APPENDIX.
Page 2. "Amid countless forms of schism."
Bishop Kemper gives the following information on this subject, in a recent appeal to the European Churches.
"Under a canon of the Protestant Episcopal Church, passed in the year 1835, I was consecrated a missionary Bishop for Indiana and Missouri, to which were afterwards added Wisconsin, Iowa, and the country beyond the Mississippi, extending southward to latitude 36° 30´, northward to the British possessions, and westward to the Pacific Ocean. This region contains a million of square miles, a million and a quarter of white and negro inhabitants, and numerous Indian tribes amounting in population to not less than three hundred thousand souls. I proceeded forthwith to my field of labour, and found many members of our Catholic and Apostolic Church straying from her fold through the want of pastors. Romanism, heresy, schism, infidelity, paganism, and a new religion—known as Mormonism, extensively pervading the land; and not more than six or seven clergymen of our church scattered at wide intervals over this prodigious surface. I also found that about thirty thousand emigrants from Europe annually settled within my jurisdiction, a large proportion of whom were members of the Reformed Churches of Great Britain, Germany, Prussia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, in addition to a vast influx of settlers from the eastern parts of the United States, and British America."
Speaking of the Roman Catholics, the Bishop says,
"Within the bounds of my mission, where I have (1841) but twenty-three fellow-labourers, they have three bishops, and one hundred and six priests. They annually receive large funds from Vienna, Lyons, &c., by which they are enabled to erect splendid cathedrals, extensive colleges, large convents, and substantial stone churches. In St. Louis alone they have a large cathedral, which cost, it is said, eighty thousand dollars, to which, beside the bishop, there are attached four clergymen, who preach and catechise every Sunday in English, French, and German. They have also four chapels, and a splendid church, as yet unfinished, one hundred and twenty feet in length, and eighty in width. The present position of their diocese of St. Louis is as follows:—fifty-six churches, nine churches building, sixty other stations, seventy-three clergymen, two ecclesiastical seminaries, two colleges for young men, one academy for boys, ten female convents, ten academies for young ladies, four schools, and eight charitable institutions."
Page 3. "A New Book."
The Book of Mormon contains five hundred and eighty-eight duodecimo pages, consisting of fifteen different books, purporting to be written at different times, and by different authors, whose names they respectively bear. The period of time covered by these spurious records is about a thousand years, commencing with the time of Zedekiah, and terminating with the year of our Lord 420. It professes to trace the history of the American aborigines, from the time of their leaving Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah, under one Lehi, down to their final disaster near the hill Camorah, in the state of New York, in which contest, according to "the prophet Moroni," about 230,000 were slain in a single battle, and he alone escaped to tell the tale. These records, with which various prophecies and sermons are intermingled, are declared by Smith to have been written on golden plates, in "the reformed Egyptian character," and discovered to him by an angel in the year 1823. An English edition of the Book of Mormon, revised and corrected, has been published at Manchester, for the benefit of British "Saints."
Page 4. "a large portion of whom are natives of Christian and enlightened England."