Your ShelfYour Projects

The Mormon Plague

5%

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 13, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 11.

Read the full edition

The Mormon Plague.

THE extensive and successful efforts of the Mormon power, in almost all nations, to decoy innocent people into its net, calls for a note of warning from every one in a position to give the sound any influence whatever. From an elaborate article in the Christian Union, by Prof. George N. Marden, of Colorado Springs, Col., who has well acquainted himself with the subject, we cull the following:—
To-day the Mormon Church has as many missionaries as has the American Board. In one year, 1881, they sent out one hundred and eighty-nine, besides seventy-nine to Arizona to spy out and secure the best land for colonization purposes. One day last April, sixty-one Mormon missionaries were at the Grand Central hotel, New York, and sailed for Europe the day following. On the 16th of October, thirty more left Salt Lake City in a Pullman car. Within eight months of last year, about 3,000 Mormon proselytes arrived at New York. The Mormons have missions in England, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Malta, Gibraltar, Hindostan, Australia, Siam, Ceylon, China, Chile, Guinea, the West Indies, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Iceland, on the banks of the Nile, and even in the Holy Land. Twenty-seven nationalities were represented in one of their recent public celebrations. More converts were sent to Utah in the past two seasons, since the passage of the Edmunds bill, than in any four years previous. Rural districts in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee have yielded many. The Book of Mormon is now printed in many tongues, and periodicals are issued in at least eight languages. Mormon land is much more than Utah land. Shrewdly, systematically, large areas have been secured in the great central plateau of this continent, and are being colonized for religious and political control. Some of the best portions of Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, and Colorado, are under Mormon control.
Forty years ago an officer of the United States Army wrote to a friend: "There is developing in the Rocky Mountain region a power that will, if unhindered, some day shake this country to its center." William Smith, brother of the prophet, left the Mormons years ago, saying, "It is their design to set up an independent government; the mass of Mormons will be purged of American feelings, and will be shut out by church restrictions from any but a Mormon freedom." To-day the Mormon vote is solid, is dictated by a few men, and is in favor of the party which is least inclined to restrain Mormonism.
Surely, Mormonism is no weakling to be ignored. It is probably the most energetic ecclesiastical body on this continent. In the face of pulpit, press, and adverse legislation this sect has thriven and thrives. Many people are asking how it is that this thing of mean origin and ridiculous pretensions has been able to rise up in the midst of the nineteenth century. How is it that in this our country, where every fifth inhabitant belongs to the Christian communion, is found a system with practices tolerated in no other nominally Christian land excepting Abyssinia? The answer is manifold.
1. Mormonism goes after simple-hearted, uneducated people. It gains a respectful hearing by means of the truth which the system contains, and not by means of the error. It says many good things, as: Repent; fear God; be honest; be just; be virtuous.
2. It is eclectic. Joseph Smith shrewdly determined that his scheme should accommodate wanderers from all folds. So it professes to believe in the New Testament, and in the mission of Christ, and in the Book of Mormon as being in harmony with the Bible. It borrows scraps of doctrine from the various Christian sects. John Taylor says: "The present dispensation is a combination of the various dispensations that have existed in the different ages of the world." This profound liberality and breadth is artfully contrasted with the exclusiveness of the sects; and Mormon unity, also, with the divided aspect of Christendom.
3. Missionary operations are conducted with enthusiastic, self-denying zeal, many missionaries traveling—as the president of the church has done—tens of thousands of miles without purse or scrip, preaching the doctrines of Mormonism. Little or nothing is said about the obnoxious features of the system. All that the converts know is from the statements of Mormons.
4. While Mormonism goes across seas to men in coal-pits and factories, and labors among them as loving their souls, it also holds out to the weary, hopeless toiler the assurance of a home of his own and forty acres in a sunny land, and offers him aid, if necessary, from the Emigration Fund.
