Hence the Mormons, who claim to possess at the present day the powers which have departed from Christians in general, are perfectly in accordance with Irenæus in holding that signs like these are invariably attendant on the kingdom of God. Revelations, visions, the powers of prophecy, of healing, of speaking with tongues, of casting out devils, and working other miracles, are (they contend) the prerogatives of those who belong to this kingdom. History, in relating first the miracles of the Jewish patriarchs and prophets, then those of the Christian Fathers, powerfully supports this theory. Scripture in several unambiguous passages entirely confirms it. And the daily experience of the Latter-day Saints, if we accept their statements, bears witness to its truth, by presenting abundant examples of the actual exercise of such supernatural gifts within their own society. Thus, one person is cured of blindness; another of dislocation of the thigh; another has his fractured backbone restored; in the fourth case it is a rupture that is healed; in the fifth convulsive fits that are stopped.[9] I have myself been present at a Mormon meeting for public worship, and have heard the saints who were gathered together narrate, with perfect solemnity and apparent good faith, the miraculous cures which they themselves experienced, or which they had personally witnessed. One after another rose to bear his testimony to some case of the kind which had fallen within his immediate knowledge. To these uncultivated and fanatical people, holy events still were what they have long ceased to be to the ordinary Christian world—living realities; and we may still study in them the mental condition of those who could accept as phenomena occurring in their own day the restoration of sight, hearing, or speech; the expulsion of devils; and the resurrection of the dead. CHAPTER II. HOLY PLACES.