Lily Dougall - The Mormon Prophet

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"Who is it?" asked Joseph Smith.

He stood up now, but not steadily; his voice was weak, as if he had
been stunned, and his utterance indistinct because his mouth had
apparently received some injury. She thought of nothing now but that he
was Angel's master, and that Angel might be in like plight.

"What have they done? What is the matter?" she whispered tenderly, tears
in her voice.

"Is it you?" he asked curiously. He said nothing for a minute and then,
"They've covered me with the tar and emptied a feather-bed on me. If
ye'd have the goodness to tell Brother Johnson to come out to me, Mrs.
Halsey--"

"They have hurt you other ways," she said tremulously, "you are
bruised."

"A man don't like to own up to having been flogged, ye see; but Peter
and Paul and all of _them_ had to stand it in their time, so I don't
know why a fellow like me need be shamefaced over it. But if you'd be
good enough, Mrs. Halsey, to go and tell Emmar that I ain't much hurt,
and send Brother Johnson out with some clothes or a blanket--"

He stopped without adding that he would feel obliged. As she went she
heard him say with another sort of unsteadiness in his tone, "It's real
kind of you to care for me that much."

In her excitement she did not know that she was weeping bitterly until
she found herself surrounded by other shuddering and weeping women in
Emma's room; for other of the converts in Hiram, hearing of the violence
abroad, had crept to this house for mutual safety and aid.

It is the low, small details of physical discomfort that make the
bitterest part of the bread of sorrow. Now and afterwards, through all
the persecutions in which she shared, Susannah often felt this. If she
could have stood off and looked at the main issues of the battle she
might have felt, even on the mere earthly plane, exaltation. Yet one
truth her experience confirmed--that no human being who in his time and
way has been hunted as the offscouring of the world--no, not the
noblest--has ever had his martyrdom presented in a form that seemed to
him majestic. It is only those who bear persecution, not in its reality
but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.

All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with
the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the
painful operation of taking the tar from Smith's lacerated skin. The
prophet bore himself well. Now and then, through the thin partition the
watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his
determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had
appointed the next day.

At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon's house. The animal was
safe. When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those
within the house. Rigdon was raving in delirium. He had, it seemed, been
dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony
ground. They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers. He lay
upon a small bed in horrible condition. His wife, with swollen eyes and
pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out
with vain efforts to soothe him. His mother, a thin and dark old woman,
vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out
of the room silently, as though to say, "This is the work of those whose
virtue you extolled."

The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of
dawn. The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as
innocence may sleep. The famous preacher, and all those souls that he
had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in
silence. Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the
roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to
renewed wrath. Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past
night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey's safety. She gave her
horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had
reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was
being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight,
with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths
of the leafless nut woods. It was high day, and the people were
gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through
the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.

As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to
preach. His face was very white and sad. Susannah's glad relief,
fatigue, and excitement found vent in tears.

"You are safe!" she cried. "Oh, my dear, I will never leave you again
while danger is near--never, never again!"

In the evening of that day further news came from Hiram. The prophet had
preached long and gloriously in the open air. New converts had been
made, and he himself, scarified and bruised as he was, had gone down
into the icy river and baptized them in sight of all. The mob had
shrieked and jeered, but had been withheld by God, as the messenger
said, from further violence.

Susannah made no further effort to find new life in the old doctrines.
All her sentiments of justice and mercy combined to make her espouse her
husband's cause with renewed ardour.

CHAPTER V.

In the summer of that same year, while the wheat in the Manchester
fields was still green, and the maize had attained but half its growth,
while the ox-eyed daisies still stood a happy crowd in the unmown
meadows, and pink and yellow orchids blazed in unfrequented dells, the
preacher Finney, after long absence, chanced to be again travelling on
the Palmyra road. As was his habit, he sought entertainment at the house
of Deacon Croom in New Manchester.

The preacher remembered always that his citizenship was in heaven. From
the thought he drew great nourishment of peace and hope, but as far as
his earthly affairs were concerned the outlook was at present grievous.

