Soon the glad tidings were conveyed to other lands. Great Britain "heard the word of the Lord," borne there by apostles Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde and Willard Richards, and others. Soon also the saints began to gather from the four quarters of the earth; and those gatherings have increased until more than a hundred thousand disciples--the majority of them women--have come to America, as their land of promise, to build up thereon the Zion of the last days. CHAPTER X. THE LATTER-DAY ILIAD--REPRODUCTION OF THE GREAT HEBRAIC DRAMA--THE MEANING OF THE MORMON MOVEMENT IN THE AGE. It was "a gathering dispensation." A strange religion indeed, that meant something more than faith and prayers and creeds. An empire-founding religion, as we have said,--this religion of a latter-day Israel. A religion, in fact, that meant all that the name of "Latter-day Israel" implies. The women who did their full half in founding Mormondom, comprehended, as much as did their prototypes who came up out of Egypt, the significance of the name of Israel. Out of Egypt the seed of promise, to become a peculiar people, a holy nation, with a distinctive God and a distinctive destiny. Out of modern Babylon, to repeat the same Hebraic drama in the latter age. A Mormon iliad in every view; and the sisters understanding it fully. Indeed perhaps they have best understood it. Their very experience quickened their comprehension. The cross and the crown of thorns quicken the conception of a crucifixion. The Mormon women have borne the cross and worn the crown of thorns for a full lifetime; not in their religion, but in their experience. Their strange destiny and the divine warfare incarnated in their lives, gave them an experience matchless in its character and unparalleled in its sacrifices. The sisters understood their religion, and they counted the cost of their divine ambitions. What that cost has been to these more than Spartan women, we shall find in tragic stories of their lives, fast unfolding in the coming narrative of their gatherings and exterminations. For the first twenty years of their history the tragedy of the Latter-day Israel was woeful enough to make their guardian angels weep, and black enough in its scenes to satisfy the angriest demons. This part of the Mormon drama began in 1831 with the removal of the church from the State of New York to Kirtland, Ohio, and to Jackson, and other counties in Missouri; and it culminated in the martyrdom of the prophet and his brother at Nauvoo, and the exodus to the Rocky Mountains. In all these scenes the sisters have shown themselves matchless heroines. The following, from an early poem, written by the prophetess, Eliza R. Snow, will finely illustrate the Hebraic character of the Mormon work, and the heroic spirit in which these women entered into the divine action of their lives: