accuse all scientific men of atheism, but they allege this to be the tendency of scientific thought and the outcome of scientific philosophy. It matters nothing that this imputation is denied; it matters nothing that scientific men claim that their studies lead them to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power, manifested through the order of nature, than the conceptions offered by theology. It is enough that they disagree with current notions upon this subject, and any difference of view is here held as atheism. In this, as we have said, the theologians may be honest, but they are narrow and bigoted.”
Mr. Youmans does not perceive the tendency of “scientific” thought to foster atheism. Not he! Darwin’s theory of development has for its principal object to destroy, if possible, the history of creation and to get rid of the Creator. This Mr. Youmans does not perceive. Tyndall, in his Belfast lecture, professes atheism as the outcome of scientific philosophy, and, though he has offered some explanations to screen himself from the imputation, he stands convicted by his own words. Of this Mr. Youmans takes no notice. Büchner ridicules the idea that there is a God, and teaches that such an idea is obsolete, contrary to modern science, and condemned by philosophy as a manifest impossibility. Mr. Youmans seems to hold that this is not genuine atheism. Huxley, to avoid creation, gives up all investigation of the origin of things as useless and unscientific, and the advanced thinkers in general are everywhere at work propagating the same view in their scientific lectures, books, journals, and magazines. Yet Prof. Youmans wishes the world to believe that the tendency of advanced scientific thought is not towards atheism! Is he blind? The man who writes Nature with a capital letter, who denies creation, who contributes to the best of his power to the diffusion of infidel thought, can hardly be ignorant of the fact that what is now called advanced science is, in the hands of its apostles and leaders, an engine of war against God. But he knows also that to profess atheism is bad policy, for the present at least. Science, as he laments in many of his articles, has not yet advanced enough in the popular mind; people are still “narrow” and “ignorant,” and even “fanatic”—that is, their religious feelings and conscientious convictions do not yet permit a direct and outspoken confession of the atheistic tendency of modern “scientific” thought. Hence he is obliged to be cautious and to put on a mask. Such are, and ever have been, the tactics of God’s enemies. Thus Prof. Huxley, in his lectures on evolution, while attacking the Biblical history of creation, pretends that he is only refuting the “Miltonian hypothesis.” The same Prof. Huxley, with Herbert Spencer and many others of less celebrity, endeavors to conceal his atheism, or at any rate to make it appear less repulsive, by the convenient but absurd admission of the Great Unknown or Unknowable, to which surely neither he nor any other scientist will offer adoration, as it would be an utterly superfluous, unscientific, and unphilosophical thing to worship what they cannot know. And Prof. Youmans himself follows the same tactics, as we shall see in the sequel. Hence we do not wonder that he considers Mr. Draper’s words “a conflict between religion and science” as unfortunate, and only calculated to provoke criticism and theological abuse. It would have been so easy and so much better to say “between ecclesiasticism and science.” This would have saved appearances, and might have furnished a plausible ground for repelling the accusation of atheism.
But, says Prof. Youmans, “this imputation is denied.” We answer that the imputation cannot be evaded by any such denial. If there were question of the intimate convictions of private individuals, their denial might have some weight in favor of their secret belief. Men very frequently do not see clearly the ultimate consequences of their own principles; and it is for this reason that an atheistic science does not always lead to personal atheism. As there are honest Protestants who believe on authority, though their Protestant principle sacrifices authority to private judgment, so also there are many honest scientists who, notwithstanding their admission of atheistic theories, believe in God. This is mere inconsistency after all; and it can only furnish a ground for judging of the views of individual scientists.
