stock company. Smith's religious leadership, he holds, originated with deliberate humbug and childish flummery; but he suspects that after long imposing on others Smith finally imposed on himself. But Mr. Werner does, I think, make an honest and fruitful effort to understand and explain the man as a "product" of his times and of the rather weedy Puritan culture of the New England village.
The prophet-martyr was born, without any celestial notification or portent, in Sharon, Vt., in 1805, to an old and poverty stricken but fertile American family—there were eventually nine children—with epileptic tendencies on both sides, and various relatives subject to religious visions. Both his parents were visited, as all Puritans from the time of Wycliffe to the present day have been, by dreams assuring them that none of the existing churches was truly representative of Jesus Christ and the ancient Apostles.
The old people didn't know what to do about it. Old people in Vermont never know what to do about anything. For example, old people in Vermont have abundant streams of pure water flowing from the mountains past their back doors—have had for three hundred years. But old Vermont villagers still pump their water from driven wells, a teaspoonful at a time. That is the way the Vermont mind works on its native heath. It is only when the Vermonter is transplanted to southern latitudes that he is transformed into a Yankee Mahomet. Utah is in the latitude of Virginia and Spain. There is hope for young Vermonters if they migrate early.
Joseph Smith, like his parents, had visions; unlike them, he had ingenuity and considerable "creative imagination." In one of these visions he was visited
