It was against the Saints as a religious sect that the Missourians first complained. It was "in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people" that had settled, and was still settling in their country, "styling themselves Mormons," that led the Missourians of Jackson county to pretend to believe that an important crisis regarding their civil society was at hand. "It is more than two years," they said, "since the first of these fanatics, or knaves (for one or other they undoubtedly are), made their first appearance amongst us, and pretended as they did, and do now, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the Most High; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder-working miracles wrought by the inspired apostles and prophets of old. We believed them deluded fanatics, or weak and designing knaves, and that they and their pretensions would soon pass away; but in this we were deceived. * * * They openly blaspheme the Most High God, and cast contempt on His holy religion, by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues by direct inspiration, and by divers pretenses derogatory to God and religion, and to the utter subversion of human reason." [37] The foregoing is quoted from the first "Manifesto," or "Secret Constitution" of the mob. Somewhat later, in a second manifesto issued to the public in justification of their contemplated acts of violence against the Saints, they say: "What would be the fate of our lives and property, in the hands of jurors and witnesses, who do not blush to declare, and would not upon occasion hesitate to swear, that they have wrought miracles, and have been the subjects of miraculous and supernatural cures, have conversed with God and His angels, and possess and exercise the gifts of divination and of unknown tongues, and fired with the prospect of obtaining inheritances without money and without price--may be better imagined than described. * * * Of their pretended revelations from heaven--their personal intercourse {XLVIII} with God and His angels--the maladies they pretend to heal by the laying on of hands--and the contemptible gibberish with which they habitually profane the Sabbath, and which they dignify with the appellation of unknown tongues, we have nothing to say: vengeance belongs to God alone." [38]