292

The Indian Race of America.

schoolhouse and church at his own expense, and presented this property to the Church forever. The church he has built stands high above all the surrounding property, and is known the country round as the "Jesus house," and he is called the "Jesus man." Blessed name for God's servant and God's house! The school is crowded with scholars, and every day divine service and Gospel preaching is heard in that mission chapel. Scores have been brought to God through the labors of this devoted son of our Church, and the fountains of beneficence opened by Lum Foon's self-sacrificing life shall flow -on and on to bless the ages that are yet to come.

A son and a daughter remain to bless Lum's home. The daughter is adopted and supported by Miss Laura Templeton, of San Francisco, a dear Christian lady, who has Lum Foon's permission to take his daughter and educate her for medical missionary work among her own people.

THE INDIAN RACE OF AMERICA.

BY REV. EDWIN ARNOLD.

HOSE son is the red man? Whence came his marked peculiarities of person, mind, and temperament? No other race has any record nor can give information on this subject. We have only mere conjecture.

W

That uniform copper color; coarse, straight, shiny black uniformity of hair, with its tenacity to hang on the crown and grow so thin on his face; the uniformly small and keen black eyes; the prominent cheek bones; the straight spinal column; the straight forward foot track; the unique yet strong race pride; the mental equipoise; the peculiar secretive humor and love of a joke; the gravity in council and order in controversy, and commanding oratory-whence came they?

We know indeed, both from Scripture and nature, that he is of the same origin and blood with the rest of mankind, and from the demonstrations of miscegenation that he is of the same species, but in what country he was nursed, and how and when he emigrated hither, we may never know.

The long possession of our adopted country by this very peculiar people, and our responsible relations to each other as aborigines and as conquerors demand our careful attention. The aborigines of any country are entitled to candid consideration by their successors. Whether worthy or unworthy of confidence, their relation as former occupants of the country demands honest treatment by their successors, be they conquerors or robbers.

America was long-who knows how long?-the possession, the abode, the home of the red man. If God ever "set the bounds of our habitation" here, so he did for him, and that, too, for a much longer period than our occupancy has continued. If we love our home here, so right here he loved his home.

We did not find here a waste, barren Sahara, silent as death; where no fauna burrowed and no fowl could live to fly over the sun-burnt waste. No! no! It was owned and inhabited, but not impoverished.

Its proud forests stood in all their peerless majesty announcing in stern tones to the winds:

"Hitherto-no further rage.

Without our joint behest

Ye shall in the beechen bough
Disturb the pigeon's nes',"

The Indian Race of America.

293

Springs gushed from the hills and boiled up in the valleys. Brooks, creeks, and rivers were full, but not subject to raging floods. Perhaps our most common apology for robbing the red man of his lands is in our charge that he didn't use them right when he had them. That charge is plausible from our standpoint, but from his position it loses much of its force. He used the land as his few wants prompted him, and certainly did not wear it out, mangle, or devastate it. What one depredation did he ever maliciously inflict upon his country while in his possession? Besides not any of his neglects worked a legal or moral forfeiture. What court of justice would take away any man's farm or garden because he didn't cultivate it well? or his house for the untidy habits of the family?

Another excuse for our supplanting the Indians is the pretense that we bought their lands and paid them for them. Well, suppose that all our trades and treaties for lands had been straight and honorable so far as they went. Everybody knows that we never paid a tithe of what the lands were worth at the time, and such advantage was not honorable for a Christian nation or race.

But few of those trades were straight. Drugging to the extent of bewilderment, force to the degree of intimidation, fraud in kind and value of payments. Every kind of trickery such as make bargains null and void have been practiced upon the Indians, The final excuse is that of conquest. "These lands are ours because we wanted them and would have them if we had to kill the Indians to get them." This was Jezebel's claim to Naboth's vineyard. Some excuse this method by quoting Israel's conquest of Canaan. But the audacity of such a claim is only equaled by its blasphemy. Where is the divine authority? Where the miraculous interpositions? No one to be found. Nor does the analogy hold good in any particular but that of Naboth's vineyard, which holds in every feature but one-Ahab did offer to pay Naboth full price.

There is no room to doubt that the Ruler of nations divinely led us to settle here. But it is equally clear that he meant us to obtain our homes honestly as is right between ourselves; nay, even more considerately as a Christian nation dealing with ignorant heathen whom he sent to treat as brothers; to elevate and not cast down; to preserve and not destroy; to civilize and incorporate, Christianize, educate, and citizenize, not to rob and exterminate.

He sent us here to lift up the Indian into sober, kindly partnership with us in neighborhood use of the Lord's own lands. Not to put the bottle to his mouth and reduce him below the brute! Then rob him, pollute him, and kick him out.

