say from the Saxon good, the Dane god, the Goth goder, the German gut, the Dutch goed, the Latin bonus, the Greek kalos, the Hebrew tob, and the Egyptian mon. Hence, with the addition of More, or the contraction Mor, we have the word Mormon, which means literally "more good." By faith it is said man can remove mountains: perhaps it will also enable him to believe in the spirit of that philology that revealed unto Mr. Joseph Smith his derivation, and rendered it a shibboleth to his followers. This is not the place to discuss a subject so broad and so long, but perhaps—the idea will suggest itself—the mind of man most loves those errors and delusions into which it has become self-persuaded, and is most fanatic concerning the irrationalities and the supernaturalities to which it has bowed its own reason.
Unaccountably enough, seeing that it means "more good," scil., the best of mankind, the word Mormon is distasteful to its disciples, who look upon it as Jew by a Hebrew, Mohammedan by a Moslem, and Romanist or Puseyite by the sectarian Christian. They prefer to be called Latter-Day Saints, or, to give them their title in full, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in contradistinction to the Former-Day Saints. Latter Day alludes to the long-looked-for convulsion that will end the present quiescent geologic epoch. Its near approach has ever been a favorite dogma and improvement subject of the Christian Church, from the time of St. Paul to that of Mr. Joseph Smith, and Drs. Wolff and Cumming;[1] for who, inquires Panurge, "is able to tell if the world shall last yet three years?" Others read it as a prophecy that "Gentilism," alias "the corrupted Christianity of the age," is "on its last legs." Even as "Saints" is a term which has been applied from time immemorial in the Apocalypse and elsewhere to the orthodox, i.e., those of one's own doxy, and as Enoch speaks of "saints" before the Flood or Noachian cataclysm, so the honorable title has in these days been appropriated by seers, revelators, and prophets, and conferred upon the Lord's chosen people, i.e., themselves and their followers. According to anti-Mormons, the name Latter-Day Saints was assumed in 1835 by the Mormons at the suggestion of Sidney Rigdon.
Before beginning a description of what Mormonism really is, I would succinctly lay down a few positions illustrating its genesis.
1. The religious as well as the social history of the progressive Anglo-Saxon race is a succession of contrasts, a system of reactions; at times retrogressive, it has a general onward tendency toward an unknown development. The Unitarians of New England, for instance, arose out of Calvinism. The Puritanism of the present generation is the natural consequence of the Rationalism which preceded it.
2. In what a French author terms "le triste état de dissolution
- ↑ The Mormon Prophet fixed "the end of the world" for A.D. 1890; Dr. Cumming, I believe, in 1870.
