dif which controversialists have experienced when in argument with Mormon casuists has been their readiness to admit all that prophets and apostles have ever said, while they tie themselves to none. In handling the revelations of modern science and discovery they are never surprised. They willingly allow all that geology may establish, and if that hurts Moses or any one else it is nothing to them;—when science is positive, the record has to yield. Their faith, borrowed or adopted from the ancients, is held with a loose hand, and can be parted with at any time; but their own faith proper, that which is given through "the living oracles," can never be surrendered. No authority can be accepted, or even doubtfully entertained, that disputes Joseph Smith. To the believing Mormons, he was "the end to all controversy," and this has not been forgotten in the inheritance claimed by his successor.
The Mormons as a people are not justly chargeable with the wrong-doing which has been ascribed to them. There are bad men among them—dangerously bad men—who have committed outrages and damning deeds which would disgrace any community. But those deeds were perpetrated by the few; the masses were sincere and devoted to their conceptions of right and truth, as the whole course of their lives and eventful history abundantly proves. This has been the united testimony of all the "Gentiles" who have lived among them. The errors of the past life of the people, whether in their treatment of apostates or in their hostility to the nation, are attributable to the system and to the men who direct the public mind. Men and women who, for a religious faith, voluntarily abandon the homes of childhood, and rend asunder the hallowed ties of family and friends—as Mormon converts do in all parts of the earth—traversing oceans and plains, and suffering privations incident to creating new homes in a barren waste, are not persons devoid of the qualities of good citizens.
It was the people's love of religious truth while associated with other churches, that induced them to listen to the Mormon elders when they proclaimed the restoration of the primitive Gospel in all its purity and power, with a Church organization of Patriarchs, Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors, Teachers and Deacons. This harmony in organization—the
