Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/79



settle the Mormon question; and their prophecies are in course of rapid fulfillment.

While the railroad and the intercourse consequent to its completion have thus inaugurated a revolution soon to be complete in public sentiment among the Mormons, they have likewise made them more widely and favorably known. The public, while none the less vigorous in its condemnation of their social system, begins to give to them the honor which is their due for their persistent energy, industry, economy, temperance, and order. The people of the Pacific Coast, especially of our newer mining districts, have always been ready in their admissions of the vast national value of the Utah agricultural settlements at their very doors. This cheap source of supply to the miners of the necessaries of life has enabled them early to develop large districts, and add vastly to the common wealth. It is something for which we may all justly congratulate ourselves that during the last session of Congress, when a bill was pending relative to the forcible suppression of the Mormon 'marriage system—a bill so cruel, unjust, and vindictive in its provisions that it should condemn its authors to endless infamy—every member of the Pacific Coast delegation, to whom alone the subject was in anywise familiar, was found in the ranks of the opposition. We may hope that the day for an armed crusade against any form of religious belief has forever passed. Cutting throats, however valuable an exercise for the discipline of an army, can scarcely be deemed a missionary work.

The solution of the Mormon problem is simple; in fact, if let alone, it will speedily solve itself. Unjust persecution has no other result than to strength en religious fanaticism. The murder of Smith, the Mormon Prophet, gave a new lease of life to his tottering church. Their subsequent persecutions were a perpetual advertisement, drawing to their ranks great numbers of fanatical people who considered that whom the Lord loved He chastened, and whose sympathies were intuitively with the weaker side.

As we have already illustrated, our own marriage system is the fruit of our modern civilization and a truer appreciation of the Christian doctrine. Religious persecutions and wars have ever moved backward upon the dial-plate the hands which mark the onward progress of the race. Mormon polygamy, its evils and its cure, are questions in morals outside the field of political action. It is the department of the missionary rather than of the jurist, statesman, or soldier. Our clergy, and not our Congressmen, should take this evil in hand. Already several eminent divines have taken this position, and warned us that this is not the age when Catholics can broil Protestants, Protestants grill Catholics, or Presbyterians hang Quakers for the glory of God. The faith of the forty millions of American Christians is not endangered by the presence among them of one hundred thousand people heretical upon the marriage question. It should rather be quickened into zealous action that these guasi-heathens are at their doors. And although the transfer of this great debate from Congress to the pulpits of the land may destroy the entire capital of a considerable number of obscure politicians, otherwise unknown, and thus perchance still forever the plash and babble of these several fountains of dish-water, yet even then have we faith to believe that the Republic and Salt Lake City shall live.