“He _ain’t_ crazy,” said Brigham. “All that’s the matter with him, he’s got more faith than the whole pack of us put together. You just remember he ain’t like us. We was all converted after we got our second teeth, while he’s had it from the cradle up. He’s the first one we’ve caught young. He’s what the priesthood can turn out when they get a full swing with the rising generation. We got to remember that. We old birds had to learn to crow in middle life. These young ones will crow stronger; they’ll out-crow us. But all the better for that. They’ll be mighty brash at first, but all they need is to be held in a little, and then they’ll be a power in the Kingdom.” “Well, of course you’re right, Brother Brigham, but that boy certainly needs a check-rein and a curb-bit right now,” said Snow. “He’ll have his needings,” answered Brigham, shortly, and the informal council dispersed. Brigham talked to him late that night, advancing many cogent reasons why it should be unwise to make war at once upon the nation of Gentiles to the east. Of these reasons the one that had greatest weight with his listener was the assurance that such a course would not at present be pleasing in the sight of God. To others, touching upon the matter of superior forces they might have to contend with, he was loftily inattentive. Having made this much clear, Brigham went on in his fatherly way to impress him anew with the sinfulness of all temporal governments outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Again he learned from the lips of authority that any people presuming to govern themselves by laws of their own making and officers of their own appointing, are in wicked rebellion against the Kingdom of God; that for seventeen hundred years the nations of the Western Hemisphere have been destitute of this Kingdom and destitute of all legal government; and that the Lord was now about to rend all earthly governments, to cast down thrones, overthrow nations, and make a way for the establishment of the everlasting Kingdom, to which all others would have to yield, or be prostrated never more to rise. Thus was the rebuff of the afternoon gracefully atoned for. From matters of civil government the talk ranged to affairs domestic. “Tell me,” said the young man, “the truth of this new order of celestial marriage.” And Brigham had become animated at once. “Yes,” he said, “when the family organisation was revealed from Heaven, and Joseph began on the right and the left to add to his family, oh, dear, what a quaking there was in Israel! But there it was, plain enough. When you have received your endowments, keys, blessings, all the tokens, signs, and every preparatory ordinance that can be given to a man for his entrance through the celestial gate, then you can see it.” He gazed a moment into the fire of hickory logs before which they sat, and then went on, more confidentially: