Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/50

Rh next year. But here I may be mistaken. I remember hearing then the romantic story, now denied, that they had found Mr. Spaulding's book by accident, and made it their Bible.

This was perhaps the most small beginning of what has proved, after Mahomet, the most extraordinary story in the whole world of religious fanaticism and the one-man power. Even the Massanielo frenzy pales before it. At any rate, to have seen this their beginning is interesting now by the light of subsequent events. It is not the man who starts well in the race of whom we make a hero, but he who reaches the goal and ends well. These queer and dirty and disreputable Mormons became the most successful of colonists in their new home beyond the Rockies. They redeemed the dry land by irrigation, as the Moors enriched sandy Spain; and their religious tenets, absurd and abhorrent to the rest of us, have for them a power and a strong hold which would put to shame many a Protestant church.

I see it still, that ragged, dirty, uneven shore of the great Mississippi, the lazy steamboat-landing, the pigs of lead being discharged or loaded on — I forget which. The story used to run that the Mormons always dropped two or three in the river by accident, but fished them up and appropriated them afterwards. They had a bad name, but, unlike the dog, it did not hang them. The Mormons were destined to live down a great deal of bad name. I suppose that great wooden temple and the carved oxen had been built by some of their foreign converts who had a knowledge of wood-carving.

Joe Smith, the then head of the Church, the bad bricklayer, had "builded better than he knew," or, as they used to say in Keene, when I told them this story, "better than he knew how when he was here."