He was returning from a long and dreary religious convention held in an
eastern town, where one, Mr. Lyman Beecher, had stirred up against him
the foremost divines of New York and Boston. They had asserted that
Finney's doctrine, that the Spirit of God could suddenly turn men from
following evil to pursuing good, was false and pernicious; that his
method stirred up the people to unholy excitements which were productive
of great evil. Now the accusations of these divines (who, thinking that
a man's change of mind must needs be so slow a thing, some of them,
gray-haired, had not as yet produced this change in a single sinner)
were in many points wholly false, in many exaggerated, and where the
article of truth remained in the accusation there was much to be said in
defence of work that had resulted, if in some evil, certainly in much
palpable good. To such groups of priests and soldiers and publicans as
came forth to John's baptism of repentance, the godly Finney, travelling
now east and now west, had appealed, and that the wide land was the
better for the crying of his voice no candid person who knew the result
of his labours could deny. He that had two coats had imparted to him
that had none; the extortioner had returned his unfair gains, and some
rough men had become gentle. But in the assembly from which Finney had
just come the larger numbers and the greater power of rhetoric had been
on that side which appeared to show least faith in God and least zeal
for men, and Finney had come out from the combat bruised in spirit.

Some natural comfort the weary man experienced from the sweet charm of
the summer afternoon, from anticipation of the welcome and sympathy
which would soon be his. He heard, but could not see, the Canandaigua
water as it ran under its canopy of willows, over whose foliage the
light wind passed in silver waves. On the height of the hill above the
mill-dam he turned his horse into the yard of the Croom homestead. The
stalwart deacon in overalls, his excitable, slender wife, her
cap-strings flying, came forth, the one from the barn, the other from
her bake-house.

It was not to either of these worthy souls that Finney intended first to
confide the story of his glimpse of Susannah. It said much for the
sterling truth of this man's soul that, accustomed as he was to demand
from himself and others public confession of those experiences most
private to the individual soul, he had not lost delicacy of feeling or
reverence for individual privacy in human relationships. He had not been
at this house since the month after Susannah's departure, when
excitement and wrath still raged concerning her. He judged that in the
hearts of the older members the wound had healed, leaving only the
healthy scar that such sorrows leave in busy lives. He knew, too, that
in Ephraim's heart the blade of this grief had cut deeper.

The supper over, the full moon already gilding the last hour of the
summer daylight, Ephraim donned his hat to take the solitary evening
stroll to which he had become accustomed. He thought to leave the trio
who were in complete accord of sentiment to talk longer over the
persecution which Finney endured, but on the little brick path between
the flower-beds the evangelist came up with him.

Ephraim was but half pleased. It was in this brief evening hour that he
set his thoughts free, like children at playtime. Like other students
forced to live in invalidish habits, he had established a rule of
thought more strict than men of active callings need. At certain hours
he would study his country's social, political needs; at others he would
help in his father's farm management; at others he would study some
exact science. But when the measured hours of his day were over, and
before he lit his student's lamp, for a while he turned his fancies
loose, and they ran all too surely to play about Susannah's charms,
about the circumstances of her life. This was not his happiest hour. The
eternal advantage of love was lost for the time in its present distress.
Hateful thoughts were the results of this self-indulgence, yet he hated
more anything that came as interruption. During these years the lover in
him had not grown what the world calls wise.

For some minutes Finney, controlling the briskness of his ordinary pace,
walked by Ephraim's side and contented himself with the gracious scene,
passing remarks upon weather and crops. Soon, for the value of time
always pressed upon him, his business-like voice took a softened tone,
and he began preaching a heart-felt sermon to his one listener.

The subject of the sermon was "the fire God gave for other ends," and he
ventured to point out to Ephraim, in his plain, logical way, that it was
wrong to waste on a woman that devotion which God intends only himself.

