The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 2

When the Smith family moved to central New York in 1815, the country was by no means settled. Only the year before, the Holland Land Company had bought up the tract west of Seneca Lake, originally held in speculation by Phelps and Gorham, and was now offering special inducements to settlers.^[1] Joseph Smith, senior, joining in this emigration from New England, and taking up his claim in Ontario County,^[2] found that his farm had literally to be burned out of the woods. The land was called the western wilderness and there was a spice of danger in the life. Rochester consisted of not more than two or three log houses, and the Indians but two years before had desolated the whole Niagara frontier.^[3] President Timothy Dwight in his Travels draws a vivid picture of the ​region. He has a keen eye for the lonely forests and the traces of the red man; he mentions the packs of wolves which drive the wayfarer to the trees; in his journey over the military route he carefully enumerates the expansions of mud, in their order, and asserts that in all this tract there was nothing, which may be called a town except Geneva and Canandaigua.^[4]

To this locality, remote and unfriended, Lucy Smith brought her family. She followed the state road, opened from the Mohawk to the inner lakes, by which even a post rider took two weeks between Albany and the Genesee valley.^[5] It was not for a decade that the canal was completed between the Hudson and Lake Erie,^[6] and, by the time the Book of Mormon was in circulation, the journey from New York city to the centre of the state was a slow pilgrimage by stage coach, canal boat, and horse railroad.^[7]

The physical environment had its mental effects. Owing to the wretched means of communication and the rudeness of the country, the education obtainable by the Smith children, whether at Palmyra or Manchester, was necessarily meagre. If ​one of his own disciples complained of the prophet's inability to read long words,^[8] the cause for such illiteracy was obvious. He had attended school for less than a year in his native state.^[9] There the educational provisions of the state constitution had as yet not been fulfilled,^[10] while of the founders of Vermont it was said that few were versed in the rules of grammar.^[11] A like state of affairs existed on the frontiers of New York; where the average school attendance was but three months^[12] in the year and where, at the time of the writing of the Book of Mormon, there were not two academies to a county,^[13] Moreover in their toils in the backwoods the boys were needed at home; one prominent Mormon is not loth to confess that at sixteen he had his last schooling for many years.^[14] ​Another reports, with a humorous touch of truth, the local saying that 'none of them Smith boys ever went to school, when he could get out of it.'^[15] As the prophet himself said in later years: 'I am a rough stone. The sound of the hammer and chisel was never heard on me until the Lord took me in hand. I desire the learning of heaven alone.'^[16]

Along with these shortcomings in education went an equal scarcity of books. Every house had its Bible,^[17] but of general reading there was a woful lack. If at this time it cost a day's wages to carry a letter from Boston to Cincinnati,^[18] books could not have been widely circulated by mail. Moreover the state library was not founded at Albany until 1818 and local libraries were rarer than Indian reservations. It is reported by an adverse critic that Joseph had a special fondness for Captain Kidd's Life and for the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs.^[19] The latter is not improbable, for the book was published in Albany in 1811 and its author hailed from Hanover, New Hampshire, one of the abiding places of ​the Smiths. At any rate, this strange adventurer's description of himself betrays a certain prophetic affinity to his young reader. He was educated 'in all the rigors of sectarianism, which illy suited his volatile and impatient temper of mind.^[20] However large the list of books that the prophet read and recorded in his later days of self-education, there is no positive evidence as to his youthful literary pabulum. His mother said of him in his nineteenth year that he 'had never read the Bible through in his life; he seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children.'^[21] Nevertheless the classes of books available to the backwoods boy may be fairly conjectured. One Mormon emigrant from Otsego County to Ohio mentions taking with him McKenzie's Travels in the Northwest and Lewis and Clarke's Tours on the Mississippi and Colorado.^[22] But the very books of adventure had a religious tinge. Burrough's autobiography discloses a sanctimonious sinner; Lewis and Clarke's volume contains speculations as to the American Indians being the lost ten tribes of Israel.^[23] The wide currency of this peculiar belief will be examined later in its bearings on Joseph's own writings.

​Meanwhile, it is evident that the books which chiefly influenced him were of a religious cast.^[24] There yet survived, after the Puritan fashion, accounts of memorable providences and ponderous controversial treatises.^[25] If the Smiths possessed any native Vermont books they would have borne such titles as these: Baylies' Free Agency, Burnap's Etherial Director, Hopkin's Primitive Creed.^[26] Of such tomes their mere bulk, the force of their gravity, was an incubus on young minds.

