The Mormon puzzle, and how to solve it

by R. W. Beers

Rev. R. G. McNiece, D.D., of Salt Lake City, in a personal letter to the writer, said: “The number of converts directly from the Mormon ranks I cannot give you; but it is very small, especially among adults. Among the youth the number is greater, and here is where the hope lies. The children and youth come under Christian influence first in the day-schools maintained by the Christian denominations. In the Sabbath-school this influence is deepened, and thereby the way into the Church is opened. I should say that three hundred would be a large estimate of the total number of Christian converts from the Mormon ranks; but the work thus far has been preparatory.”

Now, while it is very true that the work has been in great measure preparatory, nevertheless no such long preparation as twenty years should be necessary in dealing with a people to a great extent speaking our own language. If it were China, or Japan, or India just opened, and it required time for the missionaries to get acquainted with the habits and language of the people, it would be a very different thing. It seems from the small crop of Christian converts thus far obtained that the system of missionary work adopted is somewhere defective.

And does not the fact of the large Christian element in the Mormon religious system show that it must not be treated as a pagan religion? and that different methods must be adopted to overcome its evils? All missionary labor in Utah up to the present time has been in open and direct antagonism to the whole Mormon system, and its object has been openly and professedly to exterminate it from the face of the earth. Now, we raise the question, Can any Christian sect be easily annihilated? Should it be our desire to exterminate it? Should not the object of all our efforts be to reform it—to purge the gold of its dross? And so, does it not seem far more likely that Mormonism is not to be destroyed at all, but rather reformed by various influences brought to bear upon it?

The adult Mormons will not go to hear the Christian missionaries, for they believe that all that is good in Christianity they have already in their own system. The only difference is that they have more; they have an enlarged and expanded Christianity. Consequently they think their system is vastly superior to the Christian’s. Mormon boys write “Come to Jesus” on the clean, white window-sills of Christian chapels, while their parents at home tell them that they know a hundredfold more truth than the Christians, whose whole creed, they say, begins and ends with this despised phrase.

The evangelists Moody and Sankey held a series of meetings in Salt Lake City only a few years ago, and the Deseret Evening News, the official Mormon organ, in an editorial on Moody’s preaching in that city, said: “There is not a man among the whole fraternity of evangelists who can present anything of any value to the Latter-Day Saints which they have not already received; and there is no preacher of them all who, if he were desirous of learning the truth as it is in Jesus, but could learn very many valuable lessons in the things of God from members of our Young People’s Improvement Associations, and even from our Sunday-school children. ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’ is a saying the full meaning of which is appreciated by the Latter-Day Saints. To exhort them to ‘faith in Christ’ is the work of supererogation.”

And shortly after, the same paper, in an editorial on a sermon preached by Bishop Tuttle, of the Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia, said: “So far as the institutions of modern Christendom are concerned, we candidly confess our lack of confidence in their power to do anything for us.... We have got so far beyond them through the revelations of the Almighty vouchsafed in these latter days, that we look back upon their teachings as a man reverts to the alphabet of his school-days, and we remember their powerless forms and spiritless ceremonies as mere playthings compared with the higher things of the kingdom to which the system they call Mormonism has introduced us.”

Thus we see that Christianity is discounted by the Mormons from the very start; and can we, then, hope to accomplish its overthrow by the ordinary means? From its peculiar relations to Christianity, must we not in reason and fairness regard the Mormon Church, as we must the Roman Catholic Church and even Mohammedanism, as being not utterly false, so much as a mingling of error with truth? It is, therefore, a perversion of Christianity. There is genuine Gospel enough in the Mormon creed to save it from the grave. We are, therefore, to look for a repudiation of the false rather than the destruction of both false and true together.

And what would be better calculated to effect this end than the colonization and educational scheme, which we have already advocated as the surest and easiest means to overcome the political and social evils of the system? The Roman Catholic system is in many respects similar to the Mormon system; and see what intelligence and a surrounding atmosphere of pure Christian truth has done for Roman Catholicism in our land! What a vast difference there is between the system here and the same system in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, or Italy! There is a difference almost as wide as the hemispheres. Take a Roman Catholic from our land to Brazil or Spain, and he will scarcely recognize his religion in that religion called there by the same name. And what has brought about this difference? The American Roman Catholic has been surrounded by intelligence and a free, pure, Christian society. These two things have so operated upon American Roman Catholicism as to greatly reform it and almost radically change it, while they did not antagonize it in a spirit of rancor. How wonderful the revolution! And it has not ceased yet, but is ever going on. The same things would thus be done, we believe, for Mormonism.

1. A larger intelligence would surely modify or wholly set aside the claims of the priesthood to the possession of divine authority and power, and would relegate to the realm of oblivion such outlandish doctrines as baptisms for the dead. As Froude says, “Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.”

And, from the same cause, the demand would gradually spring up for pulpit teaching, couched in a far better spirit, and of much higher intellectual character. The presence of a few intelligent Gentiles has already put to shame and almost banished from religious assemblies those harangues which in days not very remote were accustomed to combine in about equal measure the profane, the obscene, and the brutal.