Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/109

The Book of Mormon 521 frequent collision with neighbours and others till the final settlement in Utah. The story of these successive clashes with "Gentiles" and the Government has significance in interpretation of the Book of Mormon only as it indicates the exercise of a power which the Book itself at least allows and the growing determination of the American people to have done with polygamy. Finally in the constitution of the State of Utah, dated 1896, it was stipulated that "polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited." Charges have since been made in reputable journals that good faith has not been kept, but even Ex-Senator Cannon, sometime high in Latter Day Councils writing a few years ago, says it is the leaders who were guilty, not the Mormon people, whom he describes "as gentle as the Quakers, as staunch as the Jews." The Book itself provides for a compHcated hierarchy with a President — "Seer, Translator, Prophet" — shaving great au- thority and supported by two counsellors, the three regarded as successors to "Peter, James, and John," symbolizing the Trinity and perpetuating the priesthood of Melchizedek. There are besides a patriarch and twelve apostles, forming an itinerant high council, and authorized to ordain elders, priests, and deacons, to conduct religious meetings and to administer the sacraments. There are also "Seventies" who serve as missionaries and propagandists, "high priests" to take the places when necessary of those above them, and below all such of the order of Melchizedek there is the Aaronic priesthood usually occupied with temporal concerns. Not to the Book of Mormon providing this elaborate hierarchy, but to the hierarchy itself which has not always rec- ognized that "New occasions teach new duties," is due much that affronts "Gentiles." The Book differs in its spirit little from the Bible. The Latter Day Saints, in or out of the hierarchy, who in great numbers try to live up to the teachings of the Bible and the Book, live simple, godly Uves of love and faith and hope. But they are themselves an argument against their Book. By their daily