But our question regards the tendency of “advanced scientific thought” irrespective of the inconsistency of sundry individuals. This question is to be solved from the nature of the principles and of the conclusions of “advanced” science; and if such principles and such conclusions are shown to lead logically to atheism, it matters very little indeed that “the imputation is denied.” This the editor of the Popular Science Monthly must admit. Now, that atheism is the logical outcome of “advanced” science may be proved very easily. Dr. Büchner, in his Force and Matter, gives a long scientific argumentation against the existence of God. The science which led him to this profession of atheism is the “advanced” science of which Prof. Youmans speaks. Has any among the advanced scientists protested against Dr. Büchner’s conclusion? Have any of them endeavored to show that this conclusion was not logically deduced from the principles of their pretended science? Some of them may have been pained at the imprudent sincerity of the German doctor; but what he affirms with a coarse impudence they too insinuate every day in a gentler tone and in a more guarded phraseology. Their doctrine is that “whereas mankind formerly believed the phenomena of nature to be expressions of the will of a personal God, modern science, by reducing everything to laws, has given a sufficient explanation of these phenomena, and made it quite unnecessary for man to seek any further account of them.” Dr. Carpenter, from whom we have borrowed this statement, adds: “This is precisely Dr. Büchner’s position; and it seems to me a legitimate inference from the very prevalent assumption (which is sanctioned by the language of some of our ablest writers) that the so-called laws of nature ‘govern’ the phenomena of which they are only generalized expressions. I have been protesting against this language for the last quarter of a century.”[[61]]
Mr. Youmans himself implicitly admits that “advanced” science has given up the old notion of God; and he only contends that scientists, while disregarding the God of theology, fill up his place with something better. “Scientific men claim that their studies lead them to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power manifested through the order of nature than the conceptions offered by theology.” Our readers need hardly be told that this claim on the part of our advanced scientists is preposterous and ridiculous. For if the order of nature could lead to a conception of divine power higher or worthier than the conception offered by theology, it would lead to a conception of divine power greater and higher than omnipotence; for omnipotence is one of the attributes of the God of theology. But can we believe that Mr. Youmans entertains the hope of conceiving a power higher than omnipotence? How, then, can he make good his assertion? On the other hand, the God of theology is immense, eternal, and unchangeable, infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, infinitely good, infinitely perfect, as not only all theologians but also all philosophers unquestionably admit. Must we believe that our scientists will be able to conceive a higher intellect, wisdom, or goodness than infinite intellect, infinite wisdom, or infinite goodness? Will they imagine anything greater than immensity, or than eternity? The editor of the Popular Science Monthly has a very poor opinion indeed of the intellectual power of his habitual readers, if he thinks that they will not detect the absurdity of his claim.
But there is more than this. “Advanced” science has repeatedly confessed its inability to form a conception of God. The ultimate conclusion of “advanced” science is that the contemplation and study of nature afford no indication of what a God may be; so much so that the leaders of this “advanced” science, after suppressing the God of theology, could find nothing to substitute in his place but what they call “the Great Unknown” and “the Great Unknowable.” Now, surely, the unknowable cannot be known. How, then, can these scientists claim that their studies lead them “to higher and more worthy conceptions of the divine power”? Can they conceive that which is unknown and unknowable? Have they any means of ascertaining that a thing unknowable has power, or that its power is divine?
Let them understand that if their “Unknowable” is not eternal, it is no God; if it is not omniscient, it is no God; if it is not omnipotent, it is no God. And, in like manner, if it is not self-existent, immutable, immense, infinitely wise, infinitely good, infinitely perfect, it is no God. And, again, if it is not our Creator, our Master, and our Judge, it is no God, and we have no reason for worshipping it, or even for respecting it. How can we know that these and similar attributes can and must be predicated of the Unknowable, since the unknowable is not and cannot be known? If, on the contrary, we know that such a being is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immense, and infinitely perfect in all manner of perfections, then it is obvious (even to Prof. Youmans, we assume) that such a being is neither unknown nor unknowable. Thus the unknowable can lay no claim to “divine power” or other divine attributes; and therefore the pretended worshippers of the Unknowable vainly attempt to palliate their atheism by claiming that their studies have led them “to a higher and more worthy conception of the divine power than the conception offered by theology.”
