The scene was attractive, even beautiful, for these people wandered like the Patriarchs of old, with flocks and herds, pitching their tents in the wilderness. The last rays of the sun struck with slanting light the canvass homes, tinging them with dusky gold. The cheerful hum of busy labor rose healthfully on the breeze. The song of the maidens while milking the cows—the prattle of little children—the gay laughter of young people and the tones of manly voices swelled together—an anthem of toil. Bright fires were already sending their smoke on high, wreathing in fanciful coils and drifting through the air, tinged with a glorious brightness like thunder-clouds when the sun strikes them. Busy mothers bent over the coals, preparing the evening meal, while their husbands wheeled the heavy wagons into a circle, and formed a temporary fort, calculated to protect them from attack from without, and stampede within. The air was soft, and the clouds mottled, dolphin-like, changing as the sun went down into deeper hues of crimson, gold and purple. The trees were aflame—the swiftly-running stream, molten silver—the burning death-fires of the day had flooded the earth with evanescent brightness.
“Showered the maples with celestial red;
The oaks were sunsets—though the day was dead;
The green was gold—the willows drooped in wine;
The ash was fire—the humblest shrub divine;
The aspen quivered in a silver stream.”
Amid all this loveliness, selfish passions were at work, striving for their own ends, with a deluded people toiling on to erect a molten calf in the wilderness to be worshiped in the place of the true God!
But the smoke of the evening fires became thin, and faded away; the glowing coals died out amid the whitened ashes. The children, innocent as yet, thank Heaven, had passed into the sweet dreams that infancy alone can know, and the elders gathered to hear the mockery of an evening service, to profane that almost holy solitude with the idolatry of a purely sensual religion.
The master spirit rose, the beguiling serpent who had lured these ignorant men and women from their quiet homes in the old world, and desecrated the quiet of that lovely evening with his pointless ravings—inflammatory pictures of the “promised land” that should soon dawn upon their longing eyes; all the blasphemous teachings of a wily brain.
A man, subtle in his nature and in his speech—with a superfluity of words, and gifted with the low cunning of an adroit impostor, he yet was looked up to as one on whom the sacred mantle of “the prophet” had fallen. Practice, and his own nature had enabled him to assimilate himself with the peculiar ideas of those he wished to influence—to lower himself to any level, and cunningly use it for his own selfish ends and personal aggrandizement.