Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Volume 2 of 2)Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Religion
Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Volume 2 of 2)
Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Latter Day Saint churches
These gentlemen Reviewers express two fears. One is that they will
be charged, because of issuing this review, with misrepresentation.
Well, I don't wonder at that, and I think we have proven that you
have misrepresented. But they also fear that we will charge them with
persecution. Gentlemen, we acquit you of the intention of persecution.
When the Revs. Phineas Ewing, Dixon, Cavanaugh, Hunter, Bogart, Isaac
McCoy, Riley, Pixley, Woods and others carried on an agitation in
Missouri against "Mormonism" and the "Mormons" that resulted in burning
hundreds of our homes and driving our people--including women and
children, remember--to bivouac out in the wilderness at an inclement
season of the year; when the mob incited by these reverends, your
prototypes, gentlemen, laid waste our fields and gardens, stripped
our people of their earthly possessions, keeping up that agitation
until twelve thousand or fifteen thousand people were driven from the
state of Missouri, dispossessed of several hundred thousand acres of
land--two hundred and fifty thousand acres, to be exact--which they
had entered, and rendered them homeless--we might call, we do call,
that persecution. When the Rev. Mr. Levi Williams led the mob that
shot to death Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith in Carthage
prison, and when the Rev. Mr. Thomas S. Brockman led the forces against
Nauvoo, after the great body of the people had withdrawn from that
city, and expelled the aged, the widow and the fatherless, and laid
waste the property of the people--we think we are justified in calling
that persecution, of which right reverend gentlemen were the chief
instigators. And when in this territory some years ago one wave of
agitation followed another, of which your class, and some of you, were
chief movers, until a reign of terror was produced, and a regime was
established under which men guilty at most of a misdemeanor, could
nevertheless be imprisoned for a term of years covering a lifetime,
and fined to the exhaustion of all they possessed, under the beautiful
scheme of segregating the offense into numerous counts in each
indictment; and when in that reign of terror women were compelled to
clasp their little ones to their breasts and go out among strangers,
exiled from their homes--we might be inclined to call that persecution.
But our experience has been such that we scorn to call such attacks as
this review of yours persecution. It does not rise, gentlemen, I assure
you, to that bad eminence. So we acquit you of any intent in your
review to persecute us. You need not fear that such a charge will be
made, we are not so thin-skinned as all that. Besides, gentlemen, your
power is no longer equal to your malice, and so we do not believe you
will ever be able to persecute us again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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