Defense of the Faith and the Saints. B. H. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ with its loud rattling chain and clumsy water-bucket, but no one called. At the door of the house he pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise he could make. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes, and barren husks of his clamour. There was no curt voice of a man, no quick questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household gods." "If I went into the gardens, linking the wicket latch after me, to pull the marigolds, heart's ease and lady slippers and draw a drink with the water-sodden bucket and its noisy chain, or knocked off with my stick the tall headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples; no one called out to me from any open window, or dog sprang forward to bark alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in their houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearth, and had to tread a-tip-toe as if walking down the aisles of a country church."

      Mr. Wilson certainly has a remarkably similar taste to that of Colonel Kane for flowers and gardens. Young Rae meets Prudence in the gardens—now observe:

Mr. Wilson.	Mr. Kane.
"He ran to her—over beds of marigolds, heart's ease and lady slippers, through a row of drowsy looking heavy headed dahlias, and passed other withering flowers, all but choked out by the rank garden growths of late summer."	"If I went into the gardens … to pull the marigolds, heart's ease and lady slippers, … or knock off the tall, heavy headed dahlias and the sunflowers, hunting over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—no one called out to me."

      After Mr. Wilson had followed General Kane in the matter of flowers so closely, one marvels that he did not go with him as far as the "sunflowers and love-apples;" but General Kane was hunting "over beds of cucumbers," and perhaps the author of the "Lions of the Lord" found that his taste for vegetables did not run so closely with the General's in the vegetable line as in the matter of flowers. But seriously, does not the code of ethics in literature require that our rising young author should either have the grace to put these descriptive passages in quotation marks, or else frankly give the source whence he draws the prettiest bits of description in his much-vaunted book? In the event of the work reaching a second edition, I suggest that he adopt the whole of General Kane's description of "The Deserted City," for his opening chapter; for beautiful as his own is, it but shines with a borrowed light, and when compared with the General's it appears to great disadvantage.

      A word as to the purpose of the "Lions of the Lord;" for Mr. Wilson's performance must be classified with the "purpose novel." Undoubtedly there is such a thing as instructive fiction, and the "purpose novel" has its place as one of the agencies which contribute to the enlightenment of humanity. But if it takes hold of our respect it must be, in harmony with the truth—though fiction, it must speak truly; and keep within the probabilities of the subject in hand. Or, to slightly paraphrase an utterance in Mr. Wilson's preface, if the writer now and again has to divine certain things that do not show—yet must be—surely this must not be less than truth. For a writer of "purpose fiction" to do other than this is to make himself as much liable to censure as the historian who would pervert the truth which he is in honor bound to state whether it fits in with his personal theories or not. In his preface, Mr. Wilson informs us that he designed to make a tale from his observations of western life in Salt Lake and Utah; but in his search for things on which to found his fiction he was so dismayed by facts so much more thrilling than any fiction he might have imagined, that he turned from his first purpose in order "to try to tell what had really been." "In this story then," says he, "the things that are strangest have most truth. The make-believe is hardly more than a cement to join the queerly wrought stones of fact that were found ready." Hence we are to be turned from considering his work as fiction in order to regard it as truth.

      It is exactly at this point that I arraign Mr. Wilson before the bar of public opinion, and tell him that what he represents as true I denounce as false; and this quite apart from any books from which he has paraphrased much of the matter he weaves into his story. The trouble is that the sources whence he makes his deductions are as untrue in their statements as his paraphrases of them are. Mr. Wilson is as one who walks through some splendid orchard and gathers here and there the worm-eaten, frost-bitten, wind-blasted, growth-stunted and rotten fruit, which in spite of the best of care is to be found in every orchard; bringing this to us he says: "This is the fruit of yonder orchard; you see how worthless it is; an orchard growing such fruit is ready for the burning." Whereas, the fact may be that there are tons and tons of beautiful, luscious fruit, as pleasing to the eye as it would be agreeable to the palate, remaining in the orchard to which he does not call our attention at all. Would not such a representation of the orchard be an untruth, notwithstanding his blighted specimens were gathered from its trees? If he presents to us the blighted specimens of fruit from the orchard, is he not in truth and in honor bound also to call our attention to the rich harvest of splendid fruit that still remains ungathered before he asks us to pass judgement on the orchard? I am not so blind in my admiration of the Mormon people, or so bigoted in my devotion to the Mormon faith as to think that there are no individuals in that Church chargeable with fanaticism, folly, intemperate speech and wickedness; nor am I blind to the fact that some in their over-zeal have lacked judgement; and that in times of excitement, under stress of special provocation, even Mormon leaders have given utterance to ideas that are indefensible. But I have yet to learn that it is just in a writer of history or of "purpose fiction," that "must speak truly," to make a collection of these things and represent them as of the essence of that faith against which said writer draws an indictment.

      "No one would measure the belief of Christians," says a truly great writer, "by certain statements in the Fathers, nor judge the moral principles of Roman Catholics by prurient quotations from the casuists; nor yet estimate Lutherans by the utterances and deeds of the early successors of Luther, nor Calvanists by the burning of Servitus. In such cases the general standpoint of the times has to taken into account." (Edeshiem's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, preface, page 8.)

      A long time ago the great Edmund Burke, in his defense of the rashness expressed in both speech and action some of our patriots of the American Revolution period, said: "It is not fair to judge of the temper or the disposition of any man or set of men when they are composed and at rest from their conduct or their expressions in a state of disturbance and irritation." The justice of Burke's assertion has never been questioned, and without any wresting whatsoever it may be applied to Mormon leaders who sometimes spoke and acted under the recollection of rank injustice perpetrated against themselves and their people; or rebuke rising evils against which their souls revolted.

      Mr. Wilson's book is a false indictment against Mormonism, and against the leading characters of the Mormon Church. The speeches he represents as falling from their lips, could never be recognized in the utterances of Mormons, either among the leaders, or the rank and file. The blasphemous phraseology was never heard in Mormon camps or pulpits. Such expressions as "When that young man gets all het up with the Holy Ghost, the angel of the Lord just has to give down;" or "Lord, what won't Brother Brigham do when the Holy Ghost gets a strangle-holt on him?" are blasphemies utterly impossible to the Mormon mind. Such expressions as the following, represented as coming from Brigham Young: "The Lute of the Holy Ghost will now say a word of farewell from our pioneers to those who must stay behind," is equally impossible; and so are many other speeches which he puts into the mouths of leading characters of the Mormon Church. Even this blasphemous phrase-name given to Joel Rae—"Lute of the Holy Ghost"—is not original with Mr. Wilson. It was a cognomen given to Ephraem Syrus, "the greatest man," says Andrew D. White, author of "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,"—"the greatest man of the old Syrian Church, widely known as the 'Lute of the Holy Ghost.'" [1]

      The most serious injustice Mr. Wilson does the Mormon people, however, the thing in which he most departs from the facts established, not only by history but by the decisions of the United States courts in Utah, is in that he makes the awful crime of the massacre of emigrants at Mountain Meadows, in СКАЧАТЬ