Ephraim smiled; it was a good-tempered, buoyant smile. "Did it ever
occur to you, Finney, to reflect that, with your opinions, had you been
the Creator, you would never have made the world as it is made? What
time would you ever have thought it worth while to spend in developing
the iridescence on a beetle's wing, in adjusting man's soul till it
responds with storm or calm, gloom or glory, to outer influence, as the
surface of the ocean to weather?"

Finney was puzzled, as he always was, by Ephraim's _bonhomie_ and his
strange ideas. "But what have you to advance against what I have already
said, Ephraim?"

"Advance? I advance nothing. I even withdraw my painted insects and the
storms of emotion by which I had perhaps thought that God did his best
teaching; I withdraw also my exaltation of that strait gate of use
without abuse for the making of which I had almost said Heaven hands us
the most dangerous things. I withdraw all that offends you, Finney, in
order to thank you for having spoken her name. No one else has spoken it
in my hearing since they knew of my last parting with her, and I--I am
fool enough half the days to wish the clouds in their thunder-claps
would name her."

The voice of the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland
in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air. Beside this and
the throb of insect voices there was no sound. "I came out this
evening," said Finney, "to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw
_her_." His voice fell at the pronoun in sympathetic sorrow.

"Yes?"

"When I was about to return from Cincinnati I was advised to go
northward to the Erie Canal, in order that I might pass through that
part of the State which has been sorely infected by the cancer of that
hypocrite's teaching."

There was no need in the district of Manchester for Finney to explain
what hypocrite he meant. In his own country Smith was commonly held to
be the arch-hypocrite.

"The devil has surely espoused that cause in earnest, for the number of
deluded souls in that part of Ohio and in southern Missouri, and
scattered as missionaries up and down the country, is, I hear, between
three and four thousand."

"And always among those who worship the letter of the Scripture,"
remarked Ephraim, "for their missionaries give chapter and verse for all
they teach."

"I was told that their customs were peculiarly evil. Even among
themselves they lie and steal and are violent and licentious; and they
teach openly that it is a merit to steal from the Gentiles, as they call
those not of themselves; and, furthermore, they aim at nothing less
than setting up a government of their own in the west."

"Who told you all this?"

"I am sorry to say that I had it on good authority. Some of the western
brethren had it from a poor fellow who had been deluded into entering
the Mormon community, and had barely escaped with his life when he
desired to withdraw."

"Would you consider a pervert from your own sect the best witness of its
tenets? But you say that you saw my cousin?"

Finney told what had led him to the village of Hiram, and said, "When I
spoke of the sins of the Mormons, a young woman seated near the front of
the congregation rose up. It was your cousin. I saw at once by the
pallor of her face that the Lord was having direct dealing with her
soul. The 'power' was indeed very great; a strong man fell as dead near
her, who before the night was over gave testimony of sound conversion.
After he and your cousin had been led out, many others in different
parts of the building cried to God for mercy. When the sermon was over I
sought for your cousin, but when I told who she was, the people of the
place said that no doubt Mormon messengers had come while she was
waiting, and forced her to depart. That night there was a disturbance in
the place; some of the more hot-headed men had the leaders out, and
tarred and feathered them--a dastardly deed! I have been threatened
myself with being rid on a rail and tarred when the devil stirred up the
people against my preaching, but the Lord mercifully preserved me. 'Tis
a shameful practice, but I hear it was done to these men to intimidate
them from the more violent crimes which they had conspired to commit. In
the morning I was forced to go, as I was advertised to preach at many
stations farther on, or I would have denounced the violence from the
pulpit. I could not find out anything more concerning your cousin, but
the Lord has never allowed me to doubt that the many prayers which we
have offered on her behalf were answered that night, for I could see by
the expression of her face that she, like those upon the day of
Pentecost, was cut to the heart."

At the garden gate, under the boughs of the quince-tree, which had
increased its branches since the day in which Susannah had last passed
under them, Ephraim now stood in the moonlight, barring the entrance. At
length with a sigh he said, "Alas! Finney, I believe that there are few
souls under heaven more true and more worthy than your own; but as for
the power of God, 'His way is in the sea and his path in the great
waters, but his footsteps are not known.'"

