VI. “We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive Church, viz., Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists, etc.”—The proper signification of these words will be explained when treating of the Mormon hierarchy.
VII. “We believe in the powers and gifts of the everlasting Gospel, viz., the gift of faith, discerning of spirits, prophecy, revelations, visions, healing, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues, wisdom, charity, brotherly love, etc.”—The everlasting Gospel means the universal order and arrangement of things springing from the “two self-existing principles of intelligence and element, or matter,” and forming the law under which the primordial gods came into being. According to Mr. Joseph Smith, “God himself could not create himself,” and “Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle: it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it.” In the far eternity two of the elementary material æons met, compared intelligence, and calling in a third to council, united in what became the first power, superior because prior to all others, and ever-enduring by the union of other æons. Under this union arose a “law governing itself and all things”—the everlasting Gospel. The seer has not left on record the manner in which the head god originated: the other gods, however, sprung from him as children. Heaven has not only kings, but queens—the Sakti of Hindooism, and the various Ario-pagan faiths—who are the mothers of gods, of men’s souls, and of all spiritual existences. St. John saw a portion of the everlasting Gospel in the “little book” in the hand of the angel “coming down from heaven” to proclaim again on earth the Church of Christ, a type of Moroni, who taught the fullness of knowledge to Joseph the Seer, that the gladder tidings might be preached to men with the “signs following” which were promised to the primitive apostles.
As regards the discerning of spirits, the human soul is not visible to mortal eyes without a miracle, nor is it ponderable: it passes through the body as the electric fluid through the earth. Yet, in reality, it is more substantial than the body, for it can not be changed nor destroyed; it “coexisted equal with God,” and had no beginning, which would argue the possibility of an end, and “it is immortal as God himself.” It is uncreate: “God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all—the very idea lessens man in my estimation—I know better.” (“Last Sermon,” p. 62.) Spiritual existences have a choice of two paths. Either they must remain cribbed, cabined, and confined in their own ethereal order and proper sphere, to be called and sent as angels, heralds, or ministers from one planet or planetary system to another; and thus the Mormon, as the Moslem, places angelic nature below human, saying with St. Paul (1 Cor., vi., 3), “Know you not that we shall judge angels?” or they may choose, like the precreated spirits of El Islam in the Yaum i Alast—the Day of Am-I-Not (thy God)?—the probation of an earthly tabernacle; and, ignoring their past existence, descend below all things to attain a higher than celestial glory, and perfection in the attributes of power and happiness. As with the metempsychosist, there are grades of tabernacles. The lowest of humans is the African, who, being a “servant of servants unto his brethren,” is “cursed as to the priesthood,” and therefore can not “attain to any thing above a dim-shining glory.” Above him is the Indian, for the Red Men, through repentance, obedience, and acceptance of the new Evangelism, can rebecome a “fair and delightsome people,” worthy of their Hebrew sires. Below the negro is the brute tabernacle, into which the still rebellious spirit descends, until, yielding to Gospel law, it is permitted to retrace its course through the successive changes to splendor and perfection. So, “when we are tormented by a refractory horse or an obstinate ass, it may not be amiss to reflect that they were actuated by an apostate soul, and exemplifying a few of the human infirmities.” The same words might be spoken orthodoxically by a Jain or a Banyan.
The soul is supposed to take possession of the tabernacle at the quickening of the embryon. At baptism the Saint may ask in faith for some particular spirit or genius—an idea familiar to the adepts and spiritualists of this generation. Every one also has evil, false, and seducing spirits at variance with the good, a fancy reminding us of the poetical Moslem picture of the good guardian sitting upon man’s right shoulder, and whispering into his ear suggestions against which the bad spirit on the left contends. Revelations are received by prayer and mighty faith, but only when diligence and sagacity fail to secure the desired information—where God has appointed means he will not work by miracles, nor will a “de profundis” act without a more concrete action. Heavenly communications vouchsafed to the seer must be registered, and kept for promulgation when the Saints can bear them; for many “would be offended and turn back if the whole truth”—polygamy, for instance—“were dashed down in a mass before them.” Of prophetic times it may be observed that the habitat of God the Father is the planet Kolob, whose revolutions—one of which is the beginning and the end of a day equal to 1000 terrestrial years—are the measure of heavenly time. The Deity, being finite, employs agents and auxiliaries, e. g., light, sound, electricity, inspiration, to communicate knowledge to his world of worlds. An angel commissioned as a messenger to earth is taken either from the chief or from a minor planet, and it naturally measures time by the days and weeks, the months and years, of its own home—a style of computation which must not a little confuse our poor human chronology.
“Tongues” does not signify, as at the date of the first Pentecost, an ability to address heteroglottists in their several languages, which would render the gift somewhat too precise and Mezzofantian for these days. It means that man moved by the Spirit shall utter any set of sounds unintelligible even to himself, but which, being known to the Lord, may, by special permission to exercise the “gift of interpretation of tongues,” be explained by another to those addressed. The man gravid with “tongues” must “rise on his feet, lean in faith on Christ, and open his lips, utter a song in such cadence as he chooses, and the Spirit of the Lord will give an interpreter, and make it a language.” The linguistic feat has of late years been well known in England, where it was, of course, set down to imposture. It may more charitably be explained by an abnormal affection of the organ of language on the part of the speaker of “tongues,” and in the interpreter by the effect of a fervent and fooling faith.
