Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/381

Rh dans lequel gît le Chrétienté de nos jours"—the splitting of the Church into three grand divisions, Roman, Greek, and Eastern, the convulsion of the Northern mind, which created Protestantism, and the minute subdivision of the latter into Episcopalians and Presbyterians, Lutherans and Calvinists, Quakers and Shakers, the multiform Methodists and various Baptists, and, to quote no farther variétés des églises, the Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Universalists—a rationalistic race finds reason to inquire, "What is Christianity?" and holds itself prepared for a new faith, a regeneration of human thought—in fact, a religious and social change, such as the Reformation of the sixteenth century represented and fondly believed itself to be.

3. Mormonism boasts of few Roman Catholic or Greek converts; the French and Italians are rare, and there is a remarkable deficiency of Germans and Irish—those wretched races without nationality or loyalty—which have overrun the Eastern American States. It is, then, to Protestantism that we must look for the origin of the New Faith.

4. In 1800–1804, and in 1820, a mighty Wesleyan "revival," which in Methodism represents the missions and retreats of Catholicism, had disturbed and excited the public mind in America, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee. The founder of Mormonism, Mr. Joseph Smith, his present successor, and his principal disciples and followers, were Campbellites, Millerites, Ranters, or other Methodists. Wesleyan sectarianism, like the old Arab pagan-