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Chap. IX.
RESTORATION OF THE TEN TRIBES.
395

of animated beings breathed naught but health, peace, and joy." Over this paradise, this general garden, "man reigned, and talked face to face with the Supreme, with only a dimming veil between." After the diffusion of sin, which followed the fall, came the purification of the Noachian cataclysm, and in the days of Peleg "the earth was divided," i.e., the Homeric circumambient sea was interposed between portions of land rent asunder, which earthquakes and upheavals subsequently broke into fragments and islands. We learn from the whole and varied Scriptures that before the second coming of Christ the several pieces shall be dovetailed into one, as they were in the morn of creation, and the retiring sea shall reassume its pristine place, when Samudra Devta was enthroned by the Rishis. The earth is thus restored for a people purified to innocence, and is fitted for the first resurrection of the body to reign with the Savior for a thousand years.

X. "We believe in the literal gathering of Israel, and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion will be established upon the Western Continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth a thousand years; and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory."—The only novelty in this article is the "location" of Zion, which has already been transferred from Palestine to the celestial regions in the Valley of the Mississippi; this, in the present era, when the old cradles of civilization upon the Ganges and Indus, the Euphrates and the Nile, have been well-nigh depopulated or exhausted, promises to become one of the vast hives from which the human swarm shall issue. The American continent, as the Book of Mormon informs us, was, at the time of the Crucifixion, shaken to its foundation: towns and cities, lakes and mountains, were buried and formed when "the earth writhed in the convulsive throes of agonizing nature." After all the seed of Israel shall have been raised from the dead, they shall flock to Zion in Judea, and the saints of other races shall be gathered to New Jerusalem in America: both these cities shall be "built with fine stones, and the beauty of all precious things." At the end of the millennium comes the great sabbath of rest and enjoyment; the earth shall become celestial through the baptism of fire, while the two holy cities shall be caught up (literally) into heaven, to descend with the Lord God for their light and their temple, and shall remain forever on the new earth "under the bright canopy of the new heavens."

XI. "We believe in the literal resurrection of the body, and that the rest of the dead live not again until the thousand years are expired."—Man, it has been shown, is a duality of elements. The body is gross, the spirit—under which the intellect or mind is included—is refined matter, perme-