If the Mormon, in his later years of manhood, dares to doubt, he must either reveal his disloyalty to the ward teachers or continue to deny it, from month to month, and remain a supine servant of authority. If he reveals it, he knows that the news of his defection will permeate the entire circle with which he is associated in politics, in business and in religion. If his superstition does not hold him, his worldly prudence will. He knows that all the aid of the community will be withdrawn from him; every voice that has expressed affection for him will speak in hate; every hand that has clasped his in friendship will be turned against him. And into this very prudence there enters something of a moral warning. For he has seen how many a man, deprived of the association and fraternity of the Church, feeling himself shunned in a lonely ostracism, has not been strong enough to endure in rectitude and has fallen into dissipation. Every instance of the sort is rehearsed by the faithful, with many exultant expressions of mourning, in the hearing of the doubter. And finally, it is the prediction of the priests that no apostate can prosper; and though the Mormon people are charitable and do not intend to be unjust, they inevitably tend to fulfill the prophecy and devote the apostate to material destruction. The great doctrine of the Mormon faith is obedience; the one proof of grace is conformity. So long as a man pays a full tithe, contributes all the required donations, and yields unquestioningly to the orders of the priests, he may even depart in a moral sense from any other of the Church's laws and find himself excused. But any questioning of the rulership of the Prophets--the rightfulness of their authority or the justice of its exercise is apostasy, is a denial of the faith, is a sin against the Holy Ghost. The man who obeys in all things is promised that he shall come forth in the morning of the first resurrection; the man who disobeys, and by his disobedience apostatizes, is condemned to work out, through an eternity of suffering, his offense against the Holy Spirit. At the first sign of defection--almost inevitably discovered in its incipiency--the rebel is either disciplined into submission or at once pushed over "the battlements of Heaven!" By such perfect means, the leaders, chosen under a pretense of revelation from God, maintain an unassailable sanctity in the eyes of the people, who are themselves priests. These people implicitly believe that the voice of the leader is the voice of God. They follow with a passionate devotion that is made up of a fanatical priestly faith and of a sympathy that sees their Prophets "persecuted" by an ungenerous, impure and vindictive world. We love that for which we suffer; and it has become the inheritance of the Mormons to love the priesthood, for whose protection their parents and grandparents suffered, and under whose oppressions they now suffer themselves.