We do not read that any particular sensation was created by the announcement. Indeed, the practice had already become so common that a federal judge, a year before this date, had denounced it in a Mormon assembly, and made a somewhat remarkable appeal to the women to put a stop to the horrible practice:
“The women were excited; the most of them were in tears before he had spoken many minutes. The men were astonished and enraged, and one word of encouragement from their leader would have brought on a collision. Brigham saw this, and was equal to the occasion. When the judge sat down, he rose, and, by one of those strong, nervous appeals for which he is so famous among the brethren, restored the equilibrium of the audience. Those who but a moment before were bathed in tears now responded to his broad sarcasm and keen wit in screams of laughter; and having fully restored the spirits of the audience he turned to the judge and administered the following rebuke: ‘I will kick you,’ he said, ‘or any other Gentile judge from this stand, if you or they again attempt to interfere with the affairs of our Sion.’”[[56]]
Judge Brocchus, finding his life in danger, resigned his office and left the Territory. Once avowed, a belief in the doctrine was pronounced essential to salvation, and the practice of it was carried to a depth of bestiality which would horrify a Turk. All degrees of relationship were practically ignored. Incest and vicarious marriage became every-day affairs. The saints were taught that “when our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden he came into it with a celestial body and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him”;[[57]] and such blasphemies were coupled with the holiest of all names that the Christian shudders to think of them.
The formal adoption of the doctrine of polygamy, no longer as the personal peculiarity of a few leaders, but as the corner-stone of Mormon society, had a result which Brigham doubtless anticipated when he established it. The separation of the saints from the rest of Christendom was made complete and final. Gentile civilization had forced itself upon their mountain retreat, and in the daily contact with Christianity and common sense the Mormon imposture was not likely long to survive. But the institution of plural marriage placed between the Gentile and the Latter-Day Saint a barrier more formidable than snow-crowned sierras and alkali deserts. Social intercourse became impossible between the followers of the two rival systems. Contempt and horror on the one side bred hatred on the other. For the polygamous saint, moreover, judging after the manner of men, there was no repentance. He was tied for ever to the church, an outlaw from all Christendom, liable to a long imprisonment if he re-entered the pale of society, safe even in Utah only so long as he enabled the “Governor of Deseret” to defy the authority of the United States. The polygamist learned to place in the prophet all his hopes for this world and the next, and to accept all his utterances with the docility of a child. So Brigham became not only a more powerful man than Joseph Smith, but beyond doubt the most absolute ruler in the entire world.
It was now that the Mormon theology began to assume its most repulsive shape. Cut off from its early connection with a form of Christianity which, however corrupt, contained at least a remnant of the ancient faith, it sank with startling rapidity into the most dismal abysses of polytheism. To the materialistic doctrines which constituted the foundation and chief characteristic of the philosophy of Orson Pratt and other primitive expounders of Mormonism, was added an immense mass of crude and incongruous beliefs, not developed by any process of logic, but simply heaped on by agglomeration. Daily “revelations” brought forth daily inconsistencies and absurdities, under the weight of which the truths once professed by Smith were gradually buried and forgotten. Hence it is impossible to construct for Mormonism anything like a theological system. We can only state the isolated and often contradictory principles which are held by the saints at the present day, premising that although many of them can be traced more or less distinctly in the early literature of the sect, the most shocking of them were little, if at all, known until under Brigham Young the separation of the saints was completed. The most startling of Mormon dogmas, relieved of extraneous complications, is that God is only a good man, and that men advance by evolution until they become gods. There is no Creator, there is no creature, there is no immaterial spirit. What we call God, says one authority, is nothing but the truth abiding in man. What we call God, says Orson Pratt, is “a material intelligent personage, possessing both body and parts,” like an ordinary man. He has legs, which he uses in walking, though he can move up and down in the air without them. He cannot be in more than one place at a time. He dwells in a planet called Kolob. He was formed by the union of certain elementary particles of matter, self-moving, intelligent, and existing from all eternity. All matter is eternal. All substances are material. The souls of men were not created; they are from eternity, like God himself. God eats, drinks, loves, hates; his relations with mankind are purely human; he begets existences in the natural way.[[58]] Before he became God he was an ordinary man. He differs from other men now only in power. He is not omnipotent; he still increases and may continue to increase infinitely. As God is only an improved man, so man may come by gradual progress to know as much as God. Indeed, there are already innumerable gods. The first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” ought to read: “The Head God brought forth the gods, with the heavens and the earth.”[[59]] Each god rules over a world which he has peopled by generation, and the god of our world is Adam, who is only another form of the archangel Michael; “he is our father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.” The Mormons believe in a vague way in the Trinity—nay, in two Trinities, one composed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the other, and older, of “Elohim, Jehovah, and Adam.” The Father and Son have bodies of flesh and blood; they occupy space; they require time to move from place to place; but the Holy Spirit (which is the mind of the Father and the Son), although his substance is material, has no flesh and blood and permeates everything. After death the souls of the wicked will be imprisoned in the brutes. The saints will inhabit the planets, where they will have houses, farms, gardens, plantations of manna, and plenty of wives, and they will go on marrying and multiplying for all eternity. When this planetary system is filled up, new worlds will be called into existence, and in them the faithful, gradually developing into gods, will revel in the sensual delights of a Moslem paradise.
