with one wife there breed faster than the Turks. In the city of the Mormons, under polygamy, births are very numerous. The actual wives of Young are twelve! the twelve apostles own from three to four each. Young has forty-eight children, and all have their quivers full. The women, according to Mr. Dixon, dislike polygamy nevertheless.
In this country and among the Mormons the doctrine of polygamy is not that on which much stress is laid. Here the Mormon preaches temperance, sobriety, honesty, industry, the need of saving up money, and the advantages of emigration to Utah. In the Millennial Star, the organ of the community, one brother writes from Wales:—
“The Word of Wisdom is quite a text with us of late, and is producing very good effects. We see its fruits manifested among the Saints, several of the brethren leaving off tobacco and other things that are injurious to the constitution. The tea is a matter that bothers the sisters considerably, but in the face of this difficulty many are leaving it off, and pronouncing it of no beneficial effect in any way whatever. I think that much will be done by abstaining from those things towards clothing those children that are very thinly clad.”
It is in this way that Mormonism has spread. It
has come to the poorest of the poor, and used their own language. Its phraseology is that dear to the natural heart. We are all too prone to throw our responsibility on others: It is the Lord who saves me. It is the devil who makes me bad; and it is a great help to the ignorant and uneducated, not merely to have spiritual states shadowed forth in earthly language, but to feel that, after all, heaven is here in the shape of comfortable dwellings, wives and children, raiment to wear, and a bellyfull. “This is great encouragement to the saints in their pilgrimages here in old Babylon, and stimulates them to more diligence in building up the kingdom of God, and delivering themselves from the yoke of tyranny and oppression, to enjoy the liberty of the people of God in the valleys of the mountains.” Thus writes one of the elders with reference to certain manifestations of the gift of tongues; but I quote the passage here as applicable in an eminent degree, and as illustrating the religious phraseology, affected no doubt for certain ends by the Mormons. The kingdom of God, for instance, of the theologians may be difficult of apprehension to the illiterate and the rude; but if it means to me a good house and good living in Utah, it at once assumes an attractive form. If to live in
England is to live in Babylon, of course it is my duty to emigrate; and if Brigham Young is the Lord’s deputy on earth, then to disobey his call is an act of sin. So degraded are many of our brethren and sisters in this Christian land, where we have one parson at the least in every parish, that they are utterly unable to contemplate anything apart from its accidental forms. Their God is a God of parts and passions; their religion is one of sensation; their heaven a loss of physical pains and the presence of physical delights; they become at once an easy prey to the Mormonite preacher when for ten pounds he offers them the realization of their hopes, not at the end of life, but now, and tells them that in the Land of the Saints they shall hunger no more, nor thirst any more.
CHAPTER XVIII.
advanced religionists.
The Church of Progress.
At length, if I am to believe what I hear and see, the religious problem of the age has been solved, and I am presented with a form of worship which is in accordance with the discoveries of science and the dignity of man. In St. George’s Hall, Langham Place, this new association meets; its president is Baxter Langley, Esq. It dispenses with prayer, and with the reading of the Bible, but instead there is a performance of sacred music by a choir of a hundred voices, with solos sung by professional ladies and gentlemen specially engaged, and then the President himself, smiling and buoyant as if it were an election meeting, as chairman, performs many solos on his own account. In short, as a paper lying before me says, “Everything will be done to make the service delightful, whilst instruction will be secured by a popular lecture each
evening from some gentleman eminent in science, literature, or art.”