forty-three and explored the wilderness. On July 24, 1847, he drove the "center-stake" of faith in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. "Deseret" he named it, which in the mystic tongue of "Reformed Egyptian" meaneth "Land of the Honey-Bee." And so the long-wandering followers of the Word of Nephi at last entered into their inheritance. The ark came to rest in a Tabernacle in the midst of the city that rose on the shore of the saline sea. The spirit of Joseph Smith lived on. His successor shaped a State in 1849 and declared himself its Governor in defiance of the National Congress which had profanely presumed to substitute "Utah" for "Deseret" and demote it to a Territory. Then in 1852 he confirmed Joseph's plurality of wedlock with a ukase proclaiming polygamy as the celestial law of marriage. Washington ultimately won, but not until more than a thousand Mormons went to jail, millions of dollars in fines were paid for violation of the Federal statute forbidding more than one wife, and the Church, in 1890, reversed itself by revelation. Meantime Utah had been populated and was blooming like the Garden of Eden. Brigham Young, with the aid of twenty-one wives, contributed forty-eight descendants and on his own initiative discovered alfalfa to the world. He also introduced woman suffrage as a matter of political expediency. But he kept the helpmeets in their places. That is, all save one, Eliza Ann Webb, his No. 19, who divorced him "because she liked nice things," started to "expose" Mormonism and caused his prosecution for polygamy in 1871. He was not convicted. On August 29, 1877, he gave up the ghost and left an estate of one million six hundred twenty-six thousand, five hundred ten dollars, eight cents. Under the successors of Brigham Young the Mormon theocracy has been firmly established by adherence to the belief that the church was founded by messengers sent from heaven, all of them seers and revelators. The modern Mormon explains that "God has come in person and spoken to our prophet," the revelations being obtained through "dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind or by voices without visional appearance or by actual manifestations of the Presence before the eye." Expedient corrections have also been revealed with the passage of years and one of the most recent is the edict of 1925 regarding the undergarments of the saints. Joseph Smith got it direct from the Throne that such clothing should leave only the head, hands and feet exposed and should be fastened to the body with strings. B.V.D.'s made no headway in Utah till the new dispensation permitted shorter lingerie and buttons. And then there was a riot in the Tabernacle. A meeting of ten thousand churchmen assembled in October, 1927, to sustain the underwear revelation was startled by the entry of one Paul Feil, aged fifty, according to the Associated Press, who marched down the grand aisle waving banners and heralding "a message for Israel." "I plead guilty to delivering a message of peace from God," Paul told the judge who gave him a suspended sentence of five days in jail for disturbing the very peace he sought to bring. He had taken exception to the order of the Church authorities altering shirts, drawers and union suits "because God is unchanging and could not have permitted this deviation from the established custom." Paul was a throw-back to the olden times when Elder Kimball wrote in his Journal: "I could distinctly see the evil spirits who foamed and gnashed their teeth upon us —we gazed upon them an hour and a half" and when Elder Hyde fought a whole host of demons who "nearly choked him to death." His brethren had come a long way from the hill of Palmyra and the day of the first Prophet's excavations. The new religion had come through to permanence, regularity and respectability. But for this one that was successful, scores of others were buried with the avatars of their faith in the wilds of the early West. Always it was the apostolic incentive that led them forth. Always it was the Messianic complex. And one of those that failed deserves to be remembered with the Moses of the Mormons. It was Abel Sargent, who went out from Morgantown, Virginia, to the neighborhood of St. Clairsville, Ohio, in 1812 with a brand new revelation through which he said he held converse with the angels and was made the Almighty's medium of communication with the world. He roamed about the country with his twelve apostles, mostly women, pretending to heal the sick and raise the dead. Abel did not believe in any devil or judgment or hell, but proclaiming the annihilation of the wicked, taught that the regenerated soul was part of God and that when the body died was reabsorbed into God. One of his followers finally claimed too much for him and set him to a feat that ended his career. The disciple insisted that the prophet could fast as long as Christ did,—forty days and forty nights. Abel betook himself to a hilltop while his devotees ringed the base in a circle of constant prayer. They ate but he did not. No food could reach him through their impregnable watch of faith. Day after day the incantations at the foot of the hill waxed stronger and stronger while Abel on the mount, chanting the antiphonal responses, grew weaker and weaker. On the sixteenth morning his voice ceased alto gether. He was breathing his last when the twelve apostles reached his side. But Abel's flock were not yet satisfied. He had told them that he would resuscitate himself after three days. So they laid his body on a bier in the middle of the camp and hundreds thronged in from miles around to behold the miracle. The appointed time passed. One of the apostles got a revelation and made an extension to three times three days. Gradually vociferous prayer and song gave way to mourning and in turn grief yielded to disappointment and disillusion. The curious deserted first, and then the adherents themselves. At the last the twelve apostles of Abel had to bury him. If only there had been a spring of water and clump of berry bushes on the summit of that Ohio hill there might have descended the founder of a new church, the settler of a State, the builder of a tabernacle to stand as a monument to his name and memory. CHAPTER XII THE SECOND COMING We are pilgrims looking home, Sad and weary off we roam, But we know 'twill all be well, in the morning; Every stormy wave has past, And we gather safe at last, in the morning. Old Adventist hymn. ROTESQUE silhouettes smudged the stark white walls of the low-ceilinged tent under the dim and streaking light of half a dozen smoky lamps of brass. Twenty rows of New Hampshire farmers, woodsmen and millhands with their wives and sons and daughters were gazing ever so earnestly over the two vacant settees in front of them toward the slight little figure on the platform of creaking planks laid on sawhorses. At his left a woman was half turned round on a stool behind a diminutive organ. One of his hands was uplifted in a gesture of beckoning; the other rested upon an open Bible, most of its pages bulked to one side the center. He had said he must "prove all things." He had preached through from Genesis to Revelation. These were the last days. Prophecy had been fulfilled. The Seven Seals would soon be broken. And the Son of Man would come to sit in the morning of the Judgment. "My brother, are you ready? My sister, are you ready? This may be the last night of all. Before dawn you may stand |