Protest Against Senator Smoot
At a public meeting held in the Metropolitan Methodist church in this city, December 13, called by the Interdenominational Congress of Women of Washington, and presided over by Bishop Satterlee (Episcopal), the following resolutions were adopted against the seating in Congress of Senator Smoot, of Utah, following addresses by the bishop and a number of the ladies present:— Believing that the so-called Church of Latter Day Saints is antagonistic to our Federal Constitution, and every form of religion based upon the Bible; that it is a menace to American home life, and an insult to our American womanhood; and believing Senator Reed Smoot, of Utah, to be a pledged representative of that institution, bound by its laws and requirements to render first allegiance thereto, and that he therefore must of necessity be unfaithful to the laws of the United States; and believing that Apostle Smoot could not have been elected to the United States Senate without the dictation and command of the Mormon hierarchy, which is a complete union of church and state, and therefore in direct opposition to the principles of the Constitution of the United States; therefore,— Resolved, That the congregation here assembled do most earnestly protest against Apostle Smoot retaining his seat in our national Senate. Resolved, That we call upon all loyal and patriotic men and women of every State to send protests to the senators from their States, and urge upon such citizens immediate and prompt action. It is to be hoped that this example of the evils of church and state union will be a warning to the American people against sanctioning the connection of any other church with politics. The Mormon Church is by no means the largest church in the United States, and the evil of a union with the state, or with the civil power, is felt in proportion to the political influence which the church is able to command. There is something wrong somewhere, is the opinion expressed by the Philadelphia Public Ledger, with reference to an unnatural condition of things which is beginning to manifest itself in the juvenile stratum of society. The evidence of this, which we think amply justifies the opinion that something is wrong, and decidedly so, is thus stated by the Ledger:— Children have furnished an unusual and a distressing proportion of the criminal and tragic news of the last week. Schoolgirls have disappeared; lads have left home for wayward courses; boys barely in their teens have committed suicide, and two or three young misses have attempted to do so; two boys eight years old have been before the Federal courts, one of them, a negro pickaninny, charged with robbing the mails. A record like this provokes wonder whether there may not be something wrong somewhere. Is it home training, or the lack of it? or is it nerves? Does it point toward a growing native depravity? Does it mean precocity or degeneracy? A number of writers recently have coincided in remarking the extinction of the line between the young and the old. No longer do middle-aged men and women find their ideas and interests different from those of the younger generation, there is a new camaraderie in society, in business, at home. Age does not count much either way, as it used to. But we do not want it to come to pass that infants furnish us the news of suicides, abduction, embezzlement, and mail robbery. We are in the “perilous times” of the last days, when men have given themselves up to worldliness, and cut themselves off from the influences of the Spirit of God, until the spirit of evil has almost unlimited sway. This is what is wrong.