THE REAL ISSUE IN UTAH.

It is not simply
That question,
Nor is the ques-

It is not a question of obedience to a certain law. whether Mormons shall practice polygamy or not. important as it is, is wholly lost in one far deeper. tion simply whether there shall be allowed to exist in Utah a government that usurps the place of the national government, and wields a power which is without right, and dangerous. That certainly is a grave question, and one which, in one form or another, must soon be met. But what is called The Mormon Problem, involves a question still more fundamental and vital to the welfare, not of the nation alone, but humanity itself.

The real indictment against Mormonism is that it is an assault on the integrity of human nature. It is a premeditated, prolonged and merciless invasion of human rights. Its permanent success would violate humanity. Its final triumph would degrade mankind.

This indictment has at least four counts:

(1) By degrading womanhood it degrades humanity. Manhood and womanhood are integral and equal parts of humanity. If one be degraded, both are. The very postulate on which polygamy depends is that woman, standing before the verities of another world, is inferior to man. Apart from him, she probably has no immortality. Her soul does not, like his, wear that crown by virtue of its creation. Her only honor and hope consist in the privilege of being permitted to swell the retinue of some-perhaps lustful and brutal-polygamous satrap, as he stalks up to the gates of glory. The mind falters as it attempts to conceive the degradation of womanhood which would follow such an idea of her quality and place. From being the peer of man she would at once descend to be his slave. Her desire for immortality, depending upon a marriage bond which he might break at will, would make her obedience to him instant, abject, complete. No tyranny on his part would provoke rebellion on hers, for he would control her destiny. His will would be supreme, for he would have something worse than a whip of scorpions to enforce it. Her spirit would be broken, her life would be wretched, her very womanhood would lose its human trait and quality. A system involving consequences so outrageous, is faintly described when called an assault on the integrity of human nature. The distinctive characteristic of savage life is the unequal power and prerogative given to man, and this is one of the causes making life savage. Brigham Young him

self illustrated the tendency when, in a public speech, he lashed "his women" for repining over their lot. He' was becoming a savage.

(2) Mormonism protects vice with a religious sanction, and thereby confuses moral distinctions, and blunts the moral perceptions of every person who embraces it. Every man has a right to the highest ideals and keenest moral discernment which his natural instincts and previous education make possible; and no man has a right to mar those ideals, or render less certain and accurate that discernment.

To create a suspicion that possibly God smiles on lust, is to inflict a wound on the soul itself. It is to violate it in such a way as to make its final ruin more probable. Its struggles to recover itself will be more severe. Its probation will be more hazardous. It has received a blow under which it staggers, perhaps to fall to rise no more. With a full understanding of what the words mean and what the charge involves, it must be said that Mormonism, in its doctrine of polygamy, does just this. It assails the integrity of human nature in that it degrades its moral perceptions, and justifies and sanctifies tendencies that end in pollution and destruction.

(3) The injury thus inflicted upon individuals reaches society and social rights. Polygamous Mormonism incorporates into household ideas, and gives to children, shameful thoughts and low standards. The morals of society never rise above those of the homes. Its standards are, in fact, measured by those of the homes. Corrupting home morals, therefore, polygamy corrupts public morals. Violating the laws and the decencies of domestic life, it sends its vile influence into all the channels of social intercourse. The great peril of Utah is not fanaticism, nor public disorders, nor rebellion, but moral corruption. Polygamy driven by the law from public view, and not relinquished, but rather held with a more tenacious grasp, will eventually become a clandestine institution, all the more pestilent for being concealed. No one who has read the history of the unavailing struggles of human society, during the whole progress of civilization, to suppress by law those malignant evils that lurk and burrow under the surface of social life, can help suspecting that Mormon polygamy is now entering upon its most dangerous stage. Nothing can hide the fact that polygamous Mormonism is a movement that, as a matter of fact, tends to corrupt mankind. It is, therefore, a light charge to say of it that it assails the integrity of human nature.

(4) The gravest charge against Mormonism is that it is a wicked and prolonged conspiracy to defraud men in matters touching their

eternal interests. Man has no right more sacred than to know the truth about God. Purposely to delude him on that subject is to commit an aggravated crime against him; and the professed religious teacher who does it is a robber, despoiler, an assassin. Compared with him, the wrecker who moves the beacon light from one headland to another, to lure the mariner over a sunken reef, is an innocent man. This is the crime of the Mormon leaders. By a conspiracy, reaching over half a century, and shared at the first by some who afterward repented and denounced it, they have devised, and led a multitude of visionary, ill-balanced and credulous people to embrace, religious teachings which those leaders knew then, and know now, to be false. They have feigned divine illumination when they knew they did not possess it. They have pretended to work miracles when they knew that those so-called miracles were no better than the tricks of a mountebank. They have assumed the offices of seer, prophet, revelator, while conscious that they saw nothing, could prophesy nothing, reveal nothing. They have established ecclesiastical orders, apostolic and priestly, given them biblical names, and declared them to be continuations and completions of both Judaic and Christian orders. With ready and unscrupulous invention they have traced their history over the period of two thousand years, back through Central America and South America to Palestine, through grand civilizations and bloody wars, and under the shadow of great temples, palming off upon the credulous a grotesque dream, as if it were revealed fact from the mouth of God. In a similar way they have created historic characters, and then written their biographies, to edify their dupes.

