or passions;” but on the contrary, that he is material, having both body and parts. “It is impossible,” says their chief theologian, Orson Pratt, “to show the least difference between the idea represented by nothing, and the idea represented by that which is unextended, indivisible, and without parts, having no relation to space or time.” Having established this identity of definition, he adds, “therefore an immaterial God is a deified Nothing, and all his worshippers are atheistical idolaters.” He presents six definitions, in exposition of his idea of nothing: “Space is magnitude susceptible of division: a point is the negation of space, or the zero where it begins and ends. Duration is time susceptible of division,—an instant is the negative, or zero of duration. Matter is that which occupies space, between any two instants, is susceptible of division and of removal. Nothing is the negative of space, of duration and of matter, and is the zero of all existence.” I give this as a specimen of the transcendental reasoning of this school. “In thus identifying the Deity,” says the writer from whom these extracts are taken, “with nothing, an instant and a point, the Mormon has reached a conception of the most abstract being, and has made an affirmation of which an Euclid or a Hegel might be proud”—“of being in itself, which is the basis, the boundary, the origin, and the terminus of all; at once the zero of all existence, and the plenum,—and has reached the leading postulate of Hegel, that ‘being and nothing is the same!’”[1] You will not, of course, call upon me to explain anything of all this: how, then, should it be transcendental? It is enough that I call upon you to observe how extremes meet: this untaught school of fanatics in the wilds and fastnesses of the Rocky mountains joining hands with the most unintelligible school of German meta-physicians.
But, if God be material, and was generated, there is no reason why he should not advance from lower to higher degrees of perfection. 'The hearer is perhaps prepared to learn next that God, the Father, like Christ, was once a man upon the earth,—that he died and rose again,—that he worked out his kingdom, and advanced so far in his
- ↑ Illustrated His. of the Mormons, pp. 372-374.
