CHAPTER X.
THE LATTER-DAY ILIAD—REPRODUCTION OF THE GREAT HEBRAIC DRAMA—THE MEANING OF THE MORMON MOVEMENT IN THE AGE.
It was "a gathering dispensation." A strange religion indeed, that meant something more than faith and prayers and creeds.
An empire-founding religion, as we have said,—this religion of a latter-day Israel. A religion, in fact, that meant all that the name of "Latter-day Israel" implies.
The women who did their full half in founding Mormondom, comprehended, as much as did their prototypes who came up out of Egypt, the significance of the name of Israel.
Out of Egypt the seed of promise, to become a peculiar people, a holy nation, with a distinctive God and a distinctive destiny. Out of modern Babylon, to repeat the same Hebraic drama in the latter age.
A Mormon iliad in every view; and the sisters understanding it fully. Indeed perhaps they have best understood it. Their very experience quickened their comprehension.
The cross and the crown of thorns quicken the conception of a crucifixion. The Mormon women have borne the cross and worn the crown of thorns for a full lifetime; not in their religion, but in their experience. Their strange destiny and the divine warfare incarnated in their lives, gave them an experience matchless in its character and unparalleled in its sacrifices.
The sisters understood their religion, and they counted the cost of their divine ambitions.
What that cost has been to these more than Spartan women, we shall find in tragic stories of their lives, fast unfolding in the coming narrative of their gatherings and exterminations.