The Mormon System

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 23, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 34.

The Mormon System

Yes, God wants us all to do something; but, first of all, it is essential that we be something. "Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus," who says, "Without Me ye can do nothing."

To decide from one's own concept as to what truth should be, rather than to accept what it is from the standpoint of the Word of truth, is the bane of human criticism. It is making oneself the standard, instead of being governed by the word of wisdom. Christ is the truth, and only through belief of His Word—not through criticism of it—can any one find truth. Ultra-criticism of the Word often obscures its obvious meaning; it darkens the vision of the critic, and misleads those who are inclined to trust in human wisdom for a knowledge of the truth.

The urgency with which many people press the one point of polygamy in objecting to Mormonism would lead to the supposition that in everything else the great deception is acceptable to them, or would not be specially criticized, were polygamy out of the way. Polygamy is, without question, as black as any foe could possibly paint it; but the whole Mormon system is a travesty on Christianity; the whole machination is a scheme to be a law unto itself. It was so before the adoption of polygamy, as well as afterward, and it would be none the less so with polygamy abolished. It is simply a great autocratic political organization, with religious pretension for a cloak. The admission of Utah into the Union on the condition that the Mormons abolish polygamy, was an acknowledgment that the upas tree would be harmless, if one branch were cut off. It is the cultivation of a huge church-and-state autocracy in the land, dominated by a few lords of the manor, whose venality is manifest from every point of view and in every fundamental principle, that constitutes the danger of Mormonism to the Republic. Mormonism is working insidiously, and with more progress than is generally realized, to gain the balance of political power in other states besides Utah; and wherever it may succeed the sequel will prove that the system is just as vicious without polygamy as with it. It is not wisdom to practically indorse the wicked system by contending against one particular feature, as tho that were all that is bad about it.