“But Christianity tolerates, and ever reveres, myths and mythic histories; and such toleration and reverence offer premiums on the invention of new mythologies like this.”
“We, in our churches, teach that phenomena can add authority to truth; we necessarily invite miracle-mongers, Joe Smiths, Pio Nonos, to produce miracles to sustain lies.”
“I suppose,” said Brent, “that superstition must be the handmaid of religion, except in minds very holy, or very brave and thorough in study. By and by, when mankind is educated to know that theology is a science, to be investigated and tested like a science, Mormonism and every like juggle will become forever impossible.”
“Certainly; false religions always pretend to a supernatural origin and a fresh batch of mysteries. Let Christianity discard its mysteries, and impostors will have no educated credulity to aid them.”
So Brent and I commented upon the Sizzum heresy and its mouthpiece. We abhorred the system, and were disgusted with its apostle, as a tempter and a knave. Yet we could not feel any close personal interest in the class he deluded. They seemed too ignorant and doltish to need purer spiritual food.
Bodily food had been prepared by the women while the men listened to Sizzum’s grace before meat. A fragrance of baking bread had pervaded the air. A thousand slices of fat pork sizzled in two hundred frying-pans, and water boiled for two hundred coffee or tea pots. Saints cannot solely live on sermons.
Brent and I walked about to survey the camp. We stopped wherever we found the emigrants sociable, and chatted with them. They were all eager to know how much length of journey remained.
“We’re comin’ to believe, some of us,” said an old crone, with a wrinkle for every grumble of her life, “that we’re to be forty year in the wilderness, like the old Izzerullites. I wouldn’t have come, Samwell, if I’d known what you was bringin’ me to.”
“There’s a many of us wouldn’t have come, mother,” rejoined “Samwell,” a cowed man of anxious look, “if we’d known as much as we do now.”
Samwell glanced sadly at his dirty, travel-worn children, at work at mud pies and dust vol-au-vents. His dowdy wife broke off the colloquy by announcing, in a tone that she must have learned from a rattlesnake, that the loaf was baked, the bacon was fried, and supper shouldn’t wait for anybody’s talking.