By the Rev. R. G. McNiece, D.D., for twenty years prior to 1897 Pastor First Presbyterian Church, Salt Lake City, Utah.
The writer has lived in Salt Lake City, the official headquarters of Mormonism, for over thirty years, and he has improved the opportunity to secure a complete understanding of the system. In the great Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, during a whole generation, he has heard Mormonism expounded and defended, again and again, by its chief officials - by President Brigham Young, and President John Taylor, and their successors, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith. In various Mormon meeting-houses, also, from Idaho to Arizona, he has heard the system set forth by many of its chief apostles, bishops, and elders.
Furthermore, the writer has diligently studied the chief official books of Mormonism, especially the “Book of Mormon”, the “Doctrine and Covenants”, the “Pearl of Great Price”, and, supplementing these, the Mormon Catechism, Elder Robert’s “New Witness for God”, Professor Talmage’s “Lectures on the Articles of Faith”, the works of Apostle Orson Pratt, Lucy Smith’s “History of the Prophet Joseph”, and the Autobiography of Joseph Smith. And besides he has read a great mass of pamphlets and articles by Mormon officials. The standpoint of the writer is that of friendly sympathy and good-will toward the men and women among the common people in the Mormon ranks, whose sincerity he has no desire to call in question. But since Mormonism keeps from 1,500 to 2,000 missionaries scattered up and down the country, propagating this most erroneous and harmful system, organizing Mormon meetings, and separating families, in the Eastern, Middle, Southern and Northwestern States, patriotic and Christian people everywhere need to have a clear idea of what Mormonism really is, and the shameful way in which it dishonors the Bible and the Christian religion, so that they can help to protect their own communities from the curse. And it is impossible to understand its character, without understanding its origin, so let us consider that first.
THE ORIGIN OF THE MORMON SYSTEM
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As an organization, it is only eighty-two years old, going back to April, 1830. About this time, or a few months before, the Book of Mormon was published; and on April 6th, 1830, the Mormon Church was organized with six members, in Fayette, Seneca County, New York. Notwithstanding the long-continued effort to surround this origin with great mystery, and various spectacular fireworks from heaven, as manipulated by Joseph Smith, there is no mystery about it. The period of eighty-two years is not long enough to take us back to the region of mystery.
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The two main sources of its origin: The first source is a group of three designing men, who put their profane wits together to palm off on various communities in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, this crude, bogus, man-made system under the garb of Christian phraseology, in order to deceive the unthinking.
People in general think of Joseph Smith as the one man above all others who originated the Mormon System. But the facts are solid against such a proposition. Smith was ignorant and illiterate, hardly able to read until after he was a grown man. He knew practically nothing about the Bible, according to his mother’s statement, and there is no substantial evidence in his life and conduct that he ever had any religion in his heart.
A religious man, however erratic he might be, who had been trained in the Bible and in theology, was needed to give the bogus system some kind of religious setting. The only man connected with the scheme from its very beginning, long before the public organization, who had any such qualifications, was the Rev. Sidney Rigdon. About 1819, when 26 years of age, he was licensed to preach as a Baptist minister, and in 1821 became pastor of a small Baptist church in Pittsburg.
He was an interesting speaker, but very erratic, and constantly presenting all sorts of wild and startling theories which unsettled the people. In 1824 he was deposed from the Baptist denomination because he was unwilling to work in harmony with its leaders. About two years later, he became a minister of the Campbellite denomination, and came under the powerful influence of that strong man, Alexander Campbell, who thoroughly indoctrinated him in all the doctrines and views peculiar at that time to the denomination. But Rigdon quarreled with Campbell, and argued if the latter could secure fame and authority for himself by organizing a new church, then he, Rigdon, could secure still greater fame and authority by giving to the world both a new revelation and a new religion, through the Book of Mormon.
The two unprincipled men who assisted Rigdon in working out this scheme were Parley P. Pratt, who afterwards became one of the twelve apostles, and Joseph Smith. Pratt furnished the mental and moral audacity necessary to propagate such a dishonest scheme, and Joseph Smith furnished the avaricious cunning, which enabled him to so commercialize the whole affair that the great bulk of the financial profit and of the ecclesiastical power fell into his hands. He occupied a subordinate place only until Rigdon could put the spurious Book of Mormon into its present shape. But just as soon as the church was organized, Joseph Smith seized the reins of power, rode rough-shod over everything and everybody that stood in his way, and did not lay down the power until his death in June, 1844.
The kind of man Pratt was is illustrated by the fact that he lost his life in 1857 near Fort Gibson, Arkansas, at the muzzle of a shot-gun in the hands of an enraged husband, whose wife Pratt had induced to desert her home and her children, and go with him to Utah as one of his plural wives.
These three unprincipled men were the fabricators of the Mormon system.