NO FEDERAL INTERFERENCE FOR RELIGION.
By Editor
[From the New York Christian Advocate, May 10.] IT is reported that a well-known author, reformer, and preacher proposes "Federal interference as the only possible means of preventing Mormon influence from becoming supreme in every State west of the Mississippi." He is said to state that they have more than thirteen thousand (this we fancy a misprint) missionaries at work in the Southern States, and that, "tho Mormons are only one-fifteenth of the number of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, they have increased more than all three of those denominations put together within a given period." No Federal interference (so long as they break no Federal law) will be in harmony with the Constitution of the United States. If education and Christianity can not keep it down, Mormonism has a constitutional right to succeed. Federal influence against any religion, whose votaries do not break the law, would be the most dangerous of all possible resorts. The United States rises or falls with no restriction on conscience and no interference with religion. As a religion, Mormonism can not command the assent of thoughtful, intelligent persons. It may draw uneducated people within its circle, and they may become shrewd and able within that sphere, and be involved with its property and social influences, and their children may be intelligent and incapable of looking over the moral and intellectual fences which have been built around them; but in the open field of discussion and in free association with the public, Mormonism can make no real progress. But whither is our logic leading us? Is not this country the birthplace of Modern Spiritualism and Christian Science, and the harvest-field of anti-medicine faith healing? Who knows what may happen? Do not the clairvoyants and fortune-tellers thrive here, and nowhere more than in Boston and New York? Is not this the paradise of quacks of all sorts, Miller syndicates, to say nothing of all sorts of political delusions and other mental and moral epidemics? But Federal interference, never, unless people violate the law. Federal interference and State interference with the practise of polygamy, yes. But neither Federal nor State interference with Mormonism as a religion, for that would simply mean a possible interference, Federal or State, with Protestantism where Catholicism is in the majority, or Catholicism where Protestantism is in the majority, or any branch of either. It is "pleading the baby act" for any religion in this country to ask for Federal interference in its own behalf or against another. Let the Christian church know the danger, and use Christian means of counteracting it, and all will be well. Let them send as many missionaries, and better support those they have; let pastors and laymen scour the unchurched communities, and no such ungodly mixture of the carnal and the spiritual as Mormonism can long flourish. The folly of the Spiritistic fallacy was well illustrated recently in Minneapolis. A young widow, a Spiritist, being haunted with the thought that the spirit of her dead husband was lonely, rented a house and furnished it for his accommodation. It was next impressed upon her that her husband had induced the spirits of his father and mother and two sisters, one a babe, to inhabit the house with him. This necessitated more furnishings and a cradle for the baby. The widow was about to replenish their wardrobes when she became acquainted with a young man who is to be her future husband. Into such indescribable folly as this are people led who have set aside the Word of God and placed their dependence upon human philosophy, or, as in this case, upon the "doctrines of demons." The Word is so plain upon this matter that those who wish to know the truth need not err. "The dead know not anything," "their thoughts perish." They who go down into the grave know nothing until the "trump of God" shall wake those "that sleep in dust," when "corruption" and "mortality" are changed into "incorruption" and "immortality." Let the readers of the SIGNS study the Word, that they may not be overwhelmed in the wave of Spiritism that is sweeping over the world, gathering strength as the delusions of the last days increase in number and power.