There was need for a change; but when a new stir of thought reached the masses it was anything but a message of sweetness and light. French rationalism furnished the main intellectual stimulus,^[27] and 'Tom' Paine was the popular representative of brains. An enormous edition of the Age of Reason was printed in France and shipped to America, to be sold for a few pence the copy, or distributed ​gratis.^[28] Thus, by the time that clubs of Free Thinkers sprang up in western New York,^[29] the Mormon prophet's mind was set, and he could see nothing in free thought, but rank infidelity. Later there may be found a few interesting hints of the Deistic controversy in the Book of Mormon, but the greatest force in the author's early mental environment was not rationalism but religiosity. He grew up in a perfect maze of sectarianism. In a denominational encyclopedia, to which Joseph Smith, as head of his church, contributed a characteristic article, there were set down forty-three sects of standing in the United States. The multiplying of religious bodies was particularly noticeable in Joseph's formative period. For example, in the sixteen years between the moving to Palmyra and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, four schisms occurred in the Methodist body alone.^[30] This reckless process of scission was one reason for the rise of Mormonism. Another was the length to which sectaries went in their beliefs and practices. Smith's native state had its share of fanatical bodies, and there was ​one which appeared as a strange prototype of the Mormon movement. The 'Pilgrims' were a vagabond swarm in the south of Vermont. Sickness had rendered the founder visionary; he asserted that he was a prophet and claimed immediate inspiration from heaven. Property was held in common and the leader controlled all the affairs of his followers from marriages to punishments. This band, in its search for the 'promised land,' attempted to combine with the Shakers, passed through central New York and disappeared in the West.^[31]

Although the larger denomination and not the petty sects held sway in Joseph's locality, their influence was abnormal. The pioneer churches had been founded by the missionary boards of New England, but the methods of work were borrowed from the Southwest. The doctrines were Calvinistic, the means of grace revivalistic. The camp-meeting had originated in Kentucky in 1799, and strange phenomena were seen, when thousands fell in convulsions and 'the formal professor, the deist, the intemperate were collected and laid out in order on the meeting house floor.'^[32] The methods of wholesale conversion spread from the West eastward, and it is significant that, in New York State, ​the Great Revival began in Joseph's own town. A letter of an itinerant evangelist of the Connecticut Missionary Society thus describes the movement: 'The seriousness began at Palmyra. The youth and children seem to be roused up to inquire, What must we do to be saved? A few drops from the cloud of glory have fallen upon Pittstown. There is uncommon attention to public worship in Canandaigua. It has been difficult during the winter to get places large enough to accommodate, or even contain the people. The countenances of many show how anxious their minds are to know how they may flee from the wrath to come.'^[33] The other side of the picture may be here given and from a Mormon standpoint. A brother of Brigham Young gives this fragment of experience: 'A Methodist revival occurred, and religious excitement ran so high that it became fashionable to make a profession of religion. Every young person but myself professed to receive a "saving change of heart." Meetings were held nightly. It was the custom to request those who were "seeking religion" to come forward to some seat reserved for that purpose, to be prayed for. . . . When I failed to come to the "anxious seat" Elder Gilmore told me I had sinned away the day of grace and my damnation was sure.'^[34]

​The psycho-physical effect of all this may be judged from the experience of another Mormon. He says that in one of the protracted meetings 'a continual stream of glorious truths passed through my mind, my happiness was great, and my mind so absorbed in spiritual things that all the time the meeting lasted, which was about fifteen days, I scarcely ate or drank anything. . . . The spirit of the Lord so operated on my system that I felt full at the time, and had no desire to eat or partake of anything.'^[35] The unnatural exaltation, here portrayed, was not such an evil result as the morbid depression. Even if the bodily effect was not at once manifested, there was an immediate and baleful influence on the mind. Mental bewilderment and melancholia were the accompaniments of youthful conversion. Confused by the practices of rival sectaries, one young 'seeker' wondered why the Presbyterians only sprinkled water in the face, while the Baptists immersed, and why the Methodists did not baptize for remission of sins but demanded an 'experience.' So Parley Pratt maintains that he went West to escape the wrangling about sects and creeds and doctrines.^[36]

