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98 THE STORY OF MORMONISM.

And the gentiles did tremble, as they saw so rapidly increasing their unwelcome neighbors, whose compact organization gave them a strength disproportionate to their numbers. Since there was no law to stop their coming, they determined to face the issue without law.^*

In April the people held consultations as to the best way of disposing of the Mormons; and again about the middle of July three hundred persons met at Independence to form a plan for driving them out. A declaration, in substance as follows, was drawn up and signed by nearly all present. The citizens of Jack- son county fear the effect upon society of a pretended religious sect, fanatics or knaves, settling among them, and mean to get rid of them at any hazard, and for the following reasons: They blasphemously pretend to personal intercourse with the deity, to revelations, miracles, healins^ the sick, casting: out devils, and other delusions ; they are the dregs of society, held together by the acts of designing leaders, and are idle and vicious. They are poor. They tamper with the slaves and free negroes. They declare the Indian re- gion to be theirs by heavenly inheritance.

In answer. Parley P. Pratt asks if their supernatural pretensions are more extravagant than those of the old and new testament; if it is anywhere written that there shall be no more spiritual manifestations as of old ; does the word of God or the law of man make poverty a crime? and have they not paid for all the land they occupy? They are no more dregs than their neighbors, and the charge of fraternizing with the blacks is not true ; neither is that of vice or crime, as

secular power into their hands, everything will be performed by immediate revelations from God. We shall then have Pope Joseph the Fii'st and his hierarchy.' Howe's Mormonism Unveiled, 145.

^^ 'So early as April 1832, the saints were made to feel thejnselves nnwel- come sojourners in Jackson co. Stones and brickbats were thrown through the windows of their houses, and they were otherwise annoyed and insulted. Meetings were held during that year and the early part of 1833, at which resolutions were sometimes passed, and sometimes the assembly indulged in a fight among its members; but nothing more serious resulted. Stoning houses, however, was resumed in the early summer of the last-mentioned year. ' Timea and Seasons, i. 17; vi. 851.