The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5

In council read & concurred W. Hutchinson, Speaker

J. Willard

Sec'y

Consented to

W. SHIRLEY.

THE MORMON CHURCH

By Victoria Reed

On the 24th of July, 1847, Brigham Young and a few followers pitched their tents at the base of the Wasatch Range—a spur of the Rocky Mountains. This was the nucleus of what is now known as the flourishing city of Salt Lake. These pioneers came across the vast plains, over the desolate mountains and entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake through Emigration Canon. Their first view of the locality was from the mouth of the canon which is at an elevation of seven hundred feet above the city, and from this eminence the clearness of the atmosphere enabled them to see mountain ranges ninety miles distant.

The wide valley, the broad expanse of the lake with its mountainous islands, miles in extent, and the encircling ranges, formed an amphitheatre of unexampled grandeur and rugged beauty. The valley itself at that time was a vast desert without tree or shrub, nothing but the wild sage-brush and the white alkali soil could be seen, if we except the scrub-oaks and lebanon cedars that covered the mountain sides and the emerald colored waters of the lake. Utah was then Mexican Territory, and this fact, as much perhaps as any other, determined Brigham Young to settle there. When the exodus from Nauvoo took place, the Mormons were roughly estimated at four thousand souls and probably about that number made the first settlement in Utah; but they have increased now to over two hundred and fifty thousand in the United States with societies in England, Wales and Scandinavia, all flourishing and sending yearly to Salt Lake as many as they can find means to transport. The history of this people will probably never be fully written, but they endured hardships, privations, sufferings, torture and death. Their settlement of Utah was one of extreme peril and anxiety, and for years it was a question whether they would survive or perish. Had they been actuated by conscience, by pure religious zeal, by patriotism, by any of the nobler sentiments, they would have made an enviable reputation in history and gone down to posterity as a society commanding the respect and veneration of the world; but when it is known that no community or state even would tolerate them and that they sought this uninhabitable wild, this unknown and then foreign territory, to escape the punishment of their crimes, and to practise an abhorrent and barbarous tenet of their faith, their glory departs and they look and will look in the light of history abject and pitiable. Some conception of their great undertaking in crossing the continent may be imagined when we reflect there were no roads, no known way across the vast arid plains, no mountain cuts, no bridged streams, no drinking water for miles upon miles with long tedious marches resulting in sickness and death.

To one acquainted with the country, knowing the obstacles they overcame, it is a matter of wonder that women and children were ever able to perform it. It must be remembered that their destination reached, their trials had only fairly begun. They were surrounded by savages, they were over a thousand miles from the habitation of a white man. They had pitched their tents on an alkali plain that had never been tilled; not a blade of grass grew in the soil and this in a climate where not a drop of rain or even a cloud appeared for six months in the year. Irrigation had never been tried, and the whole scheme was an experiment, the failure of which would have been fatal to the settlement. The first winter was spent in their wagons and in tents, while their subsistence was upon a scanty supply of vegetables. It is no more than common justice to accord to this people a great undertaking in founding the settlements of the territory, and a great triumph in their complete success; but above and beyond this, very little can be said in their favor.

The legal title of the Mormon church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and in the church parlance, Salt Lake city is a state of Zion and the real Zion is at Jackson, Missouri, to which place the Mormons claim they are some day to return. The Mormon church is a very complicated institution, but as perfect in its organization and operations as the Catholic church. Church and State are inseparable and the main complications are in the priesthood which extends to nearly every male member of the church who has a family, thus making them all more or less responsible for the proceedings of their leaders. This priesthood is composed of a president, in whom is combined prophet, seer or revelator of the church. There have been only three men to fill that office, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor who now occupies the position. This chief with two councillors form the first presidency. Next in order come the twelve apostles who hold equal authority in church matters with the president, though the presidency is the last resort in case of appeal. Next comes the order of the seventies, which consists of seven presidents, each having control or presiding over seventy priests or lower presidents, each of whom in turn, presides over a quorum of seventy. Out of this order of seventies come the patriarchs who dispense the blessings of the church, the high council which is an ecclesiastical court, all these orders making up a priesthood after the order of Melchisedec. Then follows the Aaronic priesthood which is composed of a senior bishop with two councillors acting as president of the state of Zion, and an indefinite number of bishops of lower rank with elders, teachers and deacons. The Mormons claim that this is the only apostolic church, the only church having the sign of miracles, the laying on of hands, the giving of tongues, the baptism for the dead, the consecration of marriage, the only church through whom and with whom God is talking as of old. Many of the ordinances of the church are performed in secret and are still more complicated. Although some of these rites and ceremonies have been revealed by apostates, yet there are others of such a character that even the bitterest seceder from the church would not dare unfold them. With this complex system conceived after the manner of the Jewish priesthood, and with the various revelations that have been added from time to time, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints stands to-day as a very curious monument to the ingenuity of men, the most prominent of whom were descended from Puritan fathers.

