as their more familiar designation runs.
Here, one could see that mixture of everyday life and religion, which
is such a marked feature of the Mormon development.

Mormonism, sprung from American soil, has developed within itself the
ideas of Church and State, and the limitations of individual freedom
and responsibility, which one would imagine only possible under the
most extreme conditions of belief in the divine right of kings, and the
more positive divine right of a visible church.

There is nothing new under the sun, and the principles which we
supposed America never could brook, are here seen in embryo, or in
fact, by the thoughtful observer. In view of the comfort and happiness
which one sees in Utah, and the mutual sympathy which the ideas I have
mentioned exhibit, one is forced to pause and ask himself, May there
not be an object-lesson for us in all this? May we not have thrown away
from our social state, with too stern a hand, all reliance upon
churchly influence, and exaggerated also that idea of personal
independence, so dear to us, forgetting that the individual, in all the
relations of his life, is a part of the state, a member of the body of
the nation, and should be the object of its sympathy, its care, and its
government, at all times and in all places?

It was my second visit to Salt Lake, a place which has always
interested me because of the social and religious problems which one
sees there. In my last visit I happened casually to meet a priest of
the Roman Catholic Church, and asked him offhand what he thought of
things around him. He looked at me fixedly for a moment, and then said,
"There is not an organization on earth that can compare to Mormonism,
in its wide scope, its great grasp, and its practical application."

I am inclined to think he is right. It was my accidental privilege to
be in the city, during my former visit, while the semi-annual
conference of the Latter-Day Saints of Utah Valley was being held.

The huge turtle-shell Tabernacle, easily seating twelve thousand
people, was filled daily. I saw the rank and file of Mormons, the
sturdy agriculturists and their wives, the latter like what one
remembers of Primitive Methodists, apparently utterly oblivious of all
personal adornment; they were, however, crowned with a maternity of
which they seemed proud, as they held their children in their arms.

At one end of the great ellipse of that Tabernacle rose up, tier on
tier of church