VIII. “We believe the word of God recorded in the Bible; we also believe the word of God recorded in the Book of Mormon, and in all other good books.”—INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.Some Christians have contended that the Biblia of the Jews have been altered; that the last chapter (verse 5) of Deuteronomy, for instance, recording the death and burial of Moses, was not written by Moses. The Moslems assert that the Scripture of both Hebrew and Christian has not only been misunderstood, but has designedly been corrupted by Baulús (St. Paul) and other Greekish Jews; that the Gospel of Infancy, and the similar compositions now banished into the apocryphal New Testament, are mere excrescences upon the pure commands of Jesus. The Mormons hold with the latter. They believe, however, that the infinite errors and interpretations have been removed by “Joseph the Seer,” to whom was given the “key of all languages”—he has quoted in his writings only 15 out of 3500—and the following specimen of his ultra-Bentleian emendations, borrowed from the “Last Sermon,” may suffice:
“I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of the creation in the Bible” (i.e., “in King James’s version;” he had probably never seen even the Douay translation). “It first read, ‘The head one of the gods brought forth the gods.’[209] If you do not believe it, you do not believe the learned man of God. And, in farther explanation, it means, ‘The head god called together the gods, and sat in grand council. The grand councilors sat in yonder heavens, and contemplated the worlds that were created at that time.’ The Bible is, therefore, held to be the foundation book.” Mr. Joseph Smith’s inspired translation or impudent rifacciamento is believed to exist in MS.: in due time it will probably be promulgated. But the Word of God is not confined to the Bible; the Book of Mormon and the Doctrines and Covenants are of equal authority, strands of the “three-fold cord,” connecting by the Church God and man. If these revelations contradict one another, the stumbling-block to the weak in faith is easily removed by considering the “situations” under which they were vouchsafed: “heaven’s government is conducted on the principle of adapting revelation to the varied circumstances of the children of the kingdom”—a dogma common to all revelationists. Additional items may be supplied to the Mormons from day to day, a process by which a “flood of light has poured into their souls, and raised them to a view of the glorious things above.” The present seer, revelator, translator, and prophet, however, shows his high wisdom by seeing, revealing, translating, and prophesying as little as possible. Yet he even repeats, and probably believes, that revelation is the rock upon which the Church is founded.
[209] I need hardly say that in the original the words are “at its head (beginning) the gods (he) created the earth and the heaven.”
IX. “We believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and we believe that he will reveal many more great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God and Messiah’s Second Coming.”—Much of this has been explained above. The second coming of Christ is for the restoration or restitution of all things, as foretold by the prophet Isaiah. When the living earth was created, the dry land emerged from the waters, which gathered by command into one place. The “Voice of Warning” draws an interesting picture of a state of things hitherto unknown to geologist and palæogeographer. “There was one vast ocean rolling around a single immense body of land, unbroken as to continents and islands; it was a beautiful plain, interspersed with gently rising hills and sloping vales; its climate delightfully varied with heat and cold, wet and dry; crowning the year with productions grateful to men and animals, while from the flowery plain or spicy grove sweet odors were wafted on every breeze, and all the vast creation of animated beings breathed naught but health, peace, and joy.” Over this paradise, this general garden, “man reigned, and talked face to face with the Supreme, with only a dimming veil between.” After the diffusion of sin, which followed the fall, came the purification of the Noachian cataclysm, and in the days of Peleg “the earth was divided,” i.e., the Homeric circumambient sea was interposed between portions of land rent asunder, which earthquakes and upheavals subsequently broke into fragments and islands. We learn from the whole and varied Scriptures that before the second coming of Christ the several pieces shall be dovetailed into one, as they were in the morn of creation, and the retiring sea shall reassume its pristine place, when Samudra Devta was enthroned by the Rishis. The earth is thus restored for a people purified to innocence, and is fitted for the first resurrection of the body to reign with the Savior for a thousand years.
X. “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel, and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes;RESTORATION OF THE TEN TRIBES. that Zion will be established upon the Western Continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth a thousand years; and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.”—The only novelty in this article is the “location” of Zion, which has already been transferred from Palestine to the celestial regions in the Valley of the Mississippi; this, in the present era, when the old cradles of civilization upon the Ganges and Indus, the Euphrates and the Nile, have been well-nigh depopulated or exhausted, promises to become one of the vast hives from which the human swarm shall issue. The American continent, as the Book of Mormon informs us, was, at the time of the Crucifixion, shaken to its foundation: towns and cities, lakes and mountains, were buried and formed when “the earth writhed in the convulsive throes of agonizing nature.” After all the seed of Israel shall have been raised from the dead, they shall flock to Zion in Judea, and the saints of other races shall be gathered to New Jerusalem in America: both these cities shall be “built with fine stones, and the beauty of all precious things.” At the end of the millennium comes the great sabbath of rest and enjoyment; the earth shall become celestial through the baptism of fire, while the two holy cities shall be caught up (literally) into heaven, to descend with the Lord God for their light and their temple, and shall remain forever on the new earth “under the bright canopy of the new heavens.”