The ordinance that has given so much unpleasant notoriety to this church is that of polygamy, or plural marriage as the Mormons designate it. There are three kinds of marriage; the marriage for this world as in other churches, "till death do us part;" the marriage for this world and for eternity combined; and the marriage for eternity alone, independent and separate from this world's relationship.

The Mormon woman has no place in the future state excepting as she enters under the protection of her husband, so this last marriage or sealing for eternity was instituted to enable all unmarried women, or those who were only married for this world, to gain a foothold in the life to come. The motto of the Mormon church is, the greater the family, the greater the reward. Brigham Young with his nineteen families excelled in this respect, and he will be awarded the highest seat in Heaven. His sealed wives are said to number two hundred and fifty.

Joseph Smith has also been very popular and has had scores sealed to him.

To uphold this peculiarly constituted church, various crimes have been committed, varying in hue, but the Mountain Meadow Massacre, when one hundred and nineteen men, women and children were butchered in cold blood under a flag of truce, surpasses in atrocity any act of the savage tribes by whom they are surrounded, and has stained indelibly the Mormon church. Before the advent of the Union Pacific Railroad, to breath a word against the church organization or any of its acts or resist one of their tenets or accumulate more wealth than was acceptable to the leaders, has always brought down instant and the severest punishment, and the perpetrators could never be brought to justice as they were emissaries of Brigham Young and his councillors.

It is polygamy, however, more than all their other deeds and revelations that has entailed misery, suffering and degradation. It has been the parent of more crime, more disloyalty, more deceit and sin generally than all the other causes combined. It is claimed that the revelation of polygamy came to the prophet Joseph Smith in 1843 at Nauvoo, and it was secretly practised by him and by other members of his church; but it was not published to the world until 1852, when Brigham Young made it known in Utah, thinking no doubt that he was beyond the pale of civilization and the terrors of the law. It was not made obligatory, but those who practised it were to have greater exaltation in the next world. A woman conforming in other respects is entitled to a seat in Heaven, but it is reserved for the polygamist to be one with the Father. Of course there is no room for Gentiles in the Mormon Heaven, excepting as hewers of wood and drawers of water to some Mormon saint.

The fanatical followers of the priesthood are filled with the superstitions of the old world, coming, as so many do from the lowest classes of Great Britain and Scandinavia, fit subjects for all the mummery imposed upon them in the name of religion. Brigham Young is often quoted as saying, that he had gathered around him a set of people that his satanic majesty himself would not have. Even after polygamy had been openly proclaimed in Utah, their missionaries utterly repudiated it, and in pursuance of private orders of the prophet they positively asserted that it was not a tenet of the church. They were afraid of bringing upon themselves the condemnation of foreign governments; but the ignorant offshoots of European Monarchies openly commit acts here, that they boast if perpetrated in their own land, would bring down upon them the severest penalties of the law. The perfect indifference and apathy of our government for so many years, however, has given the Mormons sufficient justification for their attitude. Abroad, not only their own security, but the large emigration which they sought and do secure yearly, rendered necessary a great deal of deceit. Men honest and fair-dealing in other respects have a twisted conscience in regard to plural marriage. As a Mormon woman said, "A polygamist is the most ingenious liar imaginable." In the earlier days on their arrival in Zion, when securely in the toils, their money in the hands of the elders, too far in the wilderness to make hope of return possible, these people have awakened to the horrors of the system, and women on the day of their arrival were hurried to the Endowment House to swell the number of polygamic wives in the land. Perhaps of all the women in Utah those who live in constant terror of their husbands entering polygamy are the most to be pitied. These plural marriages are performed in private in the Endowment House, a building in the same enclosure with the Tabernacle and Temple. Here they take oaths of allegiance to the church that absolve them from obedience to the laws of our country, when they conflict with their laws. They consider their obligations to their religion such that they perjure themselves on the witness stand in the most unblushing manner. They thus defeat the attempts to gain evidence of their marriages. Apostates, since the protection given to them by United States troops and the moral support of the Gentiles, have revealed many of the secrets of this place. This apostacy at any previous period of their history would have cost them their lives, as they take the most solemn oaths never to betray this most absurd and sacrilegious performance. The Endowment House is arranged to represent the Garden of Eden. The permanent Adam and Eve of the establishment are a man and woman prominent in the church. A well known public functionary who performs the ceremony represents God, while his satanic majesty fulfils his own appropriate functions. The ordeal lasts from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, and one or more wives can be taken at one ceremony.