The converse of the proposition, that confusion in thought, in turn, propagated new sects is one of ​the problems in the founding of the Church of Latter-day Saints. But in the case of the individual, mental bewilderment passes over into an abhorrence of the doctrines taught. Benjamin Brown, the same boy who had experienced an undue exaltation of spirits, was of Quaker parentage. Living on a farm in Washington County, he had gained, in his isolation, a strong faith in the Bible. Moving to the town, where the sects warred, the jarrings and uncertainties of the new ideas shook his simple faith. 'There,' he relates, 'the Universalist system appeared most reasonable; the horrible hell and damnation theories of most of the other parties, being in my idea inconsistent with the mercy and love of God.'^[37]

The accounts of the Mormon perverts are borne out by the report of the very missionary who started the Palmyra revival. He observes:—'The doctrines to awaken and convince sinners are Calvinistic,—the doctrines of man's entire depravity of heart by nature and alienation from God; his inability while remaining in this state to do anything acceptable to God; man's particular obligation to do the whole law of God; [and] the particular election of a select number of the human family to final salvation.'^[38] How such doctrines could have been privately believed and publicly set forth, has ​been but lamely explained. It is alleged that the itinerant preacher traveling from month to month through the gloom of almost sunless forests acquired a 'pensive turn of thought.'^[39]

If the cause is conjectural, the effect is not: a sombre theology brought an intense melancholy,—'as the exhorters grew enthusiastic, the people were much exercised over their sinful condition.'^[40] Now such were the preconditions of young Joseph Smith's peculiar psychic experiences, of which he gives the following account:—^[41]

First Vision.

'Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester, there was in the place ​where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion. . . . I was at this time in my fifteenth year. . . . During this time of great excitement, my mind was called up to ​serious reflection and great uneasiness; but though my feelings were deep and often pungent, still I kept myself aloof from all those ​parties, though I attended their several meetings as often as occasion would permit. . . .

It was on the morning of a beautiful clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.

After I had retired into the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction, not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such a marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being. Just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the Sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me, It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. ​When the light rested upon me, I saw two personages whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me. . . . When I came to myself again I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven.'

Second Vision.

I continued to pursue my common avocations of life until the twenty-first of September, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three, all the time suffering severe persecution at the hands of all classes of men, both religious and irreligious, because I continued to affirm that I had seen a vision.

During the space of time which intervened between the time I had the vision, and the year eighteen hundred and twenty-three, (having been forbidden to join any of the religious sects of the day, and being of very tender years, and persecuted by those who ought to have been my friends, and to have treated me kindly, and if they supposed me to be deluded to have endeavored, in a proper and affectionate manner, to have reclaimed me,) I was left to all kinds of temptations, and mingling with all kinds of society, I frequently fell into many foolish errors, and displayed the weakness of youth, and the corruption of human nature, which I am sorry to say led me into divers temptations, to the gratification of many appetites offensive in the sight of God. In consequence of these things I often felt condemned for my weakness ​and imperfections; when on the evening of the above mentioned twenty-first of September, after I had retired to my bed for the night, I betook myself to prayer and supplication to Almighty God, for forgiveness of all my sins and follies, and also for a manifestation to me, that I might know of my state and standing before him; for I had full confidence in obtaining a divine manifestation, as I had previously had one.

While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in the room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor.

*****

While he was conversing with me about the plates, the vision was opened to my mind that I could see the place where the plates were deposited, and that so clearly and distinctly, that I knew the place again when I visited it.

After this communication, I saw the light in the room begin to gather immediately around the person of him who had been speaking to me, and it continued to do so, until the room · was again left dark, except just around him, when instantly I saw, as it were, a conduit open right up into heaven, and he ascended up till he entirely disappeared, and the room was left as it had been before this heavenly light had made its appearance.

​I lay musing on the singularity of the scene, and marveling greatly at what had been told me by this extraordinary messenger, when, in the midst of my meditation, I suddenly discovered that my room was again beginning to get lighted, and in an instant, as it were, the same heavenly messenger was again by my bedside. He commenced, and again related the very same things which he had done at his first visit, without the least variation. But this time, so deep were the impressions made on my mind, that sleep had fled from my eyes, and I lay overwhelmed in astonishment at what I had both seen and heard; but what was my surprise when again I beheld the same messenger at my bedside, and heard him rehearse or repeat over again to me the same things as before . . . almost immediately after the heavenly messenger had ascended from me the third time, the cock crew, and I found that day was approaching, so that our interview must have occupied the whole of that night.

Third Vision.

