stantly come together in the shock of a conflict which though much more promptly settled than that from which we have just emerged cannot fail, if the present Mormon leaders are alive, to be as bloody.

ment.

I find extreme uncertainty prevailing at the East in regard to the Mormon character and destiny; but on no particular point to a greater degree, than on this how the collision which I have called inevitable will occur, and how it will be settled. Many good and wise men, to whose moral natures polygamy is abhorrent, are still unable to see how it can ever become a valid ground for the interference of the National GovernTo such, any governmental disturbance of local customs regarding marriage, looks as tyrannous as dictation concerning statutes of divorce. If Congress is to decide that a man may not marry as often as he pleases, why, they ask, may it not also settle the question as to what constitutes the legal ground of separation? In the majority of the States nothing but infidelity is admitted as such a ground; in a few States the decree of divorce is issued upon the simple proof of marital unhappiness. In the latter States both the divorced parties are free to contract fresh alliances. But, supposing that such divorced parties should come into one of the former class of States and select new partners, in this State they would be guilty of bigamy, their former partners not having been separated from them on any ground allowed by the State. Why should not such a case of bigamy be made the subject of Congressional legislation as well as that of Utah? Moreover, marriage seems essentially to belong to those matters which are with most propriety settled in foro conscientiæ; or, if we regard the importance of that, relation in its bearings on the neighbors of the married, as settling to a great extent the happiness and safety of the social system, legislation upon it may most naturally be committed to the community immediately concerned. Those who have favored national legislation against polygamy are in the habit of comparing it with slavery an institution with which Congress to a certain extent was always obliged to concern itself, and which, finally, it was compelled by ratificatory action, at least, to destroy, in spite of the fact that it was domestic and internal to separate independent States. The analogy, however, is a strained one. In the humanitarian point of view, slavery and polygamy are entirely different. The slave is held compulsorily; in Utah the wife of the polygamist is not obliged to stay with him a single day after she is dissatisfied. She has merely to go to Brigham Young and inform him that she is unhappy with her husband; upon which, after sufficient investigation to ascertain that her step is deliberate, and not the result of a sudden fit of passion the consequences of which she would repent in her calmer moments, the President decrees a divorce immediately. Cases have occurred in which a woman entered Brigham's office the wife of one man and went out of it another's. Nor does polygamy resemble slavery in the expansiveness of its results. The fact that a negro could be made to produce a hundred dollars' worth of cotton on one tenth of

the outlay in food and clothes for which a similar amount of labor could De procured from the poorest freeman, tended to depreciate labor throughout the entire country; and when, as often happened, especially among the class of slaves resulting from slavery's favorite practice of "miscegenation," not only brute labor, but a high grade of mechanical ingenuity and artistic skill, could be procured for the still minuter fraction of an equally accomplished white man's wages, not only muscular strength, but intellectual ability was undersold and degraded through the length and breadth of the land. But the possibility of marrying two wives in Utah affects none of the partners to monogamic marriages in other parts of the country does not degrade the marital relation, nor alter the sacredness of the tie and the condition of the married woman elsewhere. In fact, the example of a polygamic community operates, by way of warning, to intensify the monogamic spirit of people beyond the boundary of its immediate influence. To say the least, the marriage question is a very delicate and complicated one, and the central power of a Union like our own must hesitate long before it touches the question in any Territory or State. But there is no need of such an interference. Every end which might be attained by it may be secured without running the risk of establishing a bad precedent-of acting unconstitutionally against the liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty- by a method much simpler, even though less direct, and so far from being open to serious objections on the ground of our republican principles, certain to be demanded in obedience to those principles, for the settlement of the Mormon question, at no distant day. The moment that Mormonism becomes a power dangerous to the peace and supremacy of the Union, admit Utah into the sisterhood of States, and fulfill to her people the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government. For the attainment of that end, Congress will be compelled to deprive the Church of all civil authority; and the unhallowed union of Church and State once terminated, Mormonism necessarily sinks to the level of any other sect. That sinking means destruction. Episcopacy and Presbyterianism flourish still more healthily, as we have seen in this country, when disentangled from the corrupting embrace of civil power; no longer state churches, as in England and Scotland, they become churches of the people, and draw fresh blood from the great, warm heart on which they were naturally meant to lie: but Mormonism has no popular basis—it must have authority, or perish. It is government as much as it is worship— it is a despotism in both; in fine, it is Judaism revived, or rather, galvanized into a mockery of life, and adapted to the nineteenth century, in the particulars where it has not force enough to adapt the nineteenth century to itself.

