their health should be cared for and that proper sanitary arrangements should be carried out, but also able and willing, so far as in them lies, to assist, to instruct, to educate in the first principles of social and family life, and to lead them on to better and to happier times than they are yet able to conceive. For this end is more especially needed all that can be comprised in the term 'charity,' in the largest, highest, noblest sense of that great word, not mere money-giving the willing offering of time, attention, care, selfdevotion, love. These people are to be won, and they are worth the winning, and those who help to win may rest assured that they themselves will, in the largest, highest, noblest sense, as surely gain.

RICHARD ASSHETON CROSS.

A NEW VIEW OF MORMONISM.

UTAH and its inhabitants have been the theme of so many writers, that I should have hesitated to add to their number had not a recent visit to Salt Lake City greatly modified my previous ideas respecting the Mormon community. So much, indeed, do my impressions from meeting the Mormons themselves, and seeing what they have done, differ from those which are generally entertained, that I venture to submit what may be called 'A New View of Mormonism.'

Before dealing with Utah and the Mormons, as I found them, it will be of advantage to relate briefly the early history of Mormonism. According to the Mormon belief, the Lord appeared to Joseph Smith, then fourteen years of age, at Manchester, State of New York, in the year 1820.

Seven years later an angel delivered to him certain metal plates, whereon was engraved in 'reformed Egyptian characters' the Book of Mormon, which had been hid in the earth fourteen hundred years. With the plates were found two transparent stones, and, by their help, Joseph Smith translated the 'reformed Egyptian characters' into English, based evidently on the style of the Old Testament Chronicles. The book professes to be an inspired record of God's dealings with the ancient inhabitants of America, and rather laborious reading it makes.

It may be as well here to observe that the Mormons accept the Old and New Testament as fully as Christians do, and that, except as regards polygamy, there is nothing in the Book of Mormon or the Revelations of Joseph Smith, the two books on which Mormonism is founded, at variance with the generally accepted doctrines of Christianity. Respecting polygamy, the Mormon Confession of Faith merely declares 'That marriage, whether monogamic or polygamic, is honourable in all, when such marriage is contracted and carried out in accordance with the law of God.'

But to return to the early history of Mormonism. In 1829 John the Baptist, and shortly afterwards the Apostles Peter, James, and John, appeared to Joseph Smith and a devoted follower, Oliver Cawdrey, and consecrated them to the priesthoods of Aaron and Melchizedek.

The church was first organised at Seneca, New York, in 1830, and the following year the professors of the new creed-or rather the believers in Joseph Smith, for there is little new in the creedmade a settlement in Missouri.

The new sect-Latter-Day Saints they called themselves-increased, and, notwithstanding the hostility of their neighbours, appear to have flourished. After being driven from place to place in Missouri, they were finally expelled from that State in 1838, and took refuge in Illinois, where they founded a town named Commerce.'

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The people of Illinois treated the Saints no better than did the Missourians. Disturbances and popular tumults from time to time broke out, and, notwithstanding the intervention of the State authorities, ostensibly in their protection, a mob with blackened faces killed Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, and his brother; and John Taylor, now president of the Saints, narrowly escaped with his life.

To Joseph Smith succeeded Brigham Young, who, till his death in 1877, was the ruling and guiding spirit of the Mormon community.

In consequence of continued persecutions, Brigham Young resolved to lead his people beyond the reach of their persecutors into a new Canaan. The promised land lay westward beyond the great desert plains, amid the recesses of the Rocky Mountains. There, like the chosen people of old, they would be safe from their enemies.

In 1846 the Mormon emigrants had reached Council Bluffs, on the Missouri, when, in compliance with a call by the Federal Government, they sent a battalion of 500 men to join the U.S. army in the war with Mexico then going on.

By the spring of the following year preparations had been completed for the march through the wilderness, and Brigham Young, with 143 chosen followers, started in search of the new Canaan. Later in the season the main body, with a train of 700 waggons, followed the pioneers across the great plains and the Rocky Mountains to Utah, a distance of over 1,000 miles, through a country probably as little known as were the deserts of Arabia in the time of the Jews, and in the face of enemies as fierce and bloodthirsty as those encountered by the Israelites in their march from Egypt to the promised land.

The journey of the emigrants was certainly of a very remarkable character, and its success, and the prosperity which has attended the Mormon colony, prove that Brigham Young, their leader, was a man of great personal character, endowed with extraordinary sagacity and organising faculty, and that his followers possessed in no small degree several, at least, of the qualities which go to the making of nations. It is so easy nowadays to follow the emigrant track by railway from Omaha, and to visit Salt Lake City in a luxurious Pullman car, that it is hardly possible to realise the difficulty of transporting, providing

with sustenance, and protecting thousands of men, women, and children, during that long and difficult journey. At that time the great plains west of the Missouri were a desert, unvisited save by the trapper or fur trader, who, in prosecuting his daring occupation, carried his life in his hands; and the whole country along the route was infested by tribes of fierce and bloodthirsty Indians, to whom the plunder of the emigrant train offered the greatest temptation.

