It was expected that sooner or later some attempt would be made to explain Joseph Smith, the "Mormon Prophet." Such was his character, such the importance of the religion he founded, so remarkable and thrilling the history of his people, that he could not be ignored. Already of biographies there have been many, some written from the side of sympathy and belief in his prophetic calling; more from the standpoint of the polemic contemner. Even fiction before now has found incidents in his career and elements in his character that promised material for its purpose. But the fiction in the main has been "sorry stuff," utterly contemptible from its distortion of facts and sickening in its childish efforts to deny the Mormon leader or his people any honesty of purpose, uprightness of intention, or praise for what they have achieved. The latest work of Miss Lily Dougall, "The Mormon Prophet," however, does not belong to that class of fiction. Here, at least, we have a strong, clear-cut, purpose story, lofty in tone; its incidents easily within the lines of probability, and singularly free from the vulgarity of nearly all the writers of fiction who have made their work at any point touch Mormonism. It is an honest effort to account for Joseph Smith and his work; and, I may add, without depreciating any one worthy of consideration, that it enjoys the distinction of being about the first honest effort in the department of fiction to account for the Mormon Prophet. This, it must be explained, is not said in approval of the entire book or its purpose, but is said of the story as unobjectionable fiction and the honesty of effort upon the part of the authoress to solve what must have been to her, and what is to the world, a difficult problem. That Miss Dougall writes from intimate acquaintance with the early history of the Mormons is apparent on every page; that she has followed the order of events, all acquainted with the history of our people well know; and if, as she explains in her preface, she has taken "necessary liberty with incidents," those that she has used have not been violently wrested, and those invented have not been much out of harmony with the facts of history.