CHAPTER XLI.
AFTER WE LEFT THE CHURCH—INTERESTING FACTS AND FIGURES—THE MORMONISM AND MORMONS OF TO-DAY.
“The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest: with Providence their guide,
They hand in hand, with trembling steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
Paradise Lost.
When we left the Mormon Church, we were not quite as badly off as were our first parents when they began life, although in some respects we certainly resembled them. The world was all before us, and it was necessary that we also should choose a place of rest; but it was by no means an Eden from which we were dismissed—or, rather, had dismissed ourselves—and in the matter of experience in the thorny ways of that world in which we were about to begin afresh the battle of existence, we certainly had the advantage over the exiles from Paradise.
The crisis of our own lives had now arrived. The act of sending in our resignation as members of the Church cut us off from all the associations of the past and all the friendships and pleasant intimacies of so many years. A great gulf divided our by-gone life from the unknown future which lay before us.
My husband was now made painfully aware that it was altogether useless for him to attempt to carry on his paper; for his subscribers, as I before stated, had been “counselled” to discontinue taking it in. The Daily Telegraph had had a very large circulation, but as there was very little money in the Territory, the yearly subscriptions were mostly paid at harvest time, and many of them in grain. At the time, therefore, when the paper was finally given up, the Mormon people, as the book-keeper in Ogden informed me, owed about twenty thousand dollars; but when it was discovered that we were “Apostates,” the majority of them considered that they were released from all obligations on that score, and my husband being an easy, generous-minded man, most of them evaded payment. The idea that, because we had left the Church, no Saint was bound to pay us any debts which they might happen at the time to owe, was the natural result of the teachings of the Tabernacle. Apostates are delivered over to “the buffetings of Satan,” and the Saints consider it is their duty to begin in this world their master’s work of castigation. Any ill turn that can be done to an Apostate is consequently a good action in the opinion of the Mormons, and they neglect no opportunity of showing that these are the sentiments which influence them.