On leaving the banks of the Missouri the emigrants cut themselves off from the rest of the world, and marched into what was then and, for many years afterwards, a wilderness.

The Mormon hunter would no doubt provide buffalo and antelope flesh, and the cows in the emigrant train give a scanty supply of milk, but water was sometimes not to be had for many miles, and cereals had to be taken with them sufficient not only for food on the journey, but for twelve months afterwards, until the seed sown in the following spring came to maturity. Should Mormonism ever produce its poet, he will not want materials for an epic in the march of the Latter-Day Saints to their promised land.

After a weary journey of eight months the emigrants reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and pitched their camp at the mouth of a ravine, or cañon, where Salt Lake City now stands.

The Saints had now gained their promised land. What promise of being a Canaan to them did it offer?

The valley of Salt Lake is 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea-level, about 200 miles long north and south, and of irregular width, varying from 20 to 50 miles. On the east side the Wasatch range and on the west the Oquirrh Mountains rise abruptly, bare, rugged, and precipitous. To the north the valley is closed in by the mountain ranges, and southwards it rises up to the tableland of Arizona.

Twenty miles south of Salt Lake City is Lake Utah, a beautiful sheet of pure water, and from it northwards through the valley flows a considerable stream, called the Jordan, to the Great Salt Lake, which without any outlet fills the bottom of the basin.

The water of the Salt Lake contains about seventeen per cent. of solid matter, chiefly common salt, and is extremely bitter. Its height has varied as much in the last thirty years as nine feet, rising and falling irregularly. At one time the whole valley had been an inland sea, and the old margins are visible along the mountain-sides. One level at which the lake had stood for a long period is 800 feet above the present lake, but as the same margin varies 200 to 300 feet in height, changes have taken place in the level of the land as well as of the water. The lake lies nearly 20 miles north-west of Salt Lake City, and is much frequented in summer by bathers, for whose accommodation the Mormons have built a railway.

The cultivated land, cultivable only by irrigation, is chiefly along the base of the Wasatch Mountains. Outside the irrigated area the

ground has a shiny surface, due to excess of alkaline matter, and grows little but stunted sage-brush and grease-wood.

The new Canaan was anything but a land of promise, and must have presented a most desolate and uninviting appearance.

The United States surveyors had declared the country to be a hopeless alkaline desert, where cereals could not possibly grow, and the few trappers who had visited the locality gave equally discouraging reports. Lieut. Sherman's party in surveying the shores of the Salt Lake in 1850 nearly perished on more than one occasion for want of fresh water.

It must have sorely tried the faith of the Saints in their leader to believe that this could be a land of promise, or a Canaan in which they could even exist. And yet enthusiastic Latter-Day Saints would have little difficulty in drawing a parallel between themselves and the chosen people of old. Like the Israelites, they had left a country of persecution; they had crossed in safety a trackless desert; they had been miraculously preserved in the midst of many dangers and supported through numberless privations; and now they had come into a land which curiously enough possessed several remarkable geographical features common to Judæa. There in the valley, southwards from the new Zion, Lake Utah represented the Sea of Galilee, and, flowing northwards from it, a stream which they named the Jordan emptied itself into the Great Salt Lake, a Dead Sea of bitter water. The land was arid, and pure water valuable as in the Eastern desert. The site selected for the new Zion was surrounded like Jerusalem by mountains, and the Indians sufficiently represented the Philistines, so long a thorn in the side of the Israelites. Strengthened, no doubt, by such reflections in the belief that they were the chosen people of the latter days, the Saints commenced the unpromising task of establishing themselves in the new Canaan. Many troubles and difficulties threatened the very existence of the young community. Hosts of locusts, coming none knew whence, devoured the crops. The distance from civilisation and the difficulties of transport were so great that it was almost impracticable to import food, even if money could be had to buy it, and at times starvation seemed imminent. The locusts, however, happily disappeared; and the community slowly increased in numbers. The Indians were troublesome, but Brigham Young declared it was cheaper to feed than to fight them, and acting on that policy never came to actual rupture with his unwelcome neighbours.

In 1857 serious trouble arose with the Government of the United States, due to what has since been admitted were false and slanderous reports. President Buchanan despatched an army to Utah to assert the authority of the central Government, which it was said had been defied. The troops were unable to reach Utah in 1857, and the Mormons, uncertain of the intentions of the Government, made preparations to abandon their possessions in Utah and