flesh and blood of Christ" and baptism; the principles of Faith, Hope, and Charity in the Church; the continuance of miracles and of the ministry of Angels; the wrongfulness of the baptism of infants, who are not accountable, and who of themselves are alive in Christ from the foundation of the world, for "awful is the wickedness to suppose that God saveth one child because of baptism, and the other must perish because he hath no baptism "). Such is the book which the Latter-day Saints bracket in faith and worship with the Bible. The best that can be said for it is that more than a twentieth of its bulk consists of the Sermon on the Mount, and large extracts from Isaiah and other books in the Bible, passages which throw into painful relief the pseudo-Oriental style with its myriad repetitions of “and it came to pass" and its bogus proper names, the spiritual poverty, the commonplace imagination, and the all but unvarying dulness and confusion of the rest of this baseborn Apocrypha of the New World. It will always remain a marvel of the inventive century to which it belongs that an illiterate youth, however morbid his mental inheritance, should have dictated in so brief a space of time a fiction so daring and presumptuous. That he was able forthwith to find followers and dupes is a pathetic testimony to the disordered religious condition, the superstitious spiritualism, the crude Scripturalism, the credulity and ignorance of a large section of the population of the United States during the early years of the century of its most rapid settlement and expansion. It has not been proved that Joseph Smith was not the author of the Book of Mormon. The Spaulding narrative from which it was averred the Book was taken has never been found. It seems, in any case, that Smith treated all his sources, Biblical or secular, alike. He wove them not as documents but from memory into a garrulous tissue of his own. His work betrays not only his own feverish imagination and the crude ideas of his random education, but the notions current in the circles in which his early life was spent. His receptive brain gave shelter to a motley company of ideas drawn from Calvinism and the Westminster Confession, from Methodism, from Romanism, from Baptist doctrine, from Freemasonry, even from Mohammedanism, and later from the Catholic Apostolic system-a welter of heterogeneous elements corresponding to the flux of doctrinal systems which was necessarily found in a mixed emigrant population beyond the control and guidance of its ancestral Churches and their trained ministers. He owed his success, however, far less to his stock of revelations or of doctrine, than to his selfconfidence, his knowledge of the human nature which surrounded him, his insight into its weaknesses and its needs, his unscrupulous leadership, and, finally, his persecution and martyrdom. Mormonism was no product of a scholar's study, or of a settled people, but of rough motherwit in a rough land and people, out of real touch with the Bible, impatient of control from beyond the Continent, welcoming with a species of perverted patriotism a native American Book of Scriptures, and going "back of" the New Testament itself and all traditional ecclesiastical authority to a primitive Church and an Apostolic organization and endowment of its own. Democracy, anarchy, and tyranny blend in this strange theocracy. Their great thought is that Revelation never ceases: the Bible has to be supplemented not only by its American counterpart, the Book of Mormon, but by the oracles which proceed by inspiration (a) from the individual's own soul regarding personal matters of faith and life, (b) from the President or Chief Apostle, after or without consultation with his apostolic assessors, on all ecclesiastical and general matters. Thus it is peculiarly difficult to formulate the present-day system of the Latter-day Saints, in which the simplicity of the faith of Joseph Smith has been overlaid with allegorical and polytheistic mysteries, as, e.g., regarding the deity of Adam, "the only God with whom we have to do." God is corporeal. All things are begotten, not created. In many points there is a striking identity with Irvingism, including belief in the near approach of the Advent, in a revived Apostolate and in apostolic charisms, in the restoration of the Tribes of Israel, in literal Tithes for the Church, and in a ceremony of "sealing." They maintain the universal priesthood of believers either after the higher order of Melchizedec or after the lower order of Aaron, the continuance of prophetic gifts and of healing by faith and prayer, baptism not earlier than at the age of eight, baptism of the dead "by proxy," celestial or “sealed " marriage which is indissoluble for time and eternity. Polygamy, though not avowed by Joseph Smith, who had certainly no personal scruples regarding it, and not sanctioned by the Book of Mormon, became the rule under his successor Brigham Young, and was suppressed, under protest, only by the strong arm of the U.S. legislature. The ascetic side of Mormonism is seen in its prohibition of tobacco, of alcohol, and, save in wintry weather or in famine, of flesh meat. The Communion wine used is unfermented. In addition to the Bible and the Book of Mormon, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants by Smith, The Pearl of Great Price (an anthology from Smith's writings), and A Word of Wisdom are authoritative manuals. It may be of interest to quote, as a summary of primitive Mormon doctrine, a group of Thirteen Articles by Joseph Smith, written soon after the constitution of the Church at New York in 1840: 1. We believe in God the Eternal Father, and in His Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost. 2. We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression. 3. We believe that through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel. 4. We believe that these ordinances are: (i.) Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; (ii.) Repentance; (iii.) Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; (iv.) Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost. 5. We believe that a man must be called of God, by "prophecy and by the laying on of hands," by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof. 6. We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive Church, viz. apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, etc. 7. We believe in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, etc. 8. We believe the Bible to be the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. 9. We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. 10. We believe in the literal gathering of Israel, and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes: That Zion will be built upon this Continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisic glory. 11. We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. 12. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law. 13. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul: "We believe all things, we hope all things"; we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.1 1 Quoted in Religious Systems of the World, London and N.Y. 1889, pp. 658-659. CHAPTER XXII. GENERAL RETROSPECT. THE BROADER FEATURES OF THE HISTORY. OUR descriptive survey of the long history of Creeds and Confessions of Faith is now completed. We have endeavoured not only to trace the chief stages by which the Christian world has reached its present complex confessional position, and to characterize the principal types and forms in which ecclesiastical dogma has found expression, but also to furnish the reader, of whatever religious denomination he may chance to be, with extensive and strictly representative quotations from the authoritative documents, so that he may be enabled to receive some personal impression, and form some personal judgment, of their distinctive genius and worth. There is in truth great need in our time, both for the student of theology and for the general Christian public, of reliable and compendious information regarding the doctrinal differences which mark the Churches of Christendom. It is as much a pre-requisite of Christian reunion as of just and competent criticism that the advocates of one system should really understand the religious principles and the doctrinal convictions for which their neighbours in other systems contend, and by which they have lived. Few Christian scholars, and few Churchmen, can pass through a busy life without having made the painful and disconcerting discovery that through unconscious ignorance they have failed to do simple justice to some sister Church or some rival Theology. It is always easier as an apologist to be on the alert to discover the weak points in other creeds and organizations than to acquire and maintain the reformer's faculty of seeing faults that |