As to Prof. Youmans himself, he tells us that the divine nature is “unspeakable and unthinkable.” This evidently amounts to saying that the divine nature is unknowable, just as Herbert Spencer, Huxley, and others of the same sect have maintained. The professor will not deny, we trust, that what is unthinkable is also unknowable, unless he is ready to show that he knows the square circle. Hence the remarks we have passed on the doctrine of his leaders apply to him as well as to them. It is singular, however, that neither he nor any of his sect has thought of examining the question whether the “Unknowable” has any existence at all. For if it has no existence, they must confess that they have not even an unknown God, and therefore are absolute atheists; and if they assume that it has a real existence, they are supremely illogical; for no one has a right to proclaim the existence of a thing unknown and unknowable. The existence of the unknowable cannot be affirmed unless it be known; but it cannot be known unless the unknowable be known; and this implies a manifest contradiction. To affirm existence is to affirm a fact; and Mr. Youmans would certainly be embarrassed to show that science, however “advanced,” can affirm a fact of which it has no knowledge whatever. Hence atheism is the legitimate result of the doctrine which substitutes the “Unknowable” in the place of the God of theology; and “it matters nothing” that this consequence is provisionally denied by Prof. Youmans. Were it not that the horror inspired by the impious pretensions of his fallacious science obliges him to keep within the measures of prudence, it is very likely that Prof. Youmans would not only not deny his “scientific” atheism, but even glory in its open profession. So long as this cannot be safely done he must remain satisfied with writing Nature with a capital N.
From these remarks we can further infer that Mr. Youmans’ complaint about the narrowness and bigotry of theologians is utterly unfounded. There is no narrowness in rejecting foolish conceptions, and no bigotry in maintaining the rights of truth. Theology condemns your doctrines, not because they “disagree with current notions,” but because they are manifestly impious and absurd. The views you encourage are atheistical. You admit only the Unknowable; and the Unknowable, as we have just proved, is not God. Hence the theologians are not “narrow” nor “bigoted,” but strictly logical and reasonable, when they condemn your doctrines as atheistical.
And now Prof. Youmans makes the following curious argument:
“It is surprising that they (the theologians) cannot see that in arraigning scientific thinkers for atheism they are simply doing what stupid fanatics the world over are always doing when ideas of the Deity different from their own are maintained. And it is the more surprising that Christian teachers should indulge in this intolerant practice when it is remembered that their own faith was blackened with this opprobrium at its first promulgation.”
Here a long passage is quoted from The Contest of Heathenism with Christianity, by Prof. Zeller, of Berlin, in which we are reminded that the primitive Christians were reproached with atheism because they “did not agree with the prevailing conceptions of the Deity,” and that “Down with the atheists” was the war-cry of the heathen mob against the Christians. This suggests to Mr. Youmans the following remarks:
“It would be well if our theologians would remember these things when tempted to deal out their maledictions upon scientific men as propagators of atheism. For the history of their own faith attests that religious ideas are a growth, and that they pass from lower states to higher unfoldings through processes of inevitable suffering. It was undoubtedly a great step of progress from polytheism to monotheism, ... but this was neither the final step in the advancement of the human mind toward the highest conception of the Deity, nor the last experience of disquiet and grief at sundering the ties of old religious associations. But if this be a great normal process in the development of the religious feeling and aspiration of humanity, why should the Christians of to-day adopt the bigoted tactics of heathenism, first applied to themselves, to use against those who would still further ennoble and purify the ideal of the Divinity?”
Thus, according to the professor, as the pagans were wrong and stupid in denouncing the Christians as atheists, so are the Christians both wrong and stupid in denouncing the atheistic tendency of “advanced” science; and the reason alleged is that as the pagans did not recognize the superiority of monotheism to polytheism, so the Christian theologians fail to see the superiority of the “scientific” Unknowable to the God of Christianity. Need we answer this? Why, if anything were wanting to prove that Prof. Youmans is laboring for the cause of atheism, his very manner of arguing may be regarded as a convincing proof of the fact. For, if his reasoning has any meaning, it means that as the Christians rejected the gods of the pagans, so Prof. Youmans rejects the God of the Christians; and this is quite enough to show his atheism, as he neither recognizes our God, nor has he found, nor will he ever find, another God worthy of his recognition; for, surely, the “Unthinkable” of which he speaks is not an object of recognition.
