The American is, to a very great extent, a descendant of rigorous Puritanism. The English, who preponderated in numbers over the other elements of the European immigration into North America, never forgot that they had been the comrades of Penn or of other militant sectarians, and never lost the habit of keeping the Bible, the ledger, and the cash-book side by side. They remained deeply attached to their religion, which they looked upon as a social lever, although for many of them their faith did not go beyond a conviction of the immanence of the supernatural in human life. Thus it was that their spirits were often dominated by a belief in miracles, all the more easily because their intellectual culture was not always as highly developed as their business ability, and consequently the clever manufacturers of religious wonders were able to reap incredible harvests among them. There is perhaps no country where the seed sown by propagandists springs up more rapidly, where an idea thrown to the winds finds more surely a fertile soil in which to grow. A convinced and resolute man, knowing how to influence crowds by authoritative words, gestures and promises, can always be certain of attracting numerous followers. In America the conditions are without doubt propitious for the founders of new religions. I How is a new religion started in the United States? Joe Smith wakes up one morning with the thought that the hour has come for him to perform miracles, that he is called thereto by the Divine Will, that the existence and the secret hiding-place of a new Bible printed on sheets of gold have been revealed to him by an angel, and that its discovery will be the salvation of the world. He proclaims these things and convinces those who hear him, and the Book of the Mormons which he produces becomes sacred in the eyes of his followers. In ever-increasing numbers they hasten first to Illinois, then to Utah; and when Brigham Young, Smith's successor, presents the Mormon colony with religious and political laws which are a mixture of Christianity, Judaism and Paganism, and include the consecration of polygamy, they found a church which claims more than a hundred thousand adherents, and is ruled by twelve apostles, sixty patriarchs, about three thousand high priests, fifteen hundred bishops, and over four thousand deans.