Page:The Rocky Mountain Saints.djvu/494

460 wicked than the citizens of the settlements north of Fillmore, no one believes—yet the Mountain Meadows Massacre was committed by the militia from those southern settlements. When the news of that deed was heard, the people north were terror-stricken, and shuddered with horror at the thought of the barbarous crime, and the recital of the bloody work is harrowing to them to-day. Had the massacre been committed in the north, the people of the south would have experienced the same sentiments of abhorrence, yet they in the south committed the crime, and served themselves with the spoils of their victims.

The Mormon people in Utah are not the offspring of a barbarous race, neither were they raised and nurtured in uncivilized nations. Apart from the spitefulness of religious controversy—which, by-the-by, is nothing peculiar to them a kinder and more simple-hearted people is not upon the face of the earth. Had the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred in any of the neighbouring Territories, and that crime was clearly the work of white people, the Mormons would have despised them, hated them, and in all probability would have refused all intercourse with them.

That Brigham Young is by his natural instincts a bad man, or that his apostles and his bishops are men of blood, is not true. Here and there among them a malicious man is met with, but, apart from religion, the ruling men in Utah would be considered good citizens in any community.

Without the consideration of the question of personal divinity, the high moral teaching and unspotted life of the Nazarene have been the greatest blessings to mankind, and have, through the varied channels, and slow, tortuous, and muddled windings of progressive civilization, made the nineteenth century what it is. Under the influence of that Christianity, the Mormons were second to no people of their class; but once from under it, and with headlong rush flying back to the habits, customs, and morality, of the ages of the world's childhood, Mormonism is consistently just what it is. Moving in the light of past ages, the hatred of the Gentile and the apostate has made the history of Utah what it has been. The more they have approximated in situation to the nomadic Israelites, the