"The King of kings" who visits national sins upon the guilty nations in this life hath taught our own nation a lesson in this generation which we do well to consider in our dealings with weaker races. Whatever the origin or mistakes of our late war the Almighty made in the terrible carnage of it condign visitation for our wrongs to the Negro !

We ought closely to study that lesson to get some little warning of what the Father of all has in store for our wrongs to the Indian. It should be our wisdom to consider how we found and where we found the Negro; how and where we found the Indian. How differently we treated these weak races! The one with shackles and whips, but all the while providing for him shelter, food and clothing, and nursing. The other with sword, powder and bullet, foul disease, banishment, starvation, and death.

We should consider also the natural effects of this different treatment. The black people to day are free, happy citizens, planted and growing. The red people are reduced, poor and sad, uprooted and alien. Woe! woe to our nation when the God of nations shall arise in his wrath "to make inquisition for blood," and shall let loose his judgments upon the pale faces of America.

THE CLAIMS OF HOME AND FOREIGN MISSIONS.

A PARABLE.

NCE, in a great city, there arose a mighty famine. This city was in the domains of a King, wise and good, always ready to supply the needs of his subjects. No sooner did the cry of the starving masses reach his ear than he sent bread to that city-bread enough and to spare-with the command to his servants there, "Go to every house; give bread to every creature"—a command short and concise, but clear enough to convey his exact wishes to his servants. So we should say; and yet some time passed ere the servants fully realized that the command and the work were meant for them. Indeed, they seemed to be asleep until the cries of the starving could no longer be ignored.

Then they rose up in a great hurry and began rushing about with bread. But they made a great mistake; instead of spreading their forces and distributing their bread equally throughout the city, they collected in one small district and commenced to deal out the bread most liberally to its inhabitants, and soon they were all very busy indeed. Occasionally some one would suggest that bread might be needed in other parts of the city, but they were hushed up by the reply that they could spare no workers; the other parts of the city were dirty, low, and disagreeable. Besides, several were not quite sure that the King intended them to go to the other parts of the city; at any rate, he had not sent them an individual message. So they went on, growing more energetic, pressing everyone into their service, until actually among so many workers some houses were left without bread because each one supposed some one else had called there.

After a while they formed themselves into bodies and labeled their bread by various names, and each body praised their own bread and thought little of that of the other bodies, and then they fairly came to open quarreling, for they were so numerous that they got into one another's way and were very jealous lest any of those they visited should taste any other bread than theirs. At first the people were confused, not knowing whose bread to take; many ending by taking some of all. Finally, many of them had so much that they grew tired of it, complained that it was stale, they must have new; others wanted it spiced and sweetened, or so thickly spread with jam that the bread could no longer be tasted; and the end of it all was, many declared that bread was no longer fit food for their children and they kicked it out of doors.

Meanwhile the cries of the starving ones became louder and more pitiful, and many among the workers felt that they must no longer close their ears; that the King did mean every house and every creature, and that his commands were as distinctly to them, as his servants, as though he had called them personally by name. And so they went in little bands, very few at first; more in time, as others recognized the call and as the pioneers came back to plead for more helpers and related the pitiful state of the starving masses. But they did not always come back, for many of the starving people had become mad through neglect, and, unable to distinguish friend from foe, they murdered many of those who came with the bread in their hands. Others, more intelligent, who knew what was going on in the favored part of the city, asked, "Why did you not come before? Do you not care that we starve? We hear that those people are tired of bread and will not even give it to their children, while we have not had the chance of a crust for ourselves or our little ones."

And, O! that was the hardest trial of all that these pioneers had to endure. But their example stirred up others and as they fell, one by one, by the mad hands of some starving wretch, or by the more hidden dangers that infested those parts of the city,

Mormon Temples and Their Uses.

295

there were always others ready to fill up the gaps. At first they met with but scant sympathy from the mass of those busy workers. Loud were the grumblings when they suggested taking some of the bright young helpers back with them; many solemn utterances of that oft-quoted proverb, "Charity begins at home;" but there they always stopped and did not go any farther, quite forgetting that the rest of the proverb is, "But should never end there."

Many a fair young girl, casting wistful glances to the far-off neighborhood of the starving, was chilled by the frowns of her mother, who bade her be content with carrying round a few loaves occasionally in her own immediate neighborhood. Many a brave, talented youth, burning with zeal to rush off in answer to those heartrending appeals for help, was argued down by cool, sarcastic, sometimes half-plausible remarks and reasonings about "buried talents," "casting pearls before swine," "brilliant prospects at home," and "letting his light shine where it would be appreciated."

