Under these guarantees of religious liberty, in both state and national constitutions, infidels, Jews, and all sects of the Christian religion lived in unbroken peace. In the colonial history of the country there had been some intolerance and acts of violence practiced by the sects of Christians on one another, but in the main, and especially since the establishment of the republic of the United States, under its present Constitution, there had been absolute religious freedom. But now a strange thing occurred. A youth, yet in his early teens, startled the neighborhood in which he resided with the announcement that he had received a revelation from God: a new dispensation of the Gospel of Christ had been committed to him; he is authorized to found again the very {LXI} Church of Christ; men are to teach once more by divine authority; and the world is to be made ready for the incoming of the glorious kingdom, whose king shall be the resurrected, glorified Christ; and peace and truth and righteousness are to abound. Strangely enough, notwithstanding all the guarantees of religious freedom in the state and national constitutions, this proclamation is resented by the people, and those who advocate it are persecuted in various ways, until at the last, as set forth in the three volumes of the Church History now published, it culminated in the death and misery of many souls, and the final expulsion of from twelve to fifteen thousand Saints from the state of Missouri, under all the circumstances of cruelty detailed in this history.