The Miles case which attained such notoriety in Utah a short time ago was one not altogether uncommon, in which a young girl engaged to a Mormon Elder in London accompanied him to this country to have the marriage ceremony performed by the fathers of the church. On their way thither the elder felt constrained to tell this young convert that he had already made promises of marriage to two Danish sisters who were awaiting him in Zion; but he assured her that though he felt obliged to fulfil all his vows yet she should be his first and only legal wife. She reluctantly consented to this humiliating compromise and on his arrival in Salt Lake he took the three maidens to the Endowment House and they were in turn married to him. Unfortunately for conjugal felicity, the English girl was made second in order on account of priority of age of one of the Danish sisters. Terrible scenes ensued and in her indignation this girl denounced her husband and he was brought into court on the charge of bigamy. Only once before in the whole history of Mormonism has the court gained evidence of these plural marriages. Wives are bound by such terrible oaths at the marriage ceremony that they dare not give testimony against their husbands. Also, the jurors are two-thirds Mormons and these law breakers would never punish one of their own number, and no person could be convicted without destroying the rights of trial by jury. Mr. Robinson, an Englishman who has lately written a book laudatory of the Mormons, makes the statement that "Many Mormon women could not be happy until their husbands took other wives." A lady who has written thrilling stories on the subject of polygamy, writes the following in response to Mr. Robinson of a friend of hers who was a Methodist and embraced Mormonism because she had been as she thought miraculously healed in answer to a prayer of a Mormon Elder. Soon after reaching Salt Lake her husband took another wife. She was an American and had been brought up in a Christian family, so she could not take kindly to polygamy; she thought, however, that it was something ordered by God and that she must be very wicked to have such bitterness in her heart towards the woman who had won her husband's love. She said, "I thought I would go for counsel to those who were wiser and better than I, so I paid a visit to a model family, two wives in one house who were said to live like sisters, and exceptionally happy. I told the first wife my story and asked her how she attained her happiness. 'Happiness,' she replied, 'I don't know the meaning of the word, I have never seen a happy hour since that woman came into my house and never shall until I drop into my grave.' The second wife said, 'for the sake of peace, I have given up every right both as woman and wife. If it were not for my child, I would have thrown myself into the river long ago.' Then I went to two of Brigham's wives who were held up as examples. The first to whom I spoke said, 'I have shed tears enough since I have been in polygamy to drown myself twice over;' the other said, 'the plains from the Mississippi River to Salt Lake are strewed with the bones of women who were not strong enough to bear the burdens of polygamy, and the cemetery here is full of them; but every one of these women will wear a martyr's crown.'" Women who give their consent to the death knell of happiness do it on the ground that their reward will be greater in Heaven, and that the few years in this world is as nothing in view of eternity. Buoyed up by these hopes, women leaving large families at home with infants in their arms, accompany their husbands and give them in marriage to young girls who have grown up at their very doors.

They have often left their husbands and even their children behind them in foreign lands or in our own, to gain the coveted privilege of passing the remnant of their days in communion with the Latter Day Saints in the glorious State of Zion. These deluded women get their deserved punishment for deserting the highest and acknowledged duties of life, by the ignominy and contempt heaped upon them by those who allured them from their homes. Contact with this institution has in a few cases not only deadened all finer sensibilities, but has trampled upon instinct, when mothers coming with grown daughters to Utah not only marry Mormons themselves, but urge their girls to become polygamic wives to their own husbands. Very few probably are of this character, and the majority are mere tools in the hands of a tyrannical priesthood.

A gentleman well versed in the history of the church in Utah writes "that after a thousand years of Christianity and civilization, Mormons have stripped woman of all her rights, have trampled her in the dust, have sworn her on her life to obey her jailor husband, then have given her the ballot and boast of their liberality."

Suffrage under a theocratic government is a farce for both man or woman and, in the latter case, a pure mockery, as the Mormon woman has apparently a privilege which is denied to woman elsewhere, but this privilege is entirely out of her power to use excepting as ordered by the church that controls her. Suffrage given to the women of Utah has had two results; first, to increase greatly the vote for the church and its institutions, and secondly, to make woman herself the champion of her own degradation. Brigham Young gave the suffrage to Morman women, and he was confident that he could manipulate this element as he had all others in behalf of his own aggrandizement, both spiritual and temporal. Our government and Gentile residents hoped that the franchise would be productive of great good in opening the eyes of these women to the knowledge of the power invested in them, to free themselves from the superstitious obedience with which their vicegerent had enchained them; but the folly of endowing them with our privilege so long as theocracy exists, has been fully demonstrated. To ask for rights which are cheerfully conceded to woman in every other section of the country, would be utterly useless in Utah. The law of suffrage like all other laws in Utah have been made for the sole protection of their divine institution; so these Mormon women have only raised their voices to uphold polygamy which they have been forced to do on all occasions when it would benefit their church. They assembled in Mass-meeting and petitioned Congress to propose an amendment to the constitution sanctioning polygamy, and they have waved banners in the streets of Salt Lake on which were inscribed "The women of Utah believe in polygamy." The brutal teachings of Brigham Young and his councillors and all the laws and institutions of Utah are intended to reduce woman to utter and abject servitude, and to resist this power in the earlier days when they were sensitive to the touch of the tyrant's will would have been a very dangerous experiment; but now, with help stretching towards them, they seem to be too throughly paralyzed by years of total submission to be able to avail themselves of it.