On the other hand, is it true that the history of Christianity “attests that religious ideas are a growth, and that they pass from lower states to higher unfoldings”? Does the history of Christianity attest, for instance, that our conception of God has passed from a lower to a higher state? But, waiving this, it requires great audacity to contend that the theory of the “Unknowable” and of the “Unthinkable” is an unfolding of the conception of God. We appeal to Prof. Youmans himself. A theory of natural science which would lay down as the ultimate result of human progress that what we call chemistry, geology, astronomy, mechanics, electricity, optics, magnetism, is something “unknowable” and “unthinkable,” would scarcely be considered by him an “unfolding” of science. For how could he “unfold” his thoughts in the Popular Science Monthly, if the subject of his thought were “unthinkable”? But, then, how can he assume that his theory of the “unthinkable” is an “unfolding” of the conception of God? God cannot be conceived, if he is unthinkable. We conceive God as an eternal, immense, omnipotent, personal Being. These and other attributes of Divinity, as conceived by us, constitute our notion of God; and this notion is as unfolded as is consistent with the limits of the human mind. But to “unfold” the conception of Divinity by suppressing omnipotence, wisdom, eternity, goodness, and all other perfections of the divine nature, so as to leave nothing “thinkable” in it, is not to unfold our conception, but to suppress it altogether.
As to the flippant assertion that the Christian conception of Divinity is not “the final step in the advancement of the human mind toward the highest conception of the Deity,” we might say much. But what is the use of refuting what every Christian child knows to be false? We conceive God as the supreme truth, the supreme good, and the supreme Lord of whatever exists; and he who pretends that there is or can be a “higher conception of the Deity” has himself to thank if men call him a fool.
We shall say nothing of “intolerant practices,” “stupid fanaticism,” or “bigoted tactics.” These are mere words. As to “the aspiration of humanity,” it may be noticed that there is a secret society that considers its aspirations as the aspirations of “humanity,” and, when it speaks of “humanity,” it usually means nothing more and nothing better than its “free and accepted” members. This “humanity” has doubtless some curious aspirations; but mankind does not aspire to dethrone God or to pervert the notion of Divinity.
Prof. Youmans accounts for “the aspiration of humanity” in the following manner:
“It cannot be rationally questioned that the world has come to another important stage in this line of its progression. The knowledge of the universe, its action, its harmony, its unity, its boundlessness and grandeur, is comparatively a recent thing; and is it to be for a moment supposed that so vast a revolution as this is to be without effect upon our conception of its divine control?”
This manner of arguing is hardly creditable to a professor of science; for, even admitting for the sake of argument that the knowledge of the universe is comparatively “a recent thing,” it would not follow that such a knowledge must alter the Christian conception of the divine nature. Let the professor make the universe as great, as boundless, and as harmonious as possible; what then? Will such a universe proclaim a new God? By no means. It will still proclaim the same God, though in a louder voice. For the harmony, beauty, and grandeur of the universe reveal to us the infinite greatness, beauty, and wisdom of its Creator; and the greater our knowledge of such a universe, the more forcible the demonstration of the infinite perfection of its Creator. Now, this Creator is our old God, the God of the Bible, the God to whom Mr. Youmans owes his existence, and to whom he must one day give an account of how he used or abused his intellectual powers. This is, however, the God whom the professor would fain banish from the universe. Is there anything more unphilosophic or more unscientific?