I have repeatedly asserted that Mormonism is Judaism, and this seems the best place to examine how far that assertion may be verified. There has always been a Judaizing tendency at work, with greater or less vigor, in the body of Christian civilization. It troubled the Apostles, who could

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scarcely leave their flocks before Judaistic teachers sprung up among them, and tried to bring them back under the former yoke of bondage. It has manifested itself ever since, in efforts made to substitute cumbrous rituals for the simple worship of a loving nature and righteous living; sacred places like Samaria and Jerusalem, like Rome and the Temple, or the church edifice in general, for the spirit in which God would have men worship Him; special sacred days, fasts, feasts, "new-moons and Sabbaths," for the one unbroken day of a whole devoted life. In the religion of this country the Judaizing tendency has powerfully manifested itself. Noble in its spirit, purposes, and results as Puritanism to a great extent has been, it has greatly favored and fostered this tendency. It has distrusted the mild discipline, the persuasive doctrines of the Christian dispensation, impliedly treating them as too lax for the regulation of human life, and needing to be reinforced by the sterner threats, and more terrible penalties of the Mosaic ages. It has abjured the doctrine of progressive revelation, and confounded the fulfillment of a dispensation intended for the infancy of mankind with insult to that dispensation and its blasphemous degradation from the respect due a revelation of God; forgetting that the Bible itself declares its temporary purpose, calls it at best but a shadow of good things to come, and says that the first generation of our present era should not pass away before every jot and tittle of it was fulfilled. Standing on the untenable ground, that a system which was true for a given time and race, must be true for all times and all races; moreover, influenced by a sombre spirit peculiar to its own moral constitution (without which it would not have fallen into its intellectual mistake), it has favored the introduction among our people of a sort of hybrid religion, which may be called, at the risk of a theological bull, Old Testament Christianity. The child brought up under its discipline finds it hard to believe that the Messiah has really come, and cannot see anything but a technical ground of disagreement between Christians and Jews. He hears the Old Testament read at church and in the family quite as often as the New even oftener than any part but the polemic. He is taught to regard God chiefly as Force; he hears of Him manifesting the passions of humanity, and a very imperfect humanity at that; but is instructed to palliate these manifestations, on the ground that his force is the Supreme Force, his will the Paramount Will. Thus he learns that only in finite matters is "might makes right" an abominable doctrine; that making the terms infinite, the proposition becomes a formula for the expression of the highest holiness of the universe. The Judaistic Christian, as I said of the Mormon, though in a less degree, because he has not been consistent enough to carry out his views to their ultimate logical conclusions, has thrown away the results of the last eighteen centuries, and gone back for his spiritual aliment to the crude and halfdeveloped notions of truth and laws of life, which were granted to the imperfect faculties of the ancients, by that Divine Spirit of accommoda.

tion which prepares for the human race its food in due season, milk for babes, strong meat for men, and furnishes mankind in any given era only with such pabulum as it can digest. As was said above, the whole error of Puritan theology lies in its obstinate denial of the fact that all Divine dealings with mankind are progressive. It insists on this denial because it fears that a confession of the fact involves the unsettlement of faith involves an admission that what is true to-day may not be true to-morrow. If it conceded this it must lose its organic existence, for its axis is not love but belief- not a principle of life, but a set of doctrines. So, there is no way of escape for it. It cannot say that God's revelation of himself and of his plan of governing the universe, as given to the Jews, was a very good thing—even the very best thing for the day and the people to whom it was made; that it conveyed the largest amount of truth capable of being comprehended by an infant race, and that to have conveyed more would have really had the effect of conveying less; that just as I say "The sun rises" to a child, whom my utmost effort could not cause to comprehend the phenomena of terrestrial revolution, the Creator may describe Himself and his dealings to a Jew of Joshua's, David's, or Herod's time in a way which was absolutely perfect in its fitness to reveal the greatest amount of truth, and inculcate the highest degree of holiness which the ancient hearer was developed to attain, but which, at the same time, to me with my enlightenment of at least 1870 years plus the ancients', should be no truth at all, and no stimulus in the way of holiness.

