ence to these heterogeneous opinions suffices to show that Mormonism is truly an “Olla Podrida” of all the religions and superstitions upon the globe.
Let us now turn back the shadow upon the dial-plate of time at least twelve hundred years, and share the meditations of the prophet of the sixth century, in his lonely cave on Mt. Hera. He looks forth upon the tribes of Arabia, whom a haughty spirit of independence, nourished through centuries of personal and civil freedom, had made the free-thinkers of their day. Some, weaded to the ancient Sabian idolatry, did homage to the hosts of heaven, or to the angels and their images; others bowed with Magian reverence before fire as the appropriate symbol of the Deity. Every pious fraud must have its secret foundation in some religious idea; and Mohammed was enough in contact with a purer faith, to seize the truth of God’s essential unity, against which all these systems impinged. To his bold, reflecting mind, this fundamental truth loomed up with a grandeur which frowned awfully upon the paltry superstitions of the idolater. His soul may have caught fire, as the thought flashed upon him to reclaim these wretched Polytheists to the great platform of all Natural and Revealed Religion, the existence of one supreme and spiritual God. If. on the other hand, he turned from the idolatries of the Pagan, the dissensions and corruptions of Christianity were little less repulsive. The mystery of iniquity, predicted in Apostolic times, had already commenced to work; and in the sixth century, the concurrent testimony of all historians represents the worship of saints and images as carried already to the highest pitch—and it is easy to see how a Pagan mind, looking at Christianity through this medium, should misconceive even the doctrine of the Trinity, as contravening the essential unity of the Divine nature. Not only so, the heresies and conflicts of this period were so loud and bitter, fomented by bishops and emperors, and anathemas rung so fierce from councils, as naturally to bewilder a mind not indoctrinated to perceive the shades of difference in theological opinion. This, then, was doubtless the religious germ of the Arabian imposture. In the language of a learned writer, quoted in Sale’s Preliminary Discourse, “the general design of the