But the knowledge of the universe, from which we rise to the conception of God, is not “a recent thing.” Infidels are apt to imagine that the world owes to them the knowledge of natural science. We must remind them that science has been built up by men who believed in God. “Advanced” science is of course “a recent thing,” but it does not “constitute an important stage” in the line of real progress; for it consists of nothing but reckless assumptions, deceitful phraseology, and illogical conclusions. Three thousand years ago King David averred that “the heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.” Has advanced science made any recent discovery in the heavens or on earth which gives the lie to this highly philosophical statement? Quite the contrary. It is, therefore, supremely ridiculous to talk of a “vast revolution” whose effect must be “to purify the ideal of Divinity.” This vast revolution is a dream of the professor.
But he says:
“Is it rational to expect that the man of developed intellect whose life is spent in the all-absorbing study of that mighty and ever-expanding system of truth that is embodied in the method of Nature will form the same idea of God as the ignorant blockhead who knows and cares nothing for these things, who is incapable of reflection or insight, and who passively accepts the narrow notions upon this subject that other people put into his head? As regards the divine government of the world, two such contrasted minds can hardly have anything in common.”
This is a fair sample of the logical processes of certain thinkers “of developed intellect.” Our professor assumes, first, that Catholic theologians are “ignorant blockheads,” that they “know and care nothing” for natural truths, that they are “incapable of reflection or insight,” and that they “passively accept” what others may put into their heads. Would it not be more reasonable to assume that a “blockhead” is a man who asserts what cannot be proved, as a certain professor is wont to do? And would it be unfair to assume that the man who “knows and cares nothing” for truth is one who beguiles his readers into error, and, when convicted, makes no amends? We would not say that the professor is “incapable of reflection or insight,” for we think that no human being can be so degraded as to deserve this stigma; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Youmans “passively accepts” many absurd notions, for which he cannot account, except by saying that they “have been put into his head” by such “developed intellects” as Huxley’s, Darwin’s, Spencer’s, and other notorious falsifiers of truth.
Professor Youmans assumes also that our intellects cannot be “developed” enough to form a true conception of God, unless we apply to “the all-absorbing study of the method of Nature,” by which he means the conservation of energy, the indestructibility of matter, the evolution of species, and other cognate theories. This assumption has no foundation. To form a true conception of God it suffices to know that the universe is subject to continual changes, and therefore contingent, and consequently created. This leads us directly to the conception of a Creator, or of a First Cause which is self-existent, independent, and eternal. Modern science and “developed intellects” have nothing to say against this. It is therefore a gross absurdity to assume that the study of the method of nature interferes with the old conception of God.
A third assumption of the professor is that our notion of divine nature is “narrow.” It is astonishing that Mr. Youmans could have allowed himself to make so manifestly foolish a statement. Is there anything “narrow” in immensity? in omnipotence? in eternity? in infinite wisdom? or in any other attribute of the true God? And if our notion of God, which involves all such attributes, is still “narrow,” what shall we say of the professor’s notion which involves nothing but the “unthinkable”—that is, nothing at all?
The professor proceeds to say that if a man is ignorant and stupid his contemplation of divine things will reflect his own limitation. This is a great truth; but he should have been loath to proclaim it in a place where we find so many proofs of his own “limitation.” On the other hand, it is not from the ignorant and the stupid that our philosophers and theologians have derived their notion of God; and to confound the latter with the former is, on the part of a “developed intellect,” a miserable show of logic. The ignorant and the stupid, continues Mr. Youmans, “will cling to a grovelling anthropomorphism,” and conceive of the Deity “as a man like himself, only greater and more powerful, and as chiefly interested in the things that he is interested in.” To which we answer that the stupid and the ignorant of divine things are those who do not know God, and who maintain against the universal verdict of reason that God is “unknowable.” We defy Mr. Youmans to point out a stupidity and an ignorance of divine things which equals that of him who pretends to think of the “unthinkable.” This is even worse than “to cling to a grovelling anthropomorphism.” Of course our anthropomorphism is a poetic invention of the “developed intellect,” and therefore we may dismiss it without further comment.