Some of them even began to take a pride in those small, but increasing bands, going forth from time to time; and as they bustled about, treading on each other's heels, often with scarcely anything in their baskets, but rushing on their rounds from mere force of habit, they would smile complacently at each other, and say, "See what grand things we are doing over there!" But it never occurred to many of them that they ought to have been there too.

And suddenly the King came.

As the busy workers paused expectantly to hear the words of approval and commendation they looked for from his lips, slowly and solemnly came these words: "This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone.”

T

MORMON TEMPLES AND THEIR USES.

BY REV. J. D. GILLILAN.

HE Mormon Church believes in the building of temples, and proves its belief by its action, and justifies both with the following argument: "Why had the Son of man not where to lay his head? Because his Father had no house upon the earth, none dedicated to him and preserved for his exclusive use and the benefit of his obedient children. . . . The house he had prepared for the Son's reception had became polluted by money changers, dove sellers, faro gamblers, so that he could not sleep in it.

"It is no wonder that the Son of man soon after his resurrection from the tomb ascended to his Father, for he had no place on earth to lay his head, . . . the occupants thereof were professors in name, but hypocrites and apostates from whom no good thing can be expected."

The temple is the place only where men and women may obtain their endowments. Brigham Young thus says:

"Your endowment is to receive all those ordinances in the house of the Lord, which are necessary for you after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the keywords, the signs, and tokens pertaining to the holy priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell."

There are now four dedicated temples in Utah, the oldest at St. George, then follow in order, Logan, Manti, and Salt Lake-the last three having been dedicated

296

Mormon Temples and Their Uses.

within the last nine years. In them take place marriages of living parties and proxies for the dead, baptisms of the living for the dead, etc., etc.

Men are known to have been immersed hundreds, and some even thousands, of times for dead friends, particularly ancestors who passed away from the world before the coming of Joseph Smith with his new revelation as to the eternal fitness and correctness of things; for the Mormon Church not only attempts, or professes to attempt, to do the work of to-day, but reaches back into the yesterday of time, and by an incredible plan of supererogation will save all the dead of all the ages past who have by this time become repentant in the spirit world-the place of the spirits in prison as mentioned by Peter.

Celestial marriages not necessarily plural are here celebrated; parties are married for time and eternity, for they profess to believe the words of our Saviour in a peculiarly literal manner when he said, "There is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage in heaven," and argue, therefore, that as it is necessary to a man's eternal happiness that he be married, he must enter that relation in this world either in person or by proxy.

Mr. Eugene Young, a grandson of Brigham Young, explains as follows the purpose of the temple: "To explain the purpose of the temple it is necessary for me to make as clear as possible one or two points of Christian doctrine. They believe that there is no hell, but that in the salvation in the other world there will be three degrees of glory-the celestial, the telestial, and the terrestrial, compared, respectively, to the sun, moon, and stars; and to reach the celestial or highest glory one must pass through certain ordinances, among which, and most important, is baptism by immersion. This ordinance being absolutely necessary, it stands to reason that those who have died when the true Gospel was not on the earth [the Mormons allege that it was taken from the earth three or four hundred years after the death of Christ on account of the wickedness of mankind, and has been restored through Joseph Smith in accordance with the prophecy of John the Revelator] cannot reach the highest kingdom. To avoid this, relatives on earth are baptized in the name of the dead, and thus the door to the higher salvation is open to them; and temples are built for the baptism of the living for the dead, as well as for certain other ordinances pertaining to the earthly state, such as marriage."

The great new Mormon Temple was dedicated at Salt Lake City on April 6. The site for the building was selected July 28, 1847. The fifth day after the Mormon pioneers entered Great Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young, President of the Church, with a number of the apostles, was viewing the prospect in the place selected as his new home, where all seemed a barren waste, and in passing the southwest corner of where the temple now stands, struck his cane on the ground and exclaimed, "Here will be the temple of our God."

On February 6, 1853, ground was broken and two hundred and fifty men put to work on the excavation. On the 6th of April following, the corner stones were laid sixteen feet below the surface of the ground. The capstone was laid April 6, 1892, at which time the date for dedication was fixed for April 6, 1893, the sixty-third anniversary of the organization of the Mormon Church, and forty years from the day the temple corner stones were laid.

The building is 1863 feet long and 99 feet wide. With the towers it covers an area of 21,850 square feet. The foundation wall is 16 feet thick and 16 feet deep. On this the granite walls are 9 feet thick in bottom and narrow to 6 feet at the square. There are six towers, three on the east and three on the west. The corner towers are 26 feet square at the base. Those on the east are 200 feet high, and on the west 194.