Out of his breast Ephraim took a thin leather book, and from out of the
book gave Finney a letter much worn with reading.

Finney took the letter reverently, and read it by the light of his
bedroom candle. In those days letters were more formally written; this
one from Susannah to Ephraim began with wishes concerning her aunt and
uncle and the prosperity of the household. The fine flowing writing
filled the large sheet.

"I write to you, my dear cousin, rather than to my aunt, to whom I fear
my letter would not be acceptable, for although I can say that I regret
my wilfulness and the manner of my disobedience, still I can never
regret that, having been forced to choose, I threw in my lot with those
who can suffer wrong rather than with those who have it in their hearts
to inflict wrong, for if there be a God--ah, Ephraim, this is another
reason why I address you, for I am in sore doubt concerning the
knowledge of God, as to whether any knowledge is possible. My husband,
who denies me nothing, has allowed me to send for some of your books
whose names I remembered. I thought at first to write to you about them,
but I distrust now my own understanding too much to venture. I would
like you to know that they have helped me somewhat, for I do not now say
to myself in hard, tearless fashion that I know there is no God, to
which thought I was driven by the reflection that most of those who seek
him most diligently sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

"But the more immediate occasion of this letter is to tell you that a
month since Mr. Finney held a meeting not far from us. I went, thinking
to gain some help from him, and to hear news of you, but I was greatly
disappointed, and made very angry. He preached as my husband and many of
our elders preach, and there were among the crowd the same signs of
excitement and peculiar manifestations that we have constantly among us.
But toward the end of his sermon Mr. Finney spoke of my husband's
Church, and he lent the weight of his influence to very evil slanders
that are constantly repeated about us by those who have not sought to
know the truth. He did us great injury by stirring up the roughest of
the people to violence. Mr. Finney will, I suppose, visit you and repeat
those lies, which no doubt he believes, but is most culpable in
believing, because he has not investigated the scandal against us as he
would have investigated scandal against any who are orthodox. I write
now to tell you that that which he says is not true. For although there
are a few criminals amongst us, as in every community, evil is not
taught or condoned."

As Finney read this letter by his lonely candle he was so far stirred by
what he deemed the merely human side of the incident as to say to
himself, "Poor Ephraim! She has never even known that he loved her." But
next day, in speaking to Ephraim, he pointed out that in the worst
communities there were always pure-minded women who knew little or
nothing of the evil around them, and said he believed that his message
would still be the means of bringing home the truth to Susannah's heart.

CHAPTER VI.

In the meantime an interval of comparative peace had come to Kirtland.
The Gentiles, because they discovered that the town was a good market
for the produce of more fields than the Saints could till, allowed their
religious zeal to slumber.

A female relative of Halsey, having lost her friends by death, came from
the east to Kirtland upon his invitation.

Susannah went down the hill one summer day to meet the travelling
company of new converts which brought Elvira Halsey. That young lady had
seen about twenty-five years of life's vicissitudes, and had sharpened
her wits thereon. Slight, pretty, and dressed with an effort at fashion
that was quite astonishing in the Kirtland settlement, Elvira sprang
from the waggon.

"I've come to be a Mormon. How do you begin?" With these words she
presented to Susannah a new type of character, fresh, and in some ways
delightful.

There was quite a crowd at the stopping place of the waggons. Halsey,
with other elders and Smith, came to welcome the newcomer. Elvira stood
on tip-toe, peeping about, pressing Susannah's arm with whispers.
"Which is Joe Smith, do tell me? Do you go down on your knees to him,
and does he pat your head?"

Guided by keen instinct, Elvira did not make remarks in Halsey's hearing
which would have shocked him, but perhaps by the same instinct she at
once claimed Susannah as a confidante in spite of some feeble
remonstrance.

"Are you not wrong to speak so lightly of our religion?" asked Susannah,
feeling that she was an elder's wife.