“The profound student of science,” he adds, “will rise to a more spiritualized and abstract ideal of the divine nature, or will be so oppressed with a consciousness of the Infinity as to reverently refrain from all attempts to grasp, and formulate, and limit the nature of that which is past finding out, which is unspeakable and unthinkable.”
To understand the real meaning of this sentence we must remember that he who wrote it does not accept the God of theologians. Scientific men, as he has told us, claim that their studies lead them “to higher and more worthy conceptions” of the divine power than the conceptions offered by theology. It is obvious, therefore, that the “spiritualized and abstract ideal of the divine nature” to which the profound student of science is expected to rise is not the ideal recognized by theology. This is very strange; for if theology does not furnish the true ideal of divine nature, much less can such an ideal be furnished by the science of matter. Every science is best acquainted with its own specific object; and since God is the object of theology, the ideal of the divine nature is to be found in theology, not in natural science. Hence “the profound student of science” may indeed determine the laws of physical and chemical phenomena, speak of masses and densities, of solids and fluids, and of other experimental subjects without much danger of error, but he has no qualification for inventing a new ideal of divine nature. The ideal of a thing exhibits the essence of the thing; and the study of essences does not belong to the scientist, whose field is confined within the phenomena and their laws. The best scientists confess that they do not even know the essence of matter, though matter is the proper and most familiar object of their study. Yet these are the men who, according to Mr. Youmans, should know best the essence of God.
But we should like further to know how the “profound student” of advanced science will be able to rise to a “spiritualized” ideal of Divinity. The general drift of modern infidel science is towards materialism. It teaches that thought is secreted by the brain as water is by the kidneys, or, at least, that thought consists of molecular movements, and that the admission of a spiritual substance in the organism of man is quite unwarranted. How, then, can a science which rejects spiritual substances lead its “profound student” to a spiritualized ideal of Divinity? It is manifest, we think, that all this talk is mere jugglery, and the professor himself seems to have felt that it was; for he admits that the profound student of science may be “so oppressed with a consciousness of the Infinite as to refrain from all attempts to grasp and formulate and limit the nature of what is past finding out.” This last expression shows that Mr. Youmans has no ground for expecting that his profound student will rise to the ideal of the divine nature, as what is “past finding out” will never be found, and is not only “unspeakable,” as he declares, but also “unthinkable.” The profound student of science is therefore doomed, so far as Mr. Youmans may be relied on, to remain without any ideal of God. What is this but genuine atheism?
Mr. Youmans will reply that his profound student will not be an atheist, because he will feel “so oppressed with the consciousness of the Infinite.” But we should like to know how the profound student can have consciousness of what he cannot think of. And, in like manner, if the Infinite is unthinkable, how can the profound student know that it is infinite? These contradictions go far to prove that “ignorance” and “stupidity,” far from being the characteristics of Christianity, find a more congenial abode in the “developed intellects of the profound students of advanced science.”
As all errors are misrepresentations of truth, we cannot dismiss this point without saying a word about the truth here misrepresented. God is incomprehensible; such is the truth. God is unthinkable; this is the error. To argue that what is incomprehensible is also unthinkable, is a manifest fallacy. There are a very great number even of finite things which we know but cannot comprehend. For instance, we know gravitation, electricity, and magnetism, but our knowledge of them is quite inadequate. We know ancient history, though numberless facts have remained inaccessible to our research. We know the operations of our own faculties, but we are far from comprehending them. Comprehension is the perfect and adequate knowledge of the object comprehended. If the cognoscibility of the object is not exhausted, there is knowledge, but not comprehension; and as our finite intellect has no power of exhausting the cognoscibility of things, human knowledge is not comprehension, though no one will deny that it is true and real knowledge. In like manner, though we do not comprehend the infinite, yet we conceive it, and we know how to distinguish it from the finite. We know what we say when we affirm that the branches of the hyperbola extend to infinity, that the decimal division of ten by three leads to an infinite series of figures, that every line is infinitely divisible, that every genus extends infinitely more than any of its subordinate species, and the species infinitely more than the individual, etc. Thus the notion of the infinite is a familiar one among men; and when Mr. Youmans contends that the infinite is unthinkable, he commits a blunder, and every one of his readers has the right to tell him that such a blunder in inductive science is inexcusable.
