ng the possibility of the First
Councillor's candidacy as infringing upon his duties in the Church. I
pointed out to them that such a candidacy would be considered a breach
of faith, that it would raise a storm of protest. They accepted the
warning without comment, as if, having decided against the candidacy,
they did not need to consider such aspects of it. I kept my hand open
before them until my father said, with some trace of amusement: "You'd
better take up that senatorship, Frank. I think you're entitled to it."

I took it up, satisfied that there would be no more Church interference
in the matter. The decision seemed to me final and momentous. I
felt that the new Utah had faced the old and had been assured of
independence.

About this same time (although I cannot place it accurately in my
recollection), President Woodruff, speaking from the pulpit, declared
that it was the right of the priesthood of God to rule in all things on
earth, and that they had in no wise relinquished any of their authority.
The sermon raised a dangerous alarm in Salt Lake City, and I
was immediately summoned from Ogden (by a messenger from Church
headquarters) to see the proprietor and the editor of the Salt Lake
Tribune--which paper, it was feared, might oppose Utah's admission to
statehood, construing President Woodruff's remarks to mean that the
Church's political covenants were to be broken.

I found Mr. P. H. Lannan, the proprietor of the paper, anxious,
indignant and ready to denounce the Church and fight against the
admission to statehood. "When I heard of that sermon," he said, "my
heart went into my boots. We Gentiles have trusted everything to the
promises that have been made by the leaders of the Church. If the
Tribune had not supported the movement for statehood, the Gentiles would
never have taken the risk. I feel like a man who has sold his brethren
into slavery."

I assured him (as I was authorized to do) that President Woodruff
was not speaking for our generation of the Mormon people nor for his
associates in the leadership of the Church. I pleaded that it was the
privilege of an old man (and President Woodruff was nearly ninety) to
dream again the visions of his youth; his early life had been spent in
the belief that a Kingdom of God was to be set up in the valleys of
the mountains, governed by the priesthood and destined to rule all the
nations of the earth; he had planted the first flag of the country over
the Sal