Now, while it is very true that the work has been in great measure preparatory, nevertheless no such long preparation as twenty years should be necessary in dealing with a people to a great extent speaking our own language. If it were China, or Japan, or India just opened, and it required time for the missionaries to get acquainted with the habits and language of the people, it would be a very different thing. It seems from the small crop of Christian converts thus far obtained that the system of missionary work adopted is somewhere defective. And does not the fact of the large Christian element in the Mormon religious system show that it must not be treated as a pagan religion? and that different methods must be adopted to overcome its evils? All missionary labor in Utah up to the present time has been in open and direct antagonism to the whole Mormon system, and its object has been openly and professedly to exterminate it from the face of the earth. Now, we raise the question, _Can any Christian sect be easily annihilated?_ Should it be our desire to exterminate it? Should not the object of all our efforts be _to reform it_--to purge the gold of its dross? And so, does it not seem far more likely that Mormonism is not to be _destroyed_ at all, but rather _reformed_ by various influences brought to bear upon it? The adult Mormons will not go to hear the Christian missionaries, for they believe that all that is good in Christianity they have already in their own system. The only difference is that they have more; they have an enlarged and expanded Christianity. Consequently they think their system is vastly superior to the Christian's. Mormon boys write "_Come to Jesus_" on the clean, white window-sills of Christian chapels, while their parents at home tell them that they know a hundredfold more truth than the Christians, whose whole creed, they say, begins and ends with this despised phrase. The evangelists Moody and Sankey held a series of meetings in Salt Lake City only a few years ago, and the _Deseret Evening News_, the official Mormon organ, in an editorial on Moody's preaching in that city, said: "There is not a man among the whole fraternity of evangelists who can present anything of any value to the Latter-Day Saints which they have not already received; and there is no preacher of them all who, if he were desirous of learning the truth as it is in Jesus, but could learn very many valuable lessons in the things of God from members of our Young People's Improvement Associations, and even from our Sunday-school children. 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ' is a saying the full meaning of which is appreciated by the Latter-Day Saints. To exhort them to 'faith in Christ' is the work of supererogation."