Extracts.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 523, 7 November 1857, Page 3

Extracts.

MORMONISM,

(From the New York Tribune, June 20.), Mrs. McLean, the miserable woman whose husband recently avenged her seduction by taking the life of Pratt, the Mormon Elder, has written a letter to The Van Bwren (Ark.) Intelligencer, which only proves the depth of her delusion and the hopeless nature of her insanity. She still persists in her adherence to a foolish faith, which has destroyed her domestic peace, and in regarding the worthless imposter who has been sent to his account as a prophet and a . martyr. The letter is evidently the production of a lunatic who should at once be sent for medical treatment to a hospital. Nor are we able to see why other unfortunate victims of this astonishing mania might not legally and humanely be treated as acknowledged madmen and madwomen are treated; Certainly, there could be no objection to combatting promptly and stringently such a hideous hallucination. The case of Mrs. McLean, although it is not by any means a singular one, affords a striking illustration of the pernicious and demoralising effect of fanaticism. She fancied that she was converted by the gospel of Joseph Smith, She immediately commenced a series of attempts to worry her husband into the same faith. She managed to hare her children clandestinely baptised "by P. P. Pratt. She taught their young lips to utter blasphemous nonsense, which she called prayer. She absconded from her husband's house, and finally stole her offspring, that she might take them to Utah. Her insanity is perfect and absolute. She writes incoherently and absurdly. She compares Elder Pratt with our Saviour, and admits that she washed his feet and combed his hair. She.hardly seeks to disguise the fact that she had been for some time living with him adulterously. When after the perusal of a letter so lamentable, we pause to consider the nature of the pretension which has misled this unfortunate woman, we are astonished to find it so utterly flimsy and meaningless. We have taken some pains to investigate the subject; we have read a few Mormon sermons, and we have peeped into a Mormon " Bible." We confess that we have never met with a faith so utterly without foundation, so purposeless and so senseless. We are able to trace the origin of many religious delusions. The followers of Joanna Southcote and of Mother Lee seem really to have believed in something definite. Mahommedanisrn and Budhism have a sort of fixed creed.' The idolators of the Southern Sea can boast a certain theology, nor is a thread wanting by which we can ti'ace their excesses to a distorted and perverted truth. But Mormonism is a puzzle. It began in the freak of a sick man, who amused himself by writing an imitation of the Holy Scriptures. Its originator was a blackguard, without intelligence, learning or cultivation. Its prominent supporters since that time have been men of the same class. The sermons which are preached in its temples are merely incoherent farragoes of slang, smut, and nonsense. Its professors assume to be saints, without vouchsafing even a nominal proof of their saintliness. In truth, the scoundrels who have deluded so many people prove nothing:, teach nothing, and come to no conclusion. The Mormon religion is all comprised in an asserted sanctity.

It is clearly evident that such a scheme, so empty and inane, must soon have exhausted its materials of delusion in spite of the diabolical ingenuity of its inventors, had not pains been taken to graft upon it something which, if not religious, was at least tangible. The doctrine of polygamy gave to the Salt Lake faith that which it so signally lacked—an incitement, a temptation and a stimulus—and this is, in fact, the length and -breadth and thickness of it all. Take out the plurality of wives and the whole scheme becomes so nakedly nothing, that all the religious fanaticism in the world would hardly secure it a convert. But there is this low temptation, this appeal to unhallowed lust, this play upon curiosity, this practice upon the morbid minds of men and women. Its main strength is in its novelty and oddity. Bad men think that it must be a very fine thing to have seventy wives, and weak women long to know by actual experience what it is to be the inhabitant of a harem. And it is this promise of a Paradise, infinitely more sensual than that of Mahommed, which has besotted the male and seduced the female converts to Mormonism. It is by taking a strange and bewildering step towards barbarism, that Brigham Young has secured so many followers.

Of course a crime so alien to the spirit of the age and to civilized customs would have but a short existence, if it were committed in a locality accessible to ordinary influences. Unfortunately, it is practised thousands of miles from the places in which it is preached, and that distance which lends enchantment to the view precludes effective exertion for its abolition. It must, then, either be taken in hand by the Government, which has a clear right to interfere with it, go far as it rebels against federal

authority, or else it must be allowed to remain and work out its own explosion. The Government has thus far done nothing, nor is there any certainty that anything will be done. But we may safely assume that, even without such interference, such an establishment as that at Salt Lake cannot long endure in the nineteenth century on the American continent.