will be made apparent that subjection to temporals and Gentiles must be purely nominal. At the same time, it must be owned that, throughout North America, I may say throughout the New World, the Mormon polity is the only fixed and reasonable form of government. The "turnpike-road of history," which Fisher Ames, nearly a century ago, described as "white with the tombstones of republics," is in a fair way to receive fresh accessions, while the land of the Saints promises continuance and progress.
XIV. "We believe in being honest, true, chaste, temperate, benevolent, virtuous, and upright, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul; we 'believe all things,' we 'hope all things,' we have endured very many things, and hope to be able to 'endure all things.' Every thing lovely, virtuous, praiseworthy, and of good report, we seek after, looking forward to the 'recompense of reward.' But an idle or lazy person can not be a Christian, neither have salvation. He is a drone, and destined to be stung to death, and tumbled out of the hive."—All over the American Union there is an apotheosis of labor; the Latter-Day Saints add to it the damnation of osiosity.
This brief outline of Mormon faith will show its strange, but, I believe, spontaneous agglomeration of tenets which, were its disciples of a more learned and philosophical body, would suggest extensive eclecticism. But, as I have already remarked, there is a remarkably narrow limit to religious ideas: the moderns vainly attempt invention when combination is now the only possible process. In the Tessarakai Decalogue above quoted, we find syncretized the Semitic Monotheism, the Persian Dualism, and the Triads and Trinities of the Egyptians and the Hindoos. The Hebrews also have a personal Theos, the Buddhists avataras and incarnations, the Brahmans self-apotheosis of man by prayer and penance, and the East generally holds to quietism, a belief that repose is the only happiness, and to a vast complication of states in the world to be. The Mormons are like the Pythagoreans in their precreation, transmigration, and exaltation of souls; like the followers of Leucippus and Democritus in their atomic materialism; like the Epicureans in their pure atomic theories, their summum bonum, and their sensuous speculations; and like the Platonists and Gnostics in their belief of the Æon, of ideas, and of moving principles in element. They are fetichists in their ghostly fancies, their evestra, which became souls and spirits. They are Jews in their theocracy, their ideas of angels, their hatred of Gentiles, and their utter segregation from the great brotherhood of mankind. They are Christians inasmuch as they base their faith upon the Bible, and hold to the divinity of Christ, the fall of man, the atonement, and the regeneration. They are Arians inasmuch as
