Maiden Voyages by Mary Morris

water at each side, where the Saints were enjoying Sabbath repose in rocking-chairs, chewing tobacco, with their heels elevated on the back of another chair. All was neat and orderly—and very, very ugly; the shops closed, and some of the thirty thousand Mormon Sunday-school children going about hymn-book in hand.
    We entered the Tabernacle, a large oblong building, in the Mormon style of architecture—the ancient rule of thumb—over which these clever ignorant people have constructed one of the largest self-sustaining roofs in the world, and were conducted to the strangers’ seat, by a decorous German Elder. The building will hold eight thousand people; yesterday it was about half full. The large and really fine organ, also of native manufacture, was well played, and the choir of fashionably dressed young men and women sang nicely, out of the Mormon hymn-book, well-known Christian hymns. Church dignitaries and some of the twelve apostles sat on a high place round the velvet-covered desk, on which lay a large Bible and a small “Book of Mormon”—the divine revelation which, in 1827, “a holy Angel permitted the youth Joseph Smith of Manchester, New York, to take from the hill of Cumorrah, and translate through the aid of a sacred instrument, called the Urim and Thummim.” The metallic plates and sacred things were shown to three witnesses, by an angel from heaven, and five thousand copies of the inspired translation were printed in 1830.
    Below the daïs stood rows of electro-plate bread-baskets and goblets of water; and, in the centre of the building, a fountain for Baptism. Men and women chiefly sat apart; looking round on the congregation, we thought ourselves back again in some remote part of Wales or Ireland; stupid good-natured, unintelligent faces—a curious contrast to the usualAmerican crowd of keen-featured sharp-eyed citizens. And so indeed it is: Mormonism has gathered together the low-class type of humanity and uneducated of all countries, and formed them into an industrious community. One could not help feeling that many members of the congregation would have been in gaol, and living at the expense of the British taxpayer, had they not been sitting this pleasant Sunday afternoon drowsily listening—for they take their devotion easily—after a week’s hard work, to one of their twelve apostles, preaching a practical but somewhat prosy sermon. I never saw so many ugly women, or so many sad-looking black bonnets; of course, if a woman has only a share in a husband, pin-money must also be shared—and not many new bonnets obtained. We discoursed with the friendly Elder. “How many Mormons are there?” I impiously asked. “Brother, how many saints are we?” he inquired of his neighbour. “About one hundred and forty-four thousand,” was the reply. We were about to ask what proportion the womenkind bore to the population; but the preacher, Brother Orson Pratt, one of the original twelve apostles who led the Church into the wilderness—a venerable-looking old man (they say that through religious fervour and fasting his four wives were starved to death)—rose to preach.
    The 50th anniversary of the Latter-day Saints has lately been held, and the Tabernacle was still hung with flowers and decorations, for, in 1830, “Joseph Smith was ordained by John the Baptist, to preach the last Revelation to the world”; and it was also divinely revealed that his wife, Emma Smith, “was to receive as many wives as he chose to take to himself, but that she was to abide and cleave to the prophet, and none else.” Persecution is proverbially good for a Church, and the Mormons had plenty of it, and throve accordingly. At last, in 1844, the Prophet Joseph Smith was murdered, “lynched” by a mob in Illinois; and the Saints, under the leadership of their apostles, and President Brigham Young, a Yankee carpenter, determined to fly to the wilderness, and seek a Land of Promise in the Rocky Mountains. After terrible