292 ABRUPT DISMISSION. 2. Sir, I have no respect or care for you. 1. Queer apostles these, to be so mistaken in their inspiration-for once! 3. Yes, sir; hypocrite hardened 1. Silence, gentlemen. You are now going rather too far. There seems no immediate prospect of my becoming a Latter-day saint, you perceive. It is the Lord's day, and I wish not to break it. I have read of the like before. You are just such apostles proved as are described in Rev. 2: 2; and in ii. Cor. 11: 12-15. Go, read and ponder your character and your doom. You are base and horrible impostors. It is very plain who sent you, and how equally deceived and criminal you are in your inspired assurance; that I was to be your convert and your champion, and as such promoted in your kingdom, and among your kind of saints. I have done! You need make no reply. Now, I have only two more things to say; the first, this is my study; the second, there is the door; make rectilinears in quick time, and leave the premises immediately. I am not your brother or your dupe. With this, I rose and opened the door, pointed them out, cleared the way for them, and have never heard from them since. They went down the stairs, and disappeared as directed, uttering many and various denunciations and inspired predictions, for which God, who hates imposture more than any of us, will call them to account, when their true character shall be displayed to the universe. What specimens of popular imposture! They are all antievangelical, all of the policy and the patronage of the devil. These are illustrations and examples of those religious abominations which, in various forms, often more specious and insidious in their ways, delude the multitude and prosper for a season, till some newer tilt or tournament of Satan solicits their credulity, and feeds their appetite for religious oracles and marvels near at hand. It must always be something BRUTALITY OF MORMONISM. newer than the truth. country and our age! 293 Yet is it most humiliating to our Who could opine that, in our happy land, in a nation of voters, freemen, newspapers, periodical literature, and general reading, such a gross and detestable imposture as Mormonism could find disciples and devotees? That such a wretched scamp as Joe Smith, or any one of his successors, could have prospered in his audacious way, and with his hyper-apostolic pretensions, to such a grave extent? and that so many, both in Europe and in America, in insular and continental Europe, should have yielded their religious faith and being to so much absurdity, to such diabolical counterfeit? Yet they are now a numerous community, and UTAH is to become a great Mormon State of our Great Confederacy, under the primacy of these vulgar, malignant, and selfish corrupters. They are men of many wives, and of Mormon morality on all subjects. In the interview above reported, it was soon obvious that their views were destitute of all reason and evidence; that it required great decision and directness to stem the torrent of their inspired assurance; and that only a very little religious credulity, could I have mustered it, was requisite to make their sway omnipotent, their jurisdiction sure. We have now various specimens of the general sort, either secret and skulking, or advertised in newspapers, and soliciting the patronage of fools-as witchcraft, sorcery, palmistry, divination, astrology, fortune-telling, mesmerism, mysterious knockings, clairvoyance, and even some rare manifestations of phrenology, with learned manipulations and oraculous prognosis of character, founded on the conformations and configurations of the cranium, its sinuses and its protuberances, its form, its size, and its relative proportions. We ought to be, as rational and genuine Christians, wise to resist imposture, bold to confront it, and faithful to rebuke its diabolical mendacity. By their fruits ye shall know them-try the spirits-to the law and the testimony; if 294 SOME LIMIT TO TOLERATION. they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. This last plain oracle disposes of all the imposture with which, in its multifarious phases and varieties, the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, deceiveth the nations, and who is, by usurpation, the prince of the world, the leader of all its wickedness, and the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience. The truth of God is a system and a unit, eternal, unchangeable, and written for our learning, that we, through pa tience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope. If we receive not the love of the truth, that we might be saved, we know the consequence; FOR THIS CAUSE God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned, who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. This is the explanation of the matter, and there is competently none other. Let no man be diluted and doting, no man a trifler with God, or an experimental gambler with his own immortal destiny. In a moral sense, we ought to hate them that hate God, and have no silly remorses, for one moment, in their favor; proving what is acceptable to the Lord; and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. And let even an angel from heaven be anathema if he preach another gospel. To obtain money on false pretenses is actionable at common law. Yet here are notable instances! Jugglery, quackery, lying, hoaxing the poor, bewitching the credulous, robbing the simple-minded, gulling the multitude, in all these ways, so gross and palpable, so deleterious and ruinous, certainly some of these deserve the animadversion of the laws. Some of them ought to be indicted by the Grand Inquest of the county; that all kinds of charlatanry or fraud might not seem to be patronized and protected, in an easy and an ordinary way, but rather, for the good of the people, exposed and punished by our republican laws, especially when imposture IMBECILITY NOT RELIGION. 295 dresses itself in the robes of religion, the better to elude responsibility, and effectuate its purposes. It is abuse and crime; it is nuisance as well as impiety. Let no American, by approving, become a partaker of such evil. To what are we all coming? Are truth and soberness to be repudiated? Are the facts of philosophy, the laws of nature, the ways of Providence, the truths of religion, the known realities of Scripture, all wisdom and soberness, and all the province of genuine faith to be forsaken, perverted, or eclipsed, simply to please the devil and his angels. If we allow ourselves to be so easily trepanned by our adversary the devil, the age of possessions may return to us in judgment; then, like the fury of the whole herd, on a notable occasion, we shall run violently downward on a descending plain, and reach a catastrophe in the end, quite as sure, and much more tremendous in ruin. The plea of charity-a word most marvelously misunderstood, and unhappily rendered in our version, and terribly abused by blind men and infidels—the plea of charity is silly and false. Error and imposture are no objects of charity, but only of revulsion and abhorrence. Take a specimen of apostolic charity from the pen of the beloved John, by way of eminence, the THEOLOGUS of the ancient Fathers: If there come any to you, and bring not THIS DOCTRINE, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed; do not "tell him to rejoice"-literally from the original; for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of, or has communion with, his evil deeds. The disciple of Jesus' bosom wrote this! Take another specimen, apostolical and inspired, and written for our learning-another specimen of the genuine charity of heaven: And when they had gone through the isle of Cyprus to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, or magician, a false prophet, a Jew, but far more respectable, I ween, than the abominables of the pseudo-celestial and fanatico 296 THE COURAGE OF TRUE CHARITY. spiritual "knockings," or oraculous thumpings, pretension, of our own days, whose name was Bar-Jesus: who was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus, a prudent man, or an intelligent person; who called for Barnabas and Saul, and desired to hear the word or doctrine, Tòv λóyov, of God. But Elymas, the sorcerer, for so is his name by interpretation, withstood them, seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith. Then Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him; and what a withering look of apostolic charity was that, when he said, O! full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to PERVERT THE RIGHT WAYS OF THE LORD! It is supposed that the sublime Apostle of the nations, now in the initiative of his glorious embassy to them, chose to change his name from the Hebrew to the Latin, adopting or prefixing that of his illustrious convert, not only in commemoration of his cordial faith, then first professed at his baptism, but also because its meaning, small, little, suited at once the stature of his body and the humility of his mind; and also because, as a proper name, it was in common use and general honor throughout the Roman empire, so favoring his mission. Hence-PAUL, that noble hero of the cross! Let this demonstration of charity teach and arm us against all the importunities of error and imposture, which the devil patronizes and his victims accredit, in this sin-blinded, and truth-hating, and dreadfully apostate world. In the conclusion of this interview, memorable and useful, I may remark, on the one hand, that they seemed really to believe, somehow, the divinity of their own mission, not only without evidence, but against it; so high and confluent was the tide of their delusion and their assurance. They appeared to boggle at the only miracle enacted, namely, that of their own failure. It was a prodigy and a poser, that |