last century, galvanized Christianity with a wild and feverish life. Falling among uneducated men, the doctrine, both in England and the colonies, was received with a bewilderment of enthusiasm, and it soon produced the usual fruits of such phrensy—prophecies that fixed the end of the world for the 28th of February, 1763, miraculous discernment of angels and devils, mighty comings of the power of God and outpourings of the Spirit, rhapsodies and prophecies, dreams and visions, accompanied by rollings, jerks, and barks, roarings and convulsions, syncope, catalepsy, and the other hysterical affections and obscure disorders of the brain, forming the characteristic symptoms of religious mania.
Thus, out of the semi-barbarous superstitions of the Middle Ages, succeeded by the revival of learning, which in the 15th century followed the dispersion of the wise men of the East from captured Byzantium, proceeded "Protestant Rationalism," a system which, admitting the right of private judgment, protested against the religion of Southern Europe becoming that of the whole world. From Protestantism sprung Methodism, which restored to man the grateful exercise of his credulity—a leading organ in the human brain—his belief in preternatural and supernatural agencies and appearances, and his faith in miraculous communication between God and man; in fact, in that mysticism and marvel-love, which are the columns and corner-stones of religion. Mormonism thus easily arose. It will be found to contain little beyond a literal and verbal interpretation of the only book which Chillingworth recognizes as the rule for Christians, and a pointed condemnation of those who make the contents of the Bible typical, metaphysical, or symbolical, "as if God were not honest when he speaks with man, or uses words in other than their true acceptation," or could "palter in a double sense." It proposed as its three general principles, firstly, total immersion in the waters of baptism in the name of the three sacred names; secondly, the commissioning of prophets, apostles, and elders to administer in things holy the revelation and authority of heaven; and, thirdly, the ministering of angels. New Tables of the Law appeared in the Golden Plates. Another Urim and Thummim revealed to Mr. Joseph Smith that he was of the house of Israel and the tribe of Joseph, the inheritor of all things promised to that favored seed. It tempered the superstitions of popery with the rationalism of the Protestant; it supplied mankind with another sacred book and with an infallible interpreter. Human belief had now its weight to carry: those pining for the excitement of thaumaturgy felt satisfied. The Mormons were no longer compelled to ask "what made miracles cease," and "why and in which A.D. was the power taken from the Church." It relieved them from holding an apparent absurdity, viz., that the voices and visitations, the signs, miracles, and interventions—in fact, all that the Bible submitted to human faith had ended without reason about the time
