nt Brigham Young!" The people
accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power
was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward he
openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
"revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by
Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to
the day of his death.

Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and
steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively as
a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and
publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all
Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the
will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator." There was but one
dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and
took that--he proclaimed himself a God!

He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to
accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and
his heavenly status advanced accordingly.

Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been
ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with
the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of
these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children
likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it
be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,
driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they
journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes
with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their
dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in
the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the
true one. Let all these things