they must; and it became the all-absorbing question with the presidency of the Church, whether to oppose the popular fury, temporize until it should abate, or yield to circumstances and quit the state. Young had sagacity enough to see that the constitution of the Church over which he presided was such that it could never peaceably sustain itself in the States, and that it would be in vain to indulge the Mohammedan dream of conquest which once floated through the brain of the prophet Joseph. He accordingly made diligent efforts to prepare the minds of the Saints for removal beyond the bounds and out of the jurisdiction of the United States.
This was no difficult task. The Mormons had become in some degree a nomadic race; they had broken the ties of kindred and home to gather around their fancied Zion; many of them had left one part of Missouri for another, and then had removed to Nauvoo; some had wandered from beyond the broad Atlantic, and could not, within a few years, form very strong local attachments. Superadded to all this was an intense hatred to the United States, some of whose citizens had inflicted upon them the sufferings, losses, and persecutions of which they complained, and whose government had failed to afford them redress. So intense was this feeling, that they looked exultingly forward to the fulfillment of prophecy, which remorselessly consigned the country to one vast and common ruin, under the visitations of earthquakes, fires, famine, pestilence, and civil wars, from the offended majesty of heaven. There was only one tie difficult to be severed—the Temple. It was a proud monument of architectural
