The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

XI. “We believe in the literal resurrection of the body, and that the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years are expired.”—Man, it has been shown, is a duality of elements. The body is gross, the spirit—under which the intellect or mind is included—is refined matter, permeating, vivifying, and controlling the former: the union or fusion of the two constitutes the “living soul” alluded to by Moses (Gen., ii., 7) in the Adamical creation. Death followed the fall of the great patriarch, who, we are told, is called in Scripture Michael, the Ancient of Days, with hair like wool, etc. But in technical Mormon phrase, “Adam fell that man might be,” and ate the forbidden fruit with a full foreknowledge of the consequences—a Shiah belief. The “fall,” therefore, was a matter of previous arrangement, in order that spirits choosing to undertake their probations might be fitted with “tabernacles,” and be born of women. Death separates the flesh and the spirit for a useful purpose, but the latter keeps guard over every particle of the former, until, at the fiat of resurrection, the body is again “clothed upon,” and perfect man is the result—a doctrine familiar to the mediums. Such is also the orthodox Sunnite faith. The heretical peculiarity of the Mormon resurrection is this: the body will be the same as before, “except the blood,” which is the natural life, and, consequently, the principle of mortality. A man restored to flesh and blood would be subject to death; “flesh and bones,” therefore, will be the constitution of the “resurrected” body. This idea clearly derives from the Genesitic physiology, which teaches that “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Levit., xvii., 14); life being, according to the moderns, not an absolute existence nor objective entity, but a property or condition of the corporeal mechanism—the working, as it were, of the engine until arrested by material lesion. It is confirmed in the Mormon mind by the Savior bidding his disciples to handle his limbs, and to know that he had flesh and bones, not blood.

XII. “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of conscience unmolested, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how or where they may.”—This article embodies the tenets of Roger Williams, who, in establishing his simple democracy, provided that the will of the majority should rule, but “only in civil things.” The charter of Rhode Island (1644) contains the memorable words: “No person within the said colony shall be molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for any differences of opinion in matters of religion who does not actually disturb the public peace.” But how often has this been mouthed—how little it has affected mankind! Would London—boasting in the nineteenth century to be the most tolerant of cities—allow the Cardinal of Westminster to walk in procession through her streets?

XIII. “We believe in being subject to kings, queens, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”—When treating of the hierarchy, it will be made apparent that subjection to temporals and Gentiles must be purely nominal. At the same time, it must be owned that, throughout North America, I may say throughout the New World, the Mormon polity is the only fixed and reasonable form of government. The “turnpike-road of history,” which Fisher Ames, nearly a century ago, described as “white with the tombstones of republics,” is in a fair way to receive fresh accessions, while the land of the Saints promises continuance and progress.

XIV. “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, temperate, benevolent, virtuous, and upright, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul; we ‘believe all things,’ we ‘hope all things,’ we have endured very many things, and hope to be able to ‘endure all things.’ Every thing lovely, virtuous, praiseworthy, and of good report, we seek after, looking forward to the ‘recompense of reward.’ But an idle or lazy person can not be a Christian, neither have salvation. He is a drone, and destined to be stung to death, and tumbled out of the hive.”—All over the American Union there is an apotheosis of labor; the Latter-Day Saints add to it the damnation of osiosity.

This brief outline of Mormon faith will show its strange, but, I believe, spontaneous agglomerationMORMON “AGGLOMERATION.” of tenets which, were its disciples of a more learned and philosophical body, would suggest extensive eclecticism. But, as I have already remarked, there is a remarkably narrow limit to religious ideas: the moderns vainly attempt invention when combination is now the only possible process. In the Tessarakai Decalogue above quoted, we find syncretized the Semitic Monotheism, the Persian Dualism, and the Triads and Trinities of the Egyptians and the Hindoos. The Hebrews also have a personal Theos, the Buddhists avataras and incarnations, the Brahmans self-apotheosis of man by prayer and penance, and the East generally holds to quietism, a belief that repose is the only happiness, and to a vast complication of states in the world to be. The Mormons are like the Pythagoreans in their precreation, transmigration, and exaltation of souls; like the followers of Leucippus and Democritus in their atomic materialism; like the Epicureans in their pure atomic theories, their summum bonum, and their sensuous speculations; and like the Platonists and Gnostics in their belief of the Æon, of ideas, and of moving principles in element. They are fetichists in their ghostly fancies, their evestra, which became souls and spirits. They are Jews in their theocracy, their ideas of angels, their hatred of Gentiles, and their utter segregation from the great brotherhood of mankind. They are Christians inasmuch as they base their faith upon the Bible, and hold to the divinity of Christ, the fall of man, the atonement, and the regeneration. They are Arians inasmuch as they hold Christ to be “the first of God’s creatures,” a “perfect creature, but still a creature.” They are Moslems in their views of the inferior status of womankind, in their polygamy, and in their resurrection of the material body: like the followers of the Arabian Prophet, they hardly fear death, because they have elaborated “continuation.” They take no leap in the dark; they spring from this sublunary stage into a known, not into an unknown world: hence also their worship is eminently secular, their sermons are political or commercial, and—religion being with them not a thing apart, but a portion and parcel of every-day life—the intervention of the Lord in their material affairs becomes natural and only to be expected. Their visions, prophecies, and miracles are those of the Illuminati, their mysticism that of the Druses, and their belief in the Millennium is a completion of the dreams of the Apocalyptic sects. Masonry has evidently entered into their scheme; the Demiurgus whom they worship is “as good at mechanical inventions as at any other business.” With their later theories, Methodism, Swedenborgianism—especially in its view of the future state—and Transcendentalism are curiously intermingled. And, finally, we can easily discern in their doctrine of affinity of minds and sympathy of souls the leaven of that faith which, beginning with the Mesmer, and progressing through the Rochester Rappers and the Poughkeepsie Seer, threatens to extend wherever the susceptible nervous temperament becomes the characteristic of the race.

The Latter-Day Saints do not deny this agglomeration.[210] They maintain that, being guided by the Spirit unto all truth, they have sifted it out from the gross mass of error that obscures it, and that whatever knowledge has been vouchsafed to man may be found in their possession. They assert that other sects were to them what the Platonists and the Essenes were to Christianity. Moreover, as has been seen, they declare their faith to be still in its infancy, and that many dark and doubtful subjects are still to be decided by better experience or revelation.

[210] “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism” (says Mr. Joseph Smith in his sermon preached on the 9th of July, 1843) “is to receive truth, come whence it may.”... “Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Mohammedans, etc., are they in possession of any truth? Yes, they have all a little truth mixed with error. We ought to gather together all the good and true principles which are in the world, and keep them, otherwise we shall never become pure Mormons.”

I borrow the following résumé of Mormonism from Lieutenant Gunnison—a Christian writer—of course, without endorsing any one of his opinions.

“In Mormonism we recognize an intuition of Transcendentalism—intuition, we say, for its founder was no scholar in the idealistic philosophy. He trampled under foot creeds and formulas, and soared away for perpetual inspiration from the God; and by the will, which he calls faith, he won the realms of truth, beauty, and happiness. Such things can only be safely confided to the strong and pure-minded, and even they must isolate themselves in self-idolatry, and be ‘alone with the alone,’ and seek converse with the spirit of man’s spirit.

“But this prophet was educated by passion, and sought to be social with the weak; he therefore baptized spiritually in the waters of materialism. Instead of evolving the godlike nature of the human spirit, he endeavored to prove that humanity was already divinity by investing Deity with what is manlike—men were to be like gods by making gods men.”