At the first preaching of Mormonism, sensible and religious persons, both in Europe and in America, rather ridiculed than seriously opposed it. They imagined it to be an absurd delusion, which would shortly overturn itself. But system and discipline, almost equal to those of Rome, have been brought to its aid. What was at first crude and undigested, has been gradually reduced to shape and proportion. At the present moment Mormonism numbers more than a hundred thousand adherents, a large portion of whom are natives of Christian and enlightened England. The immediate cause of my visit to Nauvoo was the following. Early in April, 1842, business took me to St. Louis, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants, situated on the western bank of the Mississippi, from which Kemper College is six miles distant. Curiosity led me to the river's side, where about forty steam-boats were busily engaged in receiving or discharging their various cargoes. The spectacle was truly exciting. The landing-place (or _levée_, as it is denominated) was literally swarming with life. Here a ponderous consignment of lead had arrived from Galena, four hundred miles to the north, and the crew were piling it upon the shore in regular and well-constructed layers. There a quantity of ploughs, scythes, and other agricultural implements, crowded the decks of a steamer which had just finished a westward voyage of fourteen hundred miles from Pittsburg. In another place, a vessel that had descended the rapid current of the Missouri for many hundred miles in an easterly direction, was landing pork and other produce of the fertile West; while farther down a large steam-boat from New Orleans, crowded with passengers from the South, having completed her voyage of twelve hundred miles, was blowing off the steam from her high pressure engines with a noise like thunder.