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

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      I.

      "THE FOUNDER OF MORMONISM."

       Table of Contents

      Some of you perhaps are aware of the fact that I have been giving some attention of late to the literature on Mormonism; not only that which we ourselves publish, but that also which is Published by others. The publications on Mormonism during the last five years, I believe, are more numerous than in any twenty years previous to that time. The last five years have witnessed an awakening of thought upon our religion. More, and ever more attention is being given to it. More newspaper articles, more magazine articles, more volumes—some of them quite pretentious—have been written on Mormonism than ever before, and indicate the universal interest taken in the subject. The books and magazine articles have been written from various standpoints, some of them in the old spirit of bitterness, and some of them are intended to be written in a spirit of fairness. Yet I marvel at their author's ideas of fairness. One work, written by a noted professor, pretending to be an impartial history, and issued by one of the first publishing houses in the United States, with the view, evidently, of establishing a standard history of Mormonism, gives full credence to everything that has been said against us, but the author frequently cautions his readers against quotations he makes from our own works—and yet that book is put forth as an impartial history of Mormonism! Some have attempted to write from a philosophical standpoint, but with the result that they plainly manifest that they have not yet reached foundation principles upon which they can satisfactorily account for Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and the great work he accomplished. When I see men shifting their grounds, and advancing first one theory and then, another to account for Mormonism, and there is confusion among them, uncertainty, indecision—I know that the citadel of our mighty faith is secure from harm from their attacks; that Mormonism cannot fall a victim to their philosophies or their arguments.

      Let me, for a little while, draw your attention to at least one of the so-called philosophical solutions of Mormonism, a scientific accounting for Joseph Smith. The work I allude to was offered to Yale University as a thesis upon which the author hoped to secure, and I think he did secure, the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy. He candidly confesses that it is an effort to account for Joseph Smith upon some other hypothesis than that he was a conscious fraud, bent on deceiving mankind. When an intelligent man makes such an announcement as that, I know, and you know, that the theories heretofore advanced to account for Joseph Smith, are unsatisfactory; that they are efforts which have failed. The theory that Joseph Smith was a conscious fraud, an imposter, has fallen to the ground. The charges frequently made and persistently urged that Mormonism had its origin in deception and conscious fraud have failed of their purpose. The floods of falsehood with which some men have sought to overwhelm Mormonism have not accomplished the end proposed. The Latter-day Saints, after more than three-quarters of a century of existence, stand above all the floods of falsehood that have been belched out against them. The work of God has not broken down, it has survived; and the Saints smilingly pity those who would make use of such contemptible means with which to combat the truth of Almighty God. Now, however, we are to be treated philosophically. And the philosophy that is advanced is, unconscious hallucination in the mind of Joseph Smith; partly unconscious and partly conscious possession of hypnotic power, by which the minds of those around him were dominated and made to see things which in reality had no existence; and while the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, and others testify of visions and voices from God honestly enough, still as a matter of fact those revelations had really no objective existence, but were mental hallucinations. And as for Joseph Smith, he was deceived by epileptic conditions.

      The author I am considering is at great pains to trace the ancestry of the Prophet, pointing out their mental peculiarities and supposed defects, leading up to the conclusion that these defects of mind in his ancestors culminated in epilepsy in Joseph Smith. And hence, we have as the explanation of Mormonism, epileptic fits in its Prophet, whose hallucinations are honestly mistaken for inspired visions, with partly conscious and partly unconscious hypnotic power over others! And this theory is presented seriously to one of the first institutions of learning in America as a rational explanation of how Mormonism came into existence!

      Ernest Renan, the French philosopher, when considering a similar hypothesis to account for the Lord Jesus Christ, overthrew all that kind of sophistry with this simple statement:

      "It has never been given to the mere aberrations of the human mind to result in the establishment of permanent institutions that influence any considerable number of people."

      In other words, the dreams and hallucinations of the epileptic end in mere dreams and hallucinations; they never crystallize into great systems of philosophy or into rational religious institutions. They never crystallize into great organizations capable of perpetuating that philosophy and that religion in the world. No matter how nearly genius may be allied to madness, it must remain genius and not degenerate to madness if it exercises any permanent influence over the minds of men.

      It is a pleasure to find one's conclusions sustained by men of recognized ability in any line of work on which they have specialized, and in respect of which they are regarded as authorities. In such manner I find the views, above set forth sustained by one eminent in the domain of nervous diseases and psychiatry, Charles L. Dana, the writer of text books on the foregoing subject, text books used in all the great colleges and universities of our country, that give attention to the subject. Following is his definition of paranoia, a disease closely allied to that to which Mr. Riley assumes Joseph Smith was subject. [1]

      "Paranoia is a chronic psychosis characterized by the development gradually and soon after maturity of systematized delusions without other serious disturbances of the mind, and without much tendency to dementia. * * * With some the systematized idea takes a religious turn, and the patient thinks he has some divine mission or has received some inspiration from God; or the idea may take a devotional turn and the patient become an acetic. It is not, however, to be assumed that all promoters of new religions and novel social ideas are paranoiacs. Many of these are simply the natural developments, ignorance and a somewhat emotional and unbalanced temperament. The characteristic of the paranoiac is that his work is ineffective, his influence brief and trivial, his ideas really too absurd and impractical for even ignorant men to receive. I do not class successful prophets and organizers like Joseph Smith, or great apostles of social reforms like Rousseau as paranoiacs. Insane minds are not creative, but are weak, and lack persistence in purpose or powers of execution." [2]

      "A certain rather small percentage of epileptics become either demented or insane. True epilepsy is not compatible with extraordinary intellectual endowments. Caesar, Napoleon, Peter the Great, and other geniuses may have had some symptomatic fits, but not idiopathic epilepsy." [3]

      There is much glamor of sophistry, which may be taken for profound reason and argument, in the work to which I am calling your attention. But one word answers this "philosophical" accounting for our Prophet. The work accomplished by him, the institutions he founded, destroy the whole fabric of premises and argument on which this theory is based. Great as was the Prophet Joseph Smith—and he was СКАЧАТЬ