Surely no such mixture of pantheism, polytheism, and rank atheism was ever devised before; but we have not yet reached the worst. It was in 1852 that Brigham proclaimed the doctrine that Adam is God, and to be honored and revered as such. To this soon followed the announcement that Joseph Smith was God. In a year or two more the doctrine was taught, at first cautiously, but after 1856 publicly and officially, that the only God to whom this generation is amenable is Brigham Young!
The declaration of this appalling impiety was made in the midst of a tempestuous “Reformation” which historians will probably regard as the culminating point of Mormon fanaticism. In the autumn of 1856 one Jedediah Grant, who stood high in the Mormon priesthood, began to preach a revival in which the most remarkable practices were public “accusations of the brethren” and public “confessions of sin.” An uncontrollable madness seized upon the whole community. Preachers and penitents vied with one another in disgusting disclosures. The meetings resounded with wails and curses and slanderous charges. Men, women, and children, not satisfied with laying bare their hidden sins, accused themselves of crimes they had never committed, and called upon the church to punish and disgrace them. “Go to President Young,” was the cry of the preachers. “Give up all that you have to President Young—your money, your lands, your wives, your children, your blood.” “Brigham Young,” exclaimed Heber Kimball, “is my God, is your God, is the only God we shall ever see, if we do not obey him. Joseph Smith was our God when he was amongst us; Brigham Young is our God now.” The church authorities fanned the flame of excitement. They sent preachers into every ward and every settlement. Thousands of the saints placed all their property in Brigham’s hands.[[60]] Then they became inflamed with persecuting zeal. They sacked the houses of offenders, whipped and mutilated those who spoke evil of the church. From such outrages it was but a step to murder. At Brigham’s instigation the step was taken. In a discourse in the Tabernacle in February, 1857, he laid down a new law of love. We must love our neighbors as ourselves. But if we love ourselves, we must consent to the shedding of our own blood in order to atone for our sins and exalt us among the gods; so also it is true love to shed our neighbor’s blood for his eternal salvation. “I could refer you to a plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain in order to atone for their sins. The wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle being in full force, and the time will come when the law of God will be in full force. This is loving our neighbor as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; if he wants salvation, and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it!” “There are sins,” said he on another occasion while the “Reformation” was at its height, “that must be atoned for by the blood of the man. That is the reason why men talk to you as they do from this stand; they understand the doctrine and throw out a few words about it. You have been taught that doctrine, but you do not understand it.” Alas! understanding came soon enough. The Springville murders in March, 1857, were followed that summer by the appalling massacre at the Mountain Meadows of one hundred and twenty peaceable emigrants, men, women, and children, on their way to California. The midnight assassin went his rounds. The church executioners were despatched upon their awful missions. Sinners were sent on errands from which they never returned. Apostasy was punished by the knife or the bullet. A Welshman named Morris set up as a rival prophet, and was shot down in cold blood with a number of his deluded followers. Gentiles were put to death for presuming to dispute with Mormons over the title to property. A husband took his wife upon his knee and calmly cut her throat to atone for her sins.
“Men are murdered here,” said a federal judge to the grand jury—“coolly, deliberately, premeditatedly murdered. Their murder is deliberated and determined upon by church-council meetings, and that, too, for no other reason than that they had apostatized from your church and were striving to leave the Territory. You are the tools, the dupes, the instruments of a tyrannical church despotism. The heads of your church order and direct you. You are taught to obey their orders and commit these horrid murders. Deprived of your liberty, you have lost your manhood and become the willing instruments of bad men.”
Close upon the reign of terror established by the “Reformation” came the great Mormon rebellion, and the march of an army to Utah to install the territorial officers appointed by President Buchanan. Brigham thundered defiance from the pulpit; but on the approach of the troops he ordered the whole community to leave their homes and once more move out into the wilderness to build a new Sion. It is a wonderful illustration of the fanaticism and abject submission to which he had brought the people that this order was promptly obeyed. Before the “war” was settled by negotiation no fewer than 30,000 poor creatures took flight, and many of them, being utterly destitute, were never able to return. The frenzy of the Reformation era died out; the rebellion was quelled; but the doctrine of blood-atonement has not been abandoned, and to this day the soil of Utah is red with human sacrifices.
With such a savage and brutal paganism as the Mormon religion thus became under Brigham Young’s influence it is impossible that Christian civilization should ever be at peace. The steady resistance which it has offered to the authority of the United States needs no further explanation than we find in the constitution of the Mormon Church and the fundamental doctrines of the Mormon creed. There are chapters in the history of the Latter-Day Saints upon which we have not thought it necessary to linger. The organization of the Danites, and the long list of murders and other outrages preceding the open inculcation of human sacrifices, are among the most important of the events which we have thus passed over. They might be considered excrescences which time would perhaps remove. We have confined ourselves to the natural and logical consequences of the preaching of the two prophets; to the circumstances which throw light upon their personal characters; to the facts which may enable people to place a juster valuation than now seems to be current upon the elements which they have introduced into American society and the work which they have accomplished in the Rocky Mountain desert. Accepting even the most extravagant estimates of the material prosperity of the Mormon settlements, we think it must be admitted that their thrift is a curse to the world. And as for Brigham himself, cold, calculating, avaricious, sensual, violent, cruel, rolling in luxury, stretching out his hands on every side to grasp the property of his dupes, and pushing them on from crime to crime, from horror to horror, that he might the better amass money, he will take his place in history not only as a worse man than Joseph Smith, but as one of the most dangerous monsters ever let loose upon the world.