These had not yet even heard of the opening of a new dispensation of revelations. As they came by the way they had seen no angels with new commissions for the Messiah age. No Moses nor Elijah had been with them on a mount of transfiguration. Nor had they entered into the chamber with the angel of the covenant, bringing a renewal of the covenant to Israel. This was in the mission of the "one greater" than they who came after.
They brought the lamp without the light—nothing more. Better the light without the evangelical lamp—better a conscientious intellect than the forms of sectarian godliness without the power.
Without the power to unlock the heavens, and the Elijah faith to call the angels down, there could be no new dispensation—no millennial civilization for the world, to crown the civilization of the ages.
Light came to Sidney Rigdon from the Mormon Elijah, and he comprehended the light; but Alexander Campbell rejected the prophet when his message came; he would have none of his angels. He had been preaching the literal fulfillment of prophesy, but when the covenant was revealed he was not ready. The lamp, not the light, was his admiration. Himself was the lamp; Joseph had the light from the spirit world, and the darkness comprehended it not.
Alexander Campbell was a learned and an able man—the very form of wisdom, but without the spirit.
Joseph Smith was an unlettered youth. He came not in the polished form of wisdom—either divine or human—but in the demonstration of the Holy Ghost, and with signs following the believer.
Mr. Campbell would receive no new revelation from such an one—no everlasting covenant from the new Jerusalem which was waiting to come down, to establish on earth a great spiritual empire, that the King might appear to Zion in his glory, with all his angels and the ancients of days.
The tattered and blood-stained commissions of old Rome were sufficient for the polished divine,—Rome which had made all nations drunk with her spiritual fornications,—Rome which put to death the Son of God when his Israel in blindness rejected him.
Between Rome and Jerusalem there was now the great controversy of the God of Israel. Not the old Jerusalem which had traveled from the east to the west, led by the angel of the covenant, up out of the land of Egypt! The new Jerusalem to the earth then, as she is to-day! Ever will she be the new Jerusalem—ever will "old things" be passing away when "the Lord cometh!"
And the angel of the west appeared by night to the youth, as he watched in the chamber of his father's house, in a little village in the State of New York. On that charmed night when the invisibles hovered about the earth the angel that stood before him read to the messenger of Messiah the mystic text of his mission: