Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/406

388 in yonder heavens, is a man like one of yourselves; that is the great secret. If the veil was rent to-day, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and upholds all things by his power, if you were to see him to-day, you would see him in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion and image of God; Adam received instruction, walked, talked, and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another."

The Second Person is the "Son Jesus Christ," the material offspring of the First by the Virgin Mary, who was duly married, after betrothal by the angel Gabriel, to the Eternal Father, on the plains of Palestine: the Holy Babe was the "tabernacle" prepared for and assumed by the Spirit Son. The Son is the Creator: when in the material spirit still, he took of the "unformed chaotic matter element which had an existence from the time God had, and in which dwells all the glory," and formed and peopled this planetary world, which he afterward redeemed. He is to be worshiped as Lord of all, heir of the Father in power, creation, and dominion. "What did Jesus do?" "Why, I do the things that I saw my Father do when worlds came rolling into existence. I saw my Father work out his kingdom with fear and trembling, and I must do the same." ("Last Sermon," p. 61.)

The Paraclete has already been described: it differs from the other two Persons in being a merely spirit-material soul or existence without a "tabernacle." Thus the Mormons mingle with a Trinity a very distinct, though not a conflicting Duality.

The Mormon Godhead may be illustrated by a council composed of three men, possessing equal wisdom, knowledge, and truth, together with equal qualifications in every other respect: each would be a separate person or a substance distinct from the other two, and yet the three would compose but one body. This body consists of three, viz., Eloheim, Jehovah, and Michael, which is Adam. From the Christian apostles and the Apocalypse, the Mormons deduce the dogma of gods in an ad infinitum ascending series: man, however, must limit his obedience to the last heavenly Father and Son revealed by the Holy Spirit. And as God is perfect man, so is perfect man God: any individual, by faith and obedience, can, as the Brahminical faith asserts, rise to the position of a deity, until, attaining the power of forming a planet, peopling, redeeming it, and sitting there enthroned in everlasting power. The Mormons, like the Moslems, believe that—"things of earth, customs, and ceremonies, being patterned after things in the Spirit world and future abodes of the gods"—there are inferior glories and pleasures for "hewers of wood and drawers of water." In the eternal heavens there are three great mansions, the celestial of the sun, the celestial of the stars, and the terrestrial: the other state is called the Lake of Fire, or the Burning Caldron.