Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/253

 States of America, and from that centre its churches and missions extended conspicuously over all the rest of the world. The head of the Church at the time in question was Pope-President Brigham XIV., who wielded his vast spiritual sway at the great Mormon metropolis, St. Brigham, formerly Salt Lake City, from whence, periodically, the Holy Fathers of the Church, of most blessed memory to all believers, issued their encyclicals, not merely urbi et orbi, like another erroneous and once pretentious Church, but in these days of science as Religion's handmaid, alike to the city, the world, and the universe. Such being the great Mormon standpoint, let us glance at one of Pope Brigham's encyclicals of this time. After an outpouring of blessing and parental love over all the faithful, he surveyed, in strains of wrathful pity, the whole outside Gentile world. How blessed a thing, he said, if the reign of God could be substituted all over the earth, instead of the reign of man! Must they not continue to aim at this most blessed attainment! An inscrutable Providence still tolerates religious error and irreligious agency in the world. It was not for them to presume to imitate such mysterious indifference. They must ever be ready, either by help of the blessed Danites, or by other available agency, to secure the whole earth for the blessed Saints' use, to the due honour of God, and the full maintenance of His Truth.

Their Holy Church had its trials. There was constant and cruel persecution, at the instance of an opposing or indifferent secular arm, in hindering and