Page:Mormonism.djvu/10

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Mormonism.

tablished in the Apostolic age, is admitted to be pure, but alleged to have so changed God’s covenant, and corrupted his ordinances, as to be now wholly apostate. The Bible is recognised as “the foundation book”—only charged with interpolations which the Mormon seer was commissioned to detect. Its authority is not absolutely impugned, but succeeding revelations must be admitted to an equal share of its supremacy. More particular deference is shown to it, in glossing certain passages of the prophetical writings, especially of Ezekiel, to lend support to the new revelation. Some of its peculiar doctrines, as the Millennium, and the Resurrection, are incorporated into his creed; though the former is pushed to the utmost extravagance of Millenarian speculation, and the latter undertakes to define what are the properties of the spiritual body. The sacraments of the New Testament, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are received, and the former practised according to the views of the most rigid immersionists, and supposed to secure infallibly the remission of sins. The evangelical terms, faith, repentance, obedience, atonement, forgiveness, are freely employed, though for the most part in an obscure and mystical sense.

In another section will be exhibited the clear recognition of the Jewish Economy. Indeed, the effort is most apparent to fuse the first and second dispensations into one, and to present Mormonism as the amalgam of the two. A sa symbol of this, the spirits of Moses and Elias, as representatives of the one, and the spirits of Peter, James and John, as representatives of the other, lent the sauction of their presence at his baptism, and covered the necessary irregularity of receiving it at the hands of the neophyte, Cowdery. This eclectic system takes a wider range, and smacks with the flavor of almost every Pagan superstition and mystical school upon earth. Not wishing to anticipate what will be more appropriately noticed in another connection, it is sufficient here to glance at the Gnostic dogma of æons in the Mormon “Principles of Element,” or matter—the Pantheism which, beginning with making God a man, very consistently ends with making man a God—and the Persian idea of transmigration of souls in accomplishing their probation. A simple refer-