"First let me be sure that you have any religion to speak of." She
looked up prettily in Susannah's face. "What a beautiful creature you
are!" she cried. "And is it to please my cousin Angel that you wear a
snuff-coloured dress and a white cap and a neckerchief like an old lady
of seventy?"

As they proceeded together up the white curving road, over the crest of
the verdant bluff, Elvira announced her further intentions.

"I am not going to live with you. I am going to board with the Smiths. I
want to get to the bottom of this business, and see the apparitions
myself."

"There are no apparitions," said Susannah gently.

"Gold books, you know, flying about in the air, and the angel Maroni and
hosts of the slain Lamanites."

"You expect too much. Such visions as Mr. Smith had came but at the
beginning to attest his mission and give him confidence."

"Tut! I should think he had sufficient of that commodity. It is I who
require the confidence, and have I come too late?"

"I would question, if it did not appear unkind, why you have come at
all?"

"Bless you, it's relations, not revelations, that I came after."

"I fear that Angel will not be satisfied with that attitude," Susannah
sighed. She supposed that Elvira represented all too well the attitude
of educated minds in that far-off world whose existence she tried to
forget.

"Therefore," said Elvira, "I will board with the Smiths."

Elvira's whim to be received into the prophet's family could not be
carried out, but by persistency she succeeded in establishing herself in
the household of Hyrum Smith, where she distinguished herself by two
peculiarities--a refusal to marry any of the saintly bachelors who were
proposed to her, and a perpetual good-natured delight in all that she
saw and heard. She resisted baptism, but to Susannah's surprise,
remained on perfectly friendly terms with the leaders of the sect.

The next two years passed quietly in Kirtland. Susannah, imbued, as
indeed were all Smith's friends, with his belief that the peace was but
for a time, cherished her husband as though death were near, and grieved
him by no outward nonconformity to pious practices. Many chance comments
which she made were straws which might have shown him the way the
current of her thought tended underneath her habitual silence, but they
showed him nothing. It was mortifying to her to observe that Smith,
rarely as he saw her, was always cognisant of her mental attitude, while
her husband remained ignorant.

Susannah gave up the girlish habit of fencing with facts that it
appeared modest to ignore. She was perfectly aware that she exercised a
distinct influence over the prophet, of what sort or degree she could
not determine. Little as she desired this influence, she could not
withhold a puzzled admiration for Smith's conduct. He rarely spoke to
her except in the most meagre and formal way, and all his decrees which
tended for her elevation in the eyes of the community or for her
personal comfort were so expressed that no personal bias could be
detected.

She asked herself if Smith practised this self-restraint for conscience'
sake, or from motives of policy, or whether it was that several distinct
selves were living together within him, and that what appeared restraint
was in reality the usual predominance of a part of him to which she bore
little or no relation. There was much else in his character to admire
and much to condemn. He had steadily improved himself in education, in
mental discipline, and in personal appearance and address. He could
hardly now be thought the same man as when he had first preached the new
doctrine in Manchester. This bespoke an intense and unresting ambition,
and yet the selfishness that is the natural result of such ambition was
absent. As far as his arduous work would permit, he gave himself
lavishly to wife and child, to all the brethren, rich and poor, when
they asked for his ministrations. The motherless babies whom he had
helped Emma to nurse through their infancy had gone back to their
father's care, but there was never a time when some poor child or
destitute woman was not a member of his household. On the other hand,
many of the actions of his public life were questionable. He had
established a bank in Kirtland, of which he was the president. Even
Halsey admitted to Susannah that this was a great mistake, that the bank
ought to have been under the control of some one who understood money
matters; the prophet did not. He had also set up a cloth mill, and
undertaken to farm a large tract of land in the public interest. The
prophet showed to much better advantage when instituting new religious
ceremonies, of which there were now many and curious, or when giving
forth "revelations" which had to do with the principles of economy
rather than its practical details. Susannah thought that the voice of
the Gentiles all around them, shouting false accusations of greed and
dishonesty, would sooner or later find much apparent confirmation if no
financier could be found to lay a firm hand upon the prophet's sanguine
tendency toward business speculation.

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