[202]

Religious Denominations in the United States, according to the Census of 1861.
(From the “American Almanac” of 1861.)

Denominations.No. of
Churches.		Aggregate
Accommo-
dation.		Average
Accommo-
dation.		Total
Value
of
Church
Property.		Average
Value
of
Property.
Baptist8,7913,130,878356$10,931,382$1,244
Christian812296,050365845,8101,041
Congregational1,674795,1774757,973,9624,763
Dutch Reformed324181,9865614,096,73012,644
Episcopal1,422625,21344011,261,9707,919
Free361108,605300251,255698
Friends714282,8233961,709,8672,395
German Reformed327156,932479965,8802,953
Jewish3116,575534371,60011,987
Lutheran1,203531,1004412,867,8862,383
Mennonite11029,90027294,245856
Methodist12,4874,209,33333714,636,6711,174
Moravian331112,185338443,3471,339
Presbyterian4,5842,040,31644514,369,8893,135
Roman Catholic1,112620,9505588,973,8388,069
Swedenborgian155,070338108,1007,206
Tunker5235,07567446,025885
Union619213,552345690,0651,114
Unitarian243137,3675653,268,12213,449
Universalist494205,4624151,766,0153,576
Minor sects325115,347354741,9802,283
Total36,01113,849,896384$86,416,639$2,400

3. Mormonism boasts of few Roman Catholic or Greek converts; the French and Italians are rare, and there is a remarkable deficiency of Germans and Irish—those wretched races without nationality or loyalty—which have overrun the Eastern American States. It is, then, to Protestantism that we must look for the origin of the New Faith.

4. In 1800-1804, and in 1820, a mighty Wesleyan “revival,” which in Methodism represents the missions and retreats of Catholicism, had disturbed and excited the public mind in America, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee. The founder of Mormonism, Mr. Joseph Smith, his present successor, and his principal disciples and followers, were Campbellites, Millerites, Ranters, or other Methodists. Wesleyan sectarianism, like the old Arab paganism in El Islam, still shows its traces in the worship and various observances of a doxology which by literalism and exaggeration has wholly separated itself from the older creeds of the world. Thus we find Mormonism to be in its origin English, Protestant, anti-Catholic, Methodistic.

HISTORY OF MORMONISM.It may be advisable briefly to trace the steps by which we arrive at this undesirable end. The birth of Romanism, according to the Reformed writers, dates from certain edicts issued by Theodosius II. and by Valentinian III., and constituting the Bishop of Rome “Rector of the whole Church.” The newly-born hierarchy found tender nurses in Justinian, Pepin, and Charlemagne, and in the beginning of the eleventh century St. Gregory VII. (Hildebrand the Great) supplied the prime want of the age by establishing a visible theocracy, with a vicar of Jesus Christ at its head. To the existence of a mediatorial priestly caste, the officials of a spiritual despotism, claiming power of censure and excommunication, and the gift of the crown terrestrial as well as celestial, anti-papistical writers trace the various vices and corruptions inherent in a semi-barbarous age, the “melancholy duality” of faith and works of religion and morality which seems to belong to the Southern mind, and the Oriental semi-Pelagianism which taught that man might be self-sanctified or vicariously saved, with its logical deductions, penance, benefices, indulgences. An excessive superstition endured for a season. Then set in the inevitable reaction: the extreme religiousness, that characteristic of the earnest quasi-pagan age of the Christian Church, in the fullness of time fell into the opposite excess, Rationalism and its natural consequences, infidelity and irreligion.

Reformers were not wanting before the Reformation. As early as 1170, Pierre Vaud, or Valdo, of Lyons, sold off his merchandise, and appealing from popery to Scripture and to primitive Christianity, as, in a later day did Jeremy Bentham from St. Paul to his Master, attacked the Roman hierarchy. John Wicliffe (1310-1385) is claimed by his countrymen to have originated the “liberal ideas” by which British Protestantism was matured; it is owned even by foreigners that he influenced opinion from Oxford to far Bohemia. He died peaceably, but the Wicliffites, who presently were called Lollards—“tares” sown by the fiend—though supported by the Commons against Henry IV. and his party, the dignified clergy, suffered, until the repeal of the Act “de hæreticis comburendis,” the fiercest persecution. During the reign of Henry V. they gained strength, as the pronunciamento of 20,000 men in St. Giles’s Fields under Sir John Oldcastle proves: the cruel death of their leader only served to strengthen them, supported as they were by the lower branch of the Legislature in their opposition to the crown. On the Continent of Europe the great follower of Wicliffe was John Huss, who preached in Bohemia about a century before the days of Luther, and who, condemned by the Councils of Constance and Basle, perished at the stake in 1432. Jerome Savonarola, tortured and burnt in 1498, and other minor names, urged forward the fatal movement until the Northern element once more prevailed, in things spiritual as in things temporal, over the Southern; the rude and violent German again attacked the soft, sensuous Italian, and Martin Luther hatched the egg which the schools of Rabelais and Erasmus had laid. It was the work of rough-handed men; the reformer Zuingle emerged from an Alpine shepherd’s hut; Melancthon, the theologian, from an armorer’s shop, as Augustine, the monk, from the cottage of a poor miner. Such, in the 16th century, on the Continent of Europe, were the prototypes and predecessors of Messrs. Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young, who arose nearly three centuries afterward in the New World.

