Second, _The work of the Lord will meet opposition, but it will increase the more it is opposed and spread farther and farther._ The reader already knows that from its inception the work of the Lord in the new dispensation met with the most violent opposition. Only the year before Oliver Cowdery published this prophecy under consideration, twelve hundred of the Saints were driven from their lands and homes in Jackson County, Missouri, more than two hundred of their houses burned and much other property destroyed. But I am to prove that opposition met the church after 1834, and that in spite of that opposition the work increased, and a knowledge of it became more widely diffused. Be it so. Five years after the expulsion from Jackson County, Missouri, opposition so increased that the inhabitants of the state of Missouri, with the officers of the state at their head, arose against the Saints; directly or indirectly caused the death of some four hundred, and drove between twelve and fifteen thousand from their homes into exile, confiscated their lands, drove off their cattle and wantonly destroyed other property. Eight years after their expulsion from the state of Missouri, the Saints to the number of twenty thousand were driven by mob violence from the state of Illinois, into the wilderness. They fled beyond the confines of civilization--going a thousand miles beyond the frontiers of the United States, and settled in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains; where, despite the waves of persecution which have broken upon the church, it still lives, its membership more numerous than ever, the faith of the Saints more strongly established; and where from its lofty station it overlooks the world and sends its accredited representatives to all the peoples of the earth, to fulfill the decree of Jehovah that the gospel of the kingdom, in the last days, shall be preached in all the world for a witness and then shall the end come. [13] It was rather a remarkable prediction that the more the work of the Lord in the last days was opposed the more it would prosper. It was still more remarkable that it should be predicted that opposition would rise against it at all, since the great work had its birth in a land where the constitution of the government guaranteed religious liberty. The marvelous fulfillment of the prediction under these circumstances is evidence that there was behind it more than human foresight.