Mormon History
What Happened to Revelation? - 1887
The Salt Lake Tribune
August 7, 1887
THE PUZZLING MORMONS.
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Their Abandonment of Revelation Looks Queer
TO A WELL-POSTED MAN IN THE EAST.
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Not a Voice Lifted for "the Lord" -- Strange Silence of the
Prophets and Spokesmen -- A Forthcoming Work Which Will
Throw Dismay into the Ranks of Mormon Historians.
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Editor Tribune: I confess to you and your
readers that of late, in common with thousands all about me, I have been in a
state of mind, in a quandry [in regard to Mormon polygamy, etc.]...
I could name a certain professor of church history
in a certain theological seminary who, in the course of his erudite
investigations into the state of religious matters and things existing in the
Middle and Western States from 55 to 75 years ago, has hit upon some choice
facts of which hitherto little has been known and less has been made. I
have been permitted to read his manuscript through from end to end, for it is
well nigh ready for the press, and your readers may be sure there is richness in
it, and some fine music in store for the Saints, Already in fancy I behold the
church press craw-fishing, wiggling, affirming, denying, protesting with
[reckless] though delicious disregard of the facts of history, and darkening
counsel with multitudinous words. For this man with the true instincts and keen
scent of a scholar, in a word, has been hunting away back in the record for the
large ear marks and foot prints of the illustrious Elder S. Rigdon, apostate
from the Baptists and Campbellites, and later from Mormons, sometimes John the
Baptist, President of Kirtland "Safety" Society Bank, author of famous Salt
Sermon and postmaster at Nauvoo, and fetching up finally as repudiator of
celestial marriage and of the whole Brighamite regime. Our professor finds this
man of many summersaults to have been always ambitious, unprincipled, vain.
fickle, fanatical, crazy, continually after the last theological notion, and
never doubting that the next step will bring him to a veritable bonanza of truth
and blessedness. He follows this uneasy and conceited soul through all his
Quixotic pereginations until he has out-Campbelled Alexander Campbell in
novelities of doctrine and practice, or until he has attainted to that toothsome
sugar plum known as the creed of the Latter-day Church.
But this
more particularly he is able to prove and to illustrate in a way both thorough
and original. He finds the same lucubrations of
Sidney R. scattered everywhere throughout the Book of Mormon, which volume he
has gone through and through with a critic's eye, and assigns on its "religious"
side wholly to Rigdon's pen. With Spalding's manuscript, or some other as a
basis, Saint Sidney proceeded to manufacture a pious fraud that he might be the
better able to force his theological fancies upon the new religion. In
that desperately dull volume he is able to trace the work of revision. He
concludes that no other hand than Rigdon's could have done it, and even thinks
he finds evidence that this man Friday was "the angel" who appears to Joseph "in
vision," and at length placed in his hands "the plates." So I much fear it will
go hard with the Mormon history, between this Prof. and
Dr. Wyl. LEO.
WESTERN RESERVE, O., August 3.
Note: The theology professor here alluded to was none other than the
Rev. Dr. William H. Whitsitt, author of the manuscript Sidney Rigdon
biography now on file in the Library of Congress. Whitsitt's writings
on the Mormons remained largely unpublished, however. See his 1888
booklet, Origins of Disciples of Christ, and his 1891 paper,
"Mormonism," for some samples of what Whitsitt was able to get
published before his death in 1911. Much the same argument (based upon
Whitsitt's work) has been more recently taken up in a paper by Craig
Criddle.