5. By thoroughness of organization the Mormon Church has a strong hold. Every fourth man is an official. There are twenty large districts; these are divided into two hundred and thirty wards; the wards are subdivided, and over the subdivisions are set deacons and teachers to visit each individual every moon, and to know his affairs, temporal and spiritual. All Mormons are solemnly sworn to keep no secrets from the teachers. From the great wheel to the least spindle the whole Mormon system is tightly belted and geared together.
6. The iron grip of the Mormon Church appears in its control of the land. The forty acres promised is to be found where the church elects to send the proselyte. The leaders have such control of choice soil in Utah that non-Mormon emigrants are discouraged from entering. Colonization for political ends is systematically carried on. Does the Mormon vote need strengthening in some county in Idaho? Strong wards in Utah are bidden to furnish their quotas of emigrants. As Bishop Lunt says: "Our people are obedient. When called by the church they promptly obey; sell houses, lands, and stock, and remove to any part of the country to which the church may direct them. You can imagine," adds the Bishop, "the results which wisdom may bring about with such a system as ours; it is the completest the world has ever seen." The Mormon Church in its control of the irrigating canals has an effective grip. If a man rebels, the thumb on the ditch chokes him into submission. No wonder the Mormon vote is solid.
7. Great is the power of the tithe. One-tenth of all one's property and income and time is required. About a round million a year is raised for purposes which strengthen the church. Thousands of dollars are spent at Washington in adroit lobbying against anti-Mormon movements. Generous attentions shown to distinguished visitors at the Mormon capital tend, in some degree, to disarm criticism.
8. The Mormons are held together, not only by external authority, but by a kind of faith and devotion. It were blindness to call them hypocrites; though it would doubtless be but a discreet and mild use of language to apply to the founder the word knave.
9. Mormonism has as a part of its capital the memory of sufferings and tribulations; especially the martyrdom of the prophet, the manner of whose death threw his vices into the background and surrounded him with a halo. The story of the march of the ten thousand across the plains, and of precious dust laid beneath the buffalo grass by the weary way, is not without effect. The shotgun policy, which report says was employed against Mormon preachers in parts of North Carolina last year, is an effective ally of Mormonism.
10. Among the leaders polygamy is a bond, the sense of fellowship being strengthened by common opposition to the law of the land. It is a sad fact that the Mormon Church furnishes to the conscience a justification of all that it bids men do. It sets its "ought" to abominable things. Adroitly shuffling texts, it teaches that the highest seats in Heaven are for those who have the largest families on earth. And the sly oracle permitting polygamy was careful to provide for future changes of policy on this subject.
11. Favorable to Mormon growth is the isolation of its seat of power, and the general segregation of the converts, by which much contact with non-Mormon civilization is generally avoided; also their concentration in a great gathering-place from all the nations, for which prediction was provided in the Book of Mormon.
The magnificent temple at Salt Lake City, whose total cost will be nine millions of dollars, and which has already been thirty years in building—this, and other grand and imposing structures, the creation of their own toil, and for their solemn mysteries, impress the people with a sense of power. Zeal in temple building is quickened by the doctrine that the living may be baptized for, and save the souls of their dead friends, or of heathen, but that the baptism, to avail, must be performed in the temple only.
The Mormons have a strong hold on their young people by means of their system of schools, from which non-Mormon teachers are excluded, and in which Mormon doctrines are assiduously taught.
The Mormon press and pulpit catch eagerly at calamities, by fire and flood, earthquakes, popular discontents, fears in high places, wars and rumors of wars, and crimes outside of Mormondom, as signs that the kingdom of the "saints" is to triumph.
Finally, by substituting church tribunals with closed doors in place of open courts, and by the apparent faith of the leaders in their ability to defy the Government, and, if it must be said, by the slowness of the Republic to awake to a sense of danger, this masterly tyranny has got a tightening grip, which can be broken only by vigorous measures applied speedily, and faithfully followed up.
Yet in the face of all this spectacle of corruption, political demagogues become fawning sycophants before the Mormon ballot and Mormon money. And in wholesale mercantile circles is whispered the fear that anti-Mormon agitation may injure trade with Utah!