After I began criticizing the Church leaders, in the editorial columns of the Salt Lake Tribune, my friend Ben Rich, then president of the Southern States Missions, and J. Golden Kimball, one of the seven presidents of the seventies, came to me repeatedly to suggest that if I wished to attack the leaders of the Church I should formally withdraw from the Church. This I declined to do: because I was in no different position toward the teachings of the Church than I had been in previous years--because I was not criticizing the Church or its religious teachings, but attacking the civil offenses of its leaders as citizens guilty against the state--and because I saw that my attack had more power as coming from a man who stood within the community, even though he had no standing in the Church. I continued as I had begun. After the publication of an editorial (January 22, 1905), in which I charged President Smith with being all that the testimony then before the Senate committee had proven him to be, Ben Rich advised me that I must either withdraw from the Church or Smith would proceed against me in the Church tribunals and make my family suffer. I replied that I would not withdraw and that I would fight all cases against me on the issue of free speech. On February 1, 1905, I published, editorially, "An address to the Earthly King of the Kingdom of God," in which I charged Smith with having violated the laws (revelations) of his predecessors; with having made and violated treaties upon which the safety of his "subjects" depended; with having taken the bodies of the daughters of his subjects and bestowed them upon his favorites; with having impoverished his subjects by a system of elaborate exaction's (tithes) in order to enrich "the crown" and so forth. All of which, burlesquely written as if to a Czar by a constitutionalist, was accepted by the Mormon people as in no way absurd in its tone as coming from one American citizen to another! Because of these two editorials I was charged (February 21, 1905) before a ward bishop's court in Ogden with "un-Christianlike conduct and apostasy," after two minor Church officials had called upon me at my home and received my acknowledgment of the authorship of the editorials, my refusal to retract them, and my statement that I did not "sustain" Joseph F. Smith as head of the Church, since he was "leaving the worship of God for the worship of Mammon and leading the people astray." On the night of February 24, I appeared in my own defense before the bishop's court, at the hour appointed, without witnesses or counsel, because I had been notified that no one would be permitted to attend with me. And, of course, the defense I made was that the articles were true and that I was prepared to prove them true.