The numbering of the vote is a very essential element in the ballot, as by that means the priesthood has knowledge of the failure of any man or woman to vote as they have been ordered. The Edmunds commission reports as follows in regard to Woman's suffrage: "We are satisfied that owing to the peculiar state of affairs in Utah—this law is an obstruction to the speedy solution of the vexed question."

There are many laws on the statute books detrimental to women. No right of dower exists in the territory, and the legislators at their last session wholly refused to provide for it. There are no marriage laws—as the Mormons hold the ordinance as strictly a Latter Day Church prerogative. There are no laws forbidding immorality such as are found in all other states and territories.

A prominent Mormon bishop lately asserted in the eastern press "that the Mormon women are happy," a statement entirely contrary to that of the women themselves who declare their state to be purgatorial.

The Anti-polygamy Standard says:—"A wife lately thwarted her husband in his attempt to enter polygamy, threatening to expose him in court; the true spirit of Mormonism was exhibited in his reply, that the laws of God would soon be in full force in Utah—we shall get rid of the Gentiles, and all such Mormon women as you will be blood-atoned." This atonement is one of the tenets of the church. Any act committed against it has in the past been punished by death, the shedding of the guilty persons, blood being necessary for the atonement of the sin.

A band of men called destroying angels, has committed these murderous deeds under the guidance of the priesthood. This doctrine is no longer in force and could not stand in the face of federal officials and a Gentile population.

It was for many years the desire of the church to prevent any expanding of the intellect on the part of their followers, and any casual observer at the Tabernacle would be convinced that this and their divine institution had done their thorough work in stamping ignorance and misery upon a large number of the faces gathered there.

Prayer has always played an important part in both secular as well as religious assemblages, used as a means to impress and overawe these superstitious disciples of an all absorbing faith. Every ball, every party, all social gatherings and even the theatre in the olden time, opened and closed with prayer. In the dedication of a building they bless the different parts even to shingles and nails. A full hour was consumed when the large tabernacle was dedicated, in enumerating and blessing the different materials that made up its construction. One other very peculiar tenet of the church is baptism for the dead. They are women principally who enter with enthusiasm in practising this rite, and they have been immersed as many as twenty times in one day to insure the future of departed friends. It was the boast of one poor simple Scotch woman that she had secured places in Heaven for Sir William Wallace and Robert Bruce. In accordance with a purpose of the priesthood, children bore a prominent part in public affairs. They were called Utah's best crop—and less than ten years ago—they formed conspicuous portions of the audiences that gathered in the tabernacle and theatre. Their youthful voices in concert rivalled those of the tabernacle choir, the latter no mean institution as it numbered over 300. At the theatre, too young to hold up their heads, their mothers tended them on pillows. This custom has gradually been abolished until now an apostle can harangue by the hour on his favorite topic of "come up and pay your tithing without an infant's cry to interrupt the monotonus strain."

This theocratic government, where one man calls himself God's vicegerent and imposes his revelations on a narrow minded fanatical class of men, carries its own hand into all its branches, nothing being too small or petty for its fingers to grasp, and implicit obedience is to-day, as it always has been, the watch-word of the church. At church conferences there is never a dissenting voice and at the polls always the same unanimous vote. The following quotations give an idea of how the power is placed in Utah and of what theocracy consists:—Brigham Young said in the Tabernacle in 1869, "what is the greatest miracle that can be wrought before God, our Saviour, the angels, the inhabitants of the earth and the infernal regions? Is it raising the dead or healing the sick? No—it is not—it is bringing a people to strict obedience to the rule of the priesthood."

Orson Pratt, the learned apostle, has always taught that "people cannot govern themselves by laws of their own making or by officers of their own choosing, for that would be in direct rebellion to the law of God. Absolute power vested in one man is the best and most efficient human government. There is one kind of government that will secure permanent prosperity and happiness, and that is theocracy or the government of God through his prophet, seer and revelator."

President Kimball said in the tabernacle:—"Have not the majority of this congregation made most solemn covenants and vows that they will listen, obey and be subject to the priesthood? Have not the sisters made the same solemn covenant before God, angels and men that they will be subject to their husbands?"