But the portion of the service which interested us the most was, of course, the sermon. Brigham Young was no orator, he had no sacred spark of eloquence; his strength, as I have said before, lay in his power as a leader and master; there he was matchless. His sermon was very poor, consisting of the commonest platitudes interlarded with grotesquely barbarized Old Testament phraseology. Just the sort of stuff that is spouted by the meanest of the Hyde Park ranters. All of a sudden he stopped the current of a discourse which to us sounded almost blasphemous, leant over and, looking us straight in the face, burst into a violent inflammatory tirade against England. Quite forgetting the way in which he had once been received, when, as he said himself on a former occasion, he landed in our island penniless and without a friend, he lashed himself into a fury of abuse of everybody and everything that was British. It was miserably poor stuff, but probably good enough for the purpose of kindling the hatred of his audience against us; it would not have been swallowed by the lowest and most ignorant socialism in England. It was violent, truculent, absolutely unreal; I felt all the time as if the man were out-talking his own reason. One passage was very amusing. He looked at me with a fixed stare—shaking his forefinger at me, and said: “I often wish that I had the power of Queen Victoria or Mr. Gladstone for forty-eight hours. I guess” (here he paused)—“Yes! I’m a Yankee, I am, and therefore I guess—I would soon see whether millions upon millions of acres should lie fallow and bare in order that a parcel of idle noblemen may _PUR_sue pheasants with their dogs!” I know not how to express the stress which he laid upon the _pur_ in _pursue_ save by printing it in capital letters. When he had reviled England to his satisfaction he turned to an exposition of the beauties of the Mormon faith. Here again he was not happy, though his none too classical language was remarkable as showing the truth of what has always been said of his loyal devotion to and faith in the first Prophet and Founder of Mormonism. He said: “I have often wondered why it was that God Almighty chose Joseph Smith, the poor uneducated farmer’s boy, to be the means of revealing His Will to His people. I can only suppose that it was because He wanted a white sheet of paper to write upon.” The image was not new, and not particularly reverent or refined; but when he spoke of Joseph Smith I could not but feel that there was in all that he said, in the tone of his utterance, something of faith, and more than faith, love, which, in a man so strong and of so coarse a fibre, was infinitely touching, infinitely pathetic. He spoke in tears, and made me forget the cant and vulgarity of the rest of his discourse; for if Brigham Young was not eloquent he was at any rate a master of coarse abuse.