* Parkman's "Old Regime in Canada."
Nor need we go to Catholic Quebec for modern illustrations of this kind of faith. "Bareheaded people stood out upon the corner in East 113th Street yesterday afternoon," said a New York City newspaper of December 18, 1898, "because they were unable to get into the church of Our Lady Queen of Angels, where a relic of St. Anthony of Padua was exposed for veneration." Describing a service in the church of St. Jean Baptiste in East 77th Street, New York, where a relic alleged to be a piece of a bone of the mother of the Virgin was exposed, a newspaper of that city, on July 24th, 1901, said: "There were five hundred persons, by actual count, in and around the crypt chapel of St. Anne when afternoon service stopped the rush of the sick and crippled at 4.30 o'clock yesterday. There were many more at the 8 o'clock evening Mass." What did these people seek at the shrine? Only the favor of St. Anne and a kiss and touch of the casket that, by church authority, contains bone of her body. "France has to-day its Grotto of Lourdes, Wales its St. Winefride's Well, Mexico its wonder-working doll" that makes the sick well and the childless mothers, and Moscow its "wonder-working picture of the Mother of God," before which the Czar prostrates himself."
Not in recent years has the appetite for some novelty on which to fasten belief been more manifest in the United States than it was at the close of the nineteenth century. Old beliefs found new teachers, and promulgators of new ideas found followers. Instructors in Brahminism attracted considerable attention. A "Chapter of the College of Divine Sciences and Realization" instituted a revival of Druid sun-adoration on the shores of Lake Michigan. An organization has been formed of believers in the One-Over-At-Acre, a Persian who claimed to be the forerunner of the Millennium, and in whom, as Christ, it is said that more than three thousand persons in this country believe. We have among us also Jaorelites, who believe in the near date of the end of the world, and that they must make their ascent to heaven from a mountain in Scotland. The hold which the form of belief called Christian Science has obtained upon people of education and culture needs only be referred to. Along with this have come the "divine healers," gaining patients in circles where it would be thought impossible for them to obtain even consideration, and one of them securing a clientage in a Western city which has enabled him to establish there a church of his own.
In fact, instead of finding in enlightened countries like the United States and England a poor field for the dissemination of new beliefs, the whole school of revealers find there their best opportunities. Discussing this susceptibility, Aliene Gorren, in her "Anglo-Saxons and Others," reaches this conclusion: "Nowhere are so many persons of sound intelligence in all practical affairs so easily led to follow after crazy seers and seeresses as in England and the United States. The truth is that the mind of man refuses to be shut out absolutely from the world of the higher abstractions, and that, if it may not make its way thither under proper guidance, it will set off even at the tail of the first ragged street procession that passes."
The "real miracle" in Mormonism, then,—the wonderful feature of its success,—is to be sought, not in the fact that it has been able to attract believers in a new prophet, and to find them at this date and in this country, but in its success in establishing and keeping together in a republic like ours a membership who acknowledge its supreme authority in politics as well as in religion, and who form a distinct organization which does not conceal its purpose to rule over the whole nation. Had Mormonism confined itself to its religious teachings, and been preached only to those who sought its instruction, instead of beating up the world for recruits and conveying them to its home, the Mormon church would probably to-day be attracting as little attention as do the Harmonists of Pennsylvania.
CHAPTER II. — THE SMITH FAMILY
Among the families who settled in Ontario County, New York, in 1816, was that of one Joseph Smith. It consisted of himself, his wife, and nine children. The fourth of these children, Joseph Smith, Jr., became the Mormon prophet.
The Smiths are said to have been of Scotch ancestry. It was the mother, however, who exercised the larger influence on her son's life, and she has left very minute details of her own and her father's family.* Her father, Solomon Mack, was a native of Lyme, Connecticut. The daughter Lucy, who became Mrs. Joseph Smith, Sr., was born in Gilsum, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, on July 8, 1776. Mr. Mack was remembered as a feeble old man, who rode around the country on horseback, using a woman's saddle, and selling his own autobiography. The "tramp" of those early days often offered an autobiography, or what passed for one, and, as books were then rare, if he could say that it contained an account of actual adventures in the recent wars, he was certain to find purchasers.
* "Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith and his Progenitors for
Many Generations," Lucy Smith.