Knowing how readily the imaginations of the ignorant may be aroused by the supposed vicinity of supernatural agencies, they have devised endowment ceremonies, through which invisible powers are declared to exert on the subject a strange influence; prescribed endowment oaths of terrible import, and sustained by penalties which unseen agents may be expected to visit upon the daring spirit who breaks them; and provided endowment robes possessed of all the marvelous efficacy for the wearer that the fetich of the Zulu is thought to confer on him. They have travestied the word of God, perverted its meaning, superseded it when it suited their purpose to do so, and appealed to its authority when that would sustain them. Importing their own profane notions into some passages, and subtracting evident truth. from others, and commenting upon the whole as if they enjoyed an inspiration superior to that of Paul, they have so blended the true and

the false as to make the whole practically false.. Their gospel is "another gospel," fraudulent in intent, destitute of authority, and destructive in influence. Its fruits already appear. People more inaccessible to religious truth than apostates from the Mormon church it would be hard to find. Having discovered the deception practiced upon them, they have passed, by a perfectly natural reaction, over into confirmed and well-nigh hopeless infidelity. Their very capacity for faith seems to be destroyed. They cannot conceal their contempt when prayer is offered in their hearing. They are sometimes angry when the name of God is even mentioned to their children. They have no words to express their loathing for religion in all its forms. It has been to them a curse, and they condemn it with an intensity of hatred that is often startling. If met with the assertion that the religion of the Bible is something far different from the Mormon religion, they reply: "No, they are alike. Both profess to be inspired, rest upon miracles, enjoin prayer, and foretell the future. Mormon elders are well read in the Bible. They base upon it the doctrines of polygamy, healing by miracle, the descent of the Spirit, and baptism for the dead. True, we know that these elders are hypocrites; but how do we know that the writers of the Bible were any better? Rest assured that having been deceived and abused once, we shall never be caught again."

Ingersoll, as a promoter of infidelity, is thought to be without a peer; but it is a mistake. The Mormon leaders far surpass him. The openness of his attacks deprives them of much of their power, while the secret nature of theirs makes them deadly. Said a Danish woman, recently converted under the influence of certain of our teachers,"The Mormon missionaries, who came to our village in Denmark, seemed to us angels of light; they were devout and apparently saintly men. They told us, among various other things, that Jesus Christ was now living in person in Salt Lake, and I came fully expecting to see him." The revolt from a system so false in the nature of its ideas, and unscrupulous in the method of propagating them, will, when the light is fully let in upon it, inevitably carry multitudes into blank infidelity.

And this is quite enough to show that the system is a merciless invasion of the most sacred rights of the human soul.

HOW TO MEET THE INVASION.

This is the practical question confronting us. If it were an invasion against civil rights we should know how to meet it. For such invasions we have the courts, the police, and in the last resort, battalions and armies. But this invasion is chiefly of another sort. It is against those rights which the civil law only incidentally protects-rights arising out of relations to another world, rights of faith and of character, personal rights belonging to man by virtue of his creation in God's image. Of such invasions one thing is true, viz., they are possible only because the victims are ignorant, inexperienced in the detection of that which is untrue, and unable, by the lack of mental discipline to defend themselves against shrewder, sharper and more unprincipled men. If this be true, the point and the means of a counter-attack are plain. We must make ourselves the allies of the people who have been so unfortunate as to fall into such hands. must seek them out in their mountain valleys, and offer them the services of skillful and sympathetic Christian teachers. We must so promote intellectual and moral training among them that their superstitions and spirit of servitude shall disappear. We must raise up on Utah soil, leaders of public opinion who will be qualified to meet in the homes, churches and lecture-rooms, by argument, appeals to reason. and every other weapon, those cunning men who have so long trifled with the most precious rights of their fellow-men. In short, we must bear to them messages of friendly feeling, offer to share their burdens, and tender to them such real ministries as will show that religion is not that shallow and deceptive thing which their experience has hitherto found it.

We

And such efforts will yield a marvelous amount of good fruit. Nay, they are doing it. A young Mormon woman having received some kindness accompanied with gentle words from one of our teachers, threw her arms about her neck and said, "If you were only a Latter Day Saint, nothing should ever part you and me." "What is that?" said the teacher. "It is nothing. Nothing ever shall part you and me." "God bless you, sir, for sending us teachers," has become a familiar form of expression to the ears of the writer of this report.

And could the Sabbath schools, churches and individuals who have sustained this cause, see its present results, and know how many grateful thoughts have taken to themselves wings and flown eastward from