Unable to make this acknowledgment without the corollary that revealed doctrine is progressive; unable to grant that corollary without the further conclusion that life, not doctrine, is the only eternal, unchangeable basis of religion; unable to see that Christ came, not to impart an immutable creed, which in the nature of human intellect is a thing impossible, but to infuse a spirit into the life of mankind, which should keep, the soul advancing into grander perceptions of intellectual truth forever, and to implant a deathless germinal principle, whose growth, while it sweetened and purified the moral character, should enable the reason to throw off shard after shard of creed, as it found their capacities successively too narrow to bound and embody the truth which its strengthening vision caught, and its increasing constructive powers formulated, — unable to do thus, Judaistic Christianity is compelled to accept the obsolete régime of types and shadows as equally commanding in our present life with the Christian régime of perfect day.

It finds the Divine character delineated in the old Hebrew Scriptures by terrible physical symbols, by forcible, but to our present enlightenment, degrading anthropomorphisms. In the Scriptures of the Christian dispensation, and progressively in the conceptions which have been developed under the influence of its implanted spirit in the general consciousness of our age, it finds an altogether higher and nobler state

ment of the relations between mankind and the Divine of the character of the latter, and the destiny of the former. But pledged by its original mistake it is compelled to carry both ideals, according them equal prominence, granting them equal respect. It therefore sets about finding a compromise. In the effort to make them fit, to reconcile them where they clash, it finds the Judaistic ideals always the most tyrannous, because they are expressed in terms most vehement, and symbols most physically tangible. The result is that Judaism gets a great deal more than its share in the statement, and the hybrid notions resulting from the compromise seem more properly to belong to the Hebrew than the Christian period of the world. The disciple of Judaistic Christianity insists that his rushlight shall not be blown out though the sun stands at high noon, and holds it so close to his eyes that they are too dazzled by its fire and bleared by its smoke to see the sun clearly.

It would startle the old Puritan to charge him with the ancestry of Mormonism but Mormorism is certainly the outgrowth of those Judaistic ideas which he has insisted on carrying over, past their fulfillment, into the life and thought of the Christian age. Talk with an intelligent Mormon upon the subject of his system, and so long as he does not touch upon polygamy you will be irresistibly reminded in all that he says of many a sermon which you have heard from the representatives of Puritan ideas. He loves as well as Cotton Mather, or his intellectual offspring, to introduce God to you in an atmosphere quaking with Hebrew thunders. He has a perfect arsenal of fiery clouds, and physical hells; he swathes all his metaphors in garments of mysterious horror. He takes the Old Testament, as he takes all the Scriptures, literally, and consistently carries this literal interpretation into his daily life.

Almost without exception, the Mormon leaders passed their childhood under the influence of the sternest Puritan thought. Both Brigham Young and Heber Kimball were brought up in its nurture and admonition. They look back with reverence upon their parents and teachers, as having prepared them for the reception of the full Latter-day glory. I am far from charging upon Puritan theology any intentional share in the generation of Mormonism; still, any dispassionate man, pledged to no sect, but to the spirit of Christianity in general, cannot fail to perceive that Mormonism is the legitimate outgrowth of its intellectual bias pushed to the extreme. Judaism has been praised, honored, imitated, kept alive in the Christian teaching of the age, until it has at last found disciples to reconstruct it as a living institution.

It is curious to see how the very physical circumstances of Mormonism are a copy of the Jewish. The parallel is not a fanciful or accidental one. The Mormons acknowledge, in some points intend it, themselves. Kirtland and Nauvoo were their settlements in Egypt; Joe Smith was their Moses; and when he died too early for a sight of the promised land, Brigham Young became the Joshua who led them all the way home.