Perhaps it may not be superfluous to point out, before we conclude, another fallacy of the “developed intellect” of the professor. He assumes that to form a conception of God is to limit the divine nature; for he declares that the profound student of science oppressed with the consciousness of Infinity ought reverently to refrain “from all attempts to grasp, and formulate, and limit the nature of that which is past finding out.” We would inform Mr. Youmans that the notion of a thing does not limit the thing, but simply expresses that the thing is what it is, whether it be limited or unlimited. In all essential definitions some notion is included, which expresses either perfection or imperfection. When we say that a being is irrational, we point out an imperfection, or a defect of further perfection; whereas when we say that a being is rational, we express a perfection of the being. Now, since all imperfection is a real limit, it follows that all denial of imperfection is a denial of some limit, and therefore the affirmation of every possible perfection is a total exclusion of limit. Thus omnipotence excludes all limit of power, eternity all limit of duration, omniscience all limit of knowledge, immensity all limit of space. We need not add that all the other attributes of God exclude limitation, as they are all infinite. It is evident, therefore, that we can “formulate” our notion of God without “limiting” the divine nature; and that those “profound students” of nature whose “developed intellect” is “oppressed with the consciousness of Infinity” strive in vain to palliate their atheism by “reverently (?) refraining from all attempts to grasp and formulate” the nature of the Supreme Cause.
We may be told that Prof. Youmans, though he rejects the “God of theology,” admits something equivalent—viz., Infinity, the consciousness of which he feels so oppressive. He also admits that “religious feelings may be awakened” in a mind so oppressed by the thought of Infinity, and insists that “religious teachers ought in these days to have liberality enough to recognize this serious fact, remembering that human nature is religiously progressive as well as progressive in its other capacities.” Would not this show that we cannot without injustice hold him up as a professor of atheism? We reply that the accusation of atheism preferred against the tendency of advanced science has been met by the professor in such a manner as to give it only more weight, according to the old proverb which says that
Causa patrocinio non bona pejor erit.
He does not believe in the God of theology. In what does he believe? In the “unthinkable”! This is sheer mockery. But the unthinkable is said to be infinite. This is sheer nonsense, as we have shown. Again, the unthinkable is said to awaken religious feelings. This is written for unthinkable persons. The professor, as we have already noticed, admires the grandeur of nature, and holds it to be “boundless,” and therefore infinite. This may lead one to suspect that the material universe—the sun, the planets, the stars, heat, light, electricity, gravity, and their laws—constitute the “Infinity” with the consciousness of which the professor is oppressed. If this could be surmised, we might regard him as a pantheist. This, of course, would not better his position, as pantheism is, after all, only another form of atheism. But if nature (or rather Nature, as he writes it) is his Deity, how can he affirm that such a nature is “unspeakable” and “unthinkable”? If nature is “unthinkable,” the science of nature is a dream; and if it is “unspeakable,” all the talk of the Popular Science Monthly is a fraud.
If Prof. Youmans wishes us to believe that “advanced” science does not tend to foster atheism, and that its foremost champions are not atheists, let him come forward like a man, and show that, after rejecting the God of theology and of philosophy, another God has been found, to whom “developed intellects” offer religious worship, and in whom their religious feelings are rationally satisfied. Let him give us, above all, his “scientific” reasons for abandoning the God of the Bible, in whom we “ignorant blockheads” have not ceased to believe; and let him state his “philosophic” reasons also, if he has any, that we may judge of the case according to its full merit. We need not be instructed about the “religious progressiveness” of mankind, or any other convenient invention of unbelievers; we want only to know the new God of “advanced” science, his nature and his claims. When Prof. Youmans shall have honestly complied with this suggestion, we shall see what answer can best meet his appeal to the “liberality” of religious teachers.