In England, when the unprincipled tyranny of Henry VIII. had established, by robbing and confiscating, hanging and quartering, that “reformed new-cast religion,” of which Sir Thomas Brown “disliked nothing but the name,” the bigotry of the ultra-reformatory school lost no time in proceeding to extremes. William Chillingworth, born A.D. 1602, and alternately Protestant, Catholic, Socinian, and Protestant, put forth in his “Religion of Protestants a safe Way of Salvation,” that Chillingworthi Novissima, “the Bible and nothing but the Bible.” This dogma swept away ruthlessly all the cherished traditions of a past age—the ancient observed customs of the Church—all, in fact, that can beautify and render venerable a faith, and substituted in their stead a bald Bibliolatry which at once justifies credulity and forbids it; which tantalizes man with the signs and wonders of antiquity, and yet which, with an unwise contradictoriness, forbids him to revise or restore them. And as each man became, by Bible-reading, his own interpreter, with fullest right of private judgment, and without any infallible guide—the inherent weakness of reformation—to direct him, the broad and beaten highway of belief was at once cut up into a parcel of little footpaths which presently attained the extreme of divergence.

One of the earliest products of such “religious freedom” in England was Methodism,METHODISM. so called from the Methodistic physicians at Rome. The founder and arch-priest of the schism, the Rev. John Wesley, son of the Rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire, and born in 1703, followed Luther, Calvin, and other creedmongers in acting upon his own speculation and peculiar opinions. One of his earliest disciples—only eleven years younger than his master—was the equally celebrated George Whitfield, of Gloucester. Suffice it to remark, without dwelling upon their history, that both these religionists, and mostly the latter, who died in 1770 at Newberry, New England, converted and preached to thousands in America, there establishing field-services and camp-meetings, revivals and conferences, which, like those of the French Convulsionists in the last century, galvanized Christianity with a wild and feverish life. Falling among uneducated men, the doctrine, both in England and the colonies, was received with a bewilderment of enthusiasm, and it soon produced the usual fruits of such phrensy—prophecies that fixed the end of the world for the 28th of February, 1763, miraculous discernment of angels and devils, mighty comings of the power of God and outpourings of the Spirit, rhapsodies and prophecies, dreams and visions, accompanied by rollings, jerks, and barks, roarings and convulsions, syncope, catalepsy, and the other hysterical affections and obscure disorders of the brain, forming the characteristic symptoms of religious mania.

Thus, out of the semi-barbarous superstitions of the Middle Ages, succeeded by the revival of learning, which in the 15th century followed the dispersion of the wise men of the East from captured Byzantium, proceeded “Protestant Rationalism,” a system which, admitting the right of private judgment, protested against the religion of Southern Europe becoming that of the whole world. From Protestantism sprung Methodism, which restored to man the grateful exercise of his credulity—a leading organ in the human brain—his belief in preternatural and supernatural agencies and appearances, and his faith in miraculous communication between God and man; in fact, in that mysticism and marvel-love, which are the columns and corner-stones of religion. Mormonism thus easily arose. It will be found to contain little beyond a literal and verbal interpretation of the only book which Chillingworth recognizes as the rule for Christians, and a pointed condemnation of those who make the contents of the Bible typical, metaphysical, or symbolical, “as if God were not honest when he speaks with man, or uses words in other than their true acceptation,” or could “palter in a double sense.” It proposed as its three general principles, firstly, total immersion in the waters of baptism in the name of the three sacred names; secondly, the commissioning of prophets, apostles, and elders to administer in things holy the revelation and authority of heaven; and, thirdly, the ministering of angels. New Tables of the Law appeared in the Golden Plates. Another Urim and Thummim revealed to Mr. Joseph Smith that he was of the house of Israel and the tribe of Joseph, the inheritor of all things promised to that favored seed. It tempered the superstitions of popery with the rationalism of the Protestant; it supplied mankind with another sacred book and with an infallible interpreter. Human belief had now its weight to carry: those pining for the excitement of thaumaturgy felt satisfied. The Mormons were no longer compelled to ask “what made miracles cease,” and “why and in which A.D. was the power taken from the Church.” It relieved them from holding an apparent absurdity, viz., that the voices and visitations, the signs, miracles, and interventions—in fact, all that the Bible submitted to human faith had ended without reason about the time when one Constantine became king, and do not recommence now when they are most wanted. The Mormons are not forced to think that God is virtually dead in the world; the eminently practical tendencies of the New-World race cause them to develop into practice their contradiction of an inference from which human nature revolts. They claim to be the true Protestants,TRUE PROTESTANTS. i. e., those who protest against the doctrines of a ceased fellowship between the Creator and the creature made in his image; they gratify their self-esteem by sneering at those who confine themselves to the old and obsolete revelation, and by pitying the blindness and ignorance that can not or will not open its eyes to the new light. Hence it follows that few Catholics become Mormons, and that those few become bad Mormons. Man’s powers of faith grow, like his physical force, with exercise. He considers over-belief a venial error compared with under-belief, and he progresses more easily in belief than he can retrograde into disbelief. Thus Catholicism has spread more widely over the world than the less credulous Protestantism, and the more thaumaturgic Mormonism is better adapted to some minds—the Hindoo’s, for instance—than Catholicism.