counterpart of primitive Christianity—binds them still to Mormonism, in spite of the extravagances of their leaders against which their early teachings and innate sense of right revolt. To the mass of the Mormon people it is no simple matter to meet in argument their own teachers—men who have seldom, if ever, been vanquished in discussion when met by the most talented ministers of other religions. When to this difficulty is added the people's own personal experience of the power of healing in the Church, something more than an opponent's denunciation is required to deliver them from the thraldom of an unquestioning faith.
The educated mind takes within its range of thoughts causes and effects, and discriminates between what is general and what is special and personal, but, among the untaught masses, ninety-nine in a hundred rely upon their own experience alone. "Was I not healed by the anointing of oil, the laying on of hands and the prayer of faith?" "Did I not see my mother carried to the waters of baptism a poor decrepit invalid, and when she had been immersed for the remission of sins she walked home, and has been well ever since?" "Was not my father deaf, and did he not get his hearing by the prayers of the elders?" "My darling child was brought from death unto life by the prayer of faith." The unscripturalness of Brigham's "Adam Deity," the despotism of an "infallible Priesthood," and the evidence of a thousand outrages and murders are nothing to minds that cling to the personal reminiscence of miracles. The only hope, therefore, is in the education of the people to the realization that those phenomenal manifestations of healing, the influences of which they have personally experienced, are not the specialty of the Mormon Church, but are to be found to some extent everywhere, in all churches, and even among persons unassociated with any religious creed; that these manifestations which the Mormon leaders have claimed as exclusive proofs of the divinity of their mission are but the result of natural causes, conditions and circumstances, and of this fact the Mormon Church furnishes the most abundant evidence.
While healing the sick, through the laying on of hands by the elders, is a common experience in every part of the world
