The institution--The Church--brought into existence, and its doctrines developed amid so much of spiritual tempest and pursued so relentlessly by mob violence, and which may be said to have had a second birth at Nauvoo, and to have received sanctification from the martyrdom of her earthly founder--The Church which these exiles bore with them into the western wilderness was not born to die. Whatever might be the fate of The Church and the Saints in other dispensations of the Gospel, God had now introduced the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times, in which He has decreed that all things in Christ shall be gathered together in one--even in Him. [8] A dispensation in which the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth itself shall be consummated. And the earth and men made ready for the all glorious reign of truth and righteousness so long promised by God and His prophets. Hence The Church was not destroyed; and the people who fled with her to the wilderness did not perish. The blinding storms of sleet and rain which enveloped their principal companies as in melancholy trains they penetrated the wilderness of the then territory of Iowa, might easily have been taken for God's curtain rung down upon the most melancholy scene in America's history--the scene of a people in free America--the boasted asylum for the oppressed, where religious freedom is guaranteed by express constitutional provision--fleeing from the worst forms of oppression--the oppression of mob violence invoked in Illinois to crush their religious faith. But the curtain so rung down was not upon the final act. The hand of God again rolled it up; and when He did, it was to reveal to the world the exiles as the redeemers of desert wastes; the planters of cities; the builders of temples, the founders of States; and for themselves and for their religious faith so entrenched, so strengthened, so enlarged that the world shall never, while the earth itself remains, or sun or stars endure be rid of that faith founded--under God--by JOSEPH SMITH, THE PROPHET-MARTYR OF NAUVOO. Footnotes 1. Wm. Clayton's journal, under date of May 24, 1845. 2. Ford's History of Illinois, p. 406. 3. The Hancock Mob, p. 4, by J. B. Conyers, M. D. 4. He was acquitted at his trial which took place at Peoria. 5. Hancock Mob, Conyers, pp. 13, 14. 6. The condition of the exiled Saints at this period is graphically described by General Thomas L. Kane, see appendix-- 7. The Hancock Mob, by J.B. Conyers, M. D., pages 73, 74. 8. Eph. 1: 9, 10. APPENDICES. APPENDIX I. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN JOSEPH SMITH AND JOHN C. CALHOUN. HON. JOHN C. CALHOUN.