I shortly after arose from my bed, and, as usual went to the necessary labors of the day, but, in attempting to labor as at other times I found my strength so exhausted as rendered me entirely unable. My father, who was laboring along with me, discovered something to be wrong with me, and told me to go home. I started with the intention of going to the house, but, in attempting to cross the fence out of the ​field where we were, my strength entirely failed me, and I fell helpless on the ground, and for a time was quite unconscious of anything. The first thing that I can recollect, was a voice speaking unto me calling me by name; I looked up and beheld the same messenger standing over my head, surrounded by light, as before. He then again related unto me all that he had related to me the previous night, and commanded me to go to my father, and tell him of the vision and commandments which I had received. I obeyed, I returned back to my father in the field and rehearsed the whole matter to him.'^[42]

​Were these early visions of Joseph entirely due to his religious environment and revivalistic experiences? The question is partially answered by ​applying the principles of the modern psychology of religion, as derived from cold-blooded statistics. According to these tests, Joseph's conversion oc​curring a year before the average, and therefore shows a not uncommon emotional development, but the accompanying visions put him in the rarer third of youth who have dreams and hallucinations. ​Nevertheless with him, as with all, there were antecedent causes leading up to conviction,—months of high mental tension compounded of emotional pressure from other religionists and the demands of established institutions. Again, his experiences at conversion were not unusual: others have felt a shock in the body, a feeling of strangling, a load on the shoulders, have seen rays of light and glory and heard imaginary sounds. With others, likewise, there have been the same after effects,—confusion, dejection and the sense of sin, followed by joy and exultation, lightness of heart and clarified vision.

The point of consideration in these common experiences is that they may be put in terms of psychic functioning, and may be largely explained by the influences of suggestion and hypnotism. Just as the so called spontaneous awakenings are the fructification of the convert's previous longings and strivings, so the ecstatic state is the result of the abnormal methods of revival leaders. Such are insistence on faith and the monotonous repetition of prayers, unconscious suggestion and the laying on of hands. If these means for the religious hypnosis are viewed in pairs, they present a twofold, a psycho-physical aspect. Hence the abnormalities of conversion can be further expressed in terms of nervous functioning. The exhaustion and helplessness, the falling to the ground and unconsciousness ​are attributable to 'decentralization': the higher cerebral centres losing control, there is a consequent lessening power of rational self-restraint. This lack of inhibitory force accounts for the fact that chronic religious excitement may be followed by sensual excesses, conveniently covered by the revivalistic term 'backsliding,'—or, as Joseph Smith expressed it, the being 'entangled again in the vanities of the world.'

In the attempt to construe these visions, a former parallel may be of avail. In his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan recounts analogous experiences. Formerly, it has been said, these have been referred to mere theological associations and ideas, or to somewhat abnormal, but loosely-defined hallucinatory delirium.^[43] Only recently has Bunyan's story been read in its psychological aspects,—how as a child he showed some of the familiar signs of a sensitive brain; how he was possessed with nocturnal terrors of devils and waking fears of the day of judgment; how the period of melancholic depression and undue elation was finally passed over, and Bunyan's reasoning power was left formally unaffected.^[44] This rough outline holds true of Joseph Smith; but the visionary of Manchester alone has a family history in ​which there is positive evidence of serious hereditary weakness. A reexamination of Joseph's ancestral line discloses a paradox: marked longevity, but also a strange heritage of fleshly ills. Of his grandmother, Mary Duty Smith, nothing is known; but his grandmother, who lived until eighty, had a well-nigh fatal illness at forty-seven. His grandfather, Asahel Smith, at the age of eighty-six, was described as 'just recovering from a severe fit' and of 'weak mind.' In early manhood he was nicknamed 'Crook-necked Smith,' and with the twist in his body there went a twist in his mind.^[45] However, if three-fourths of the first generation is counted a negligible quantity, there is a sufficient reason for the young Joseph's terrifying seizures. Whatever they may turn out to be, they took place on an already prepared ground; the Cadmean seed was sown by his maternal grandfather. Solomon Mack's abnormal mental experiences have already been described; of his physical vicissitudes the most ​notable were his 'fits.'^[46] The time of these was not in his senile infirmity—described by an eyewitness^[47]—but in the prime of his manhood; their cause was not his self-admitted intoxication as a sailor; it was after he was injured in the head, by the falling of a tree that the 'fits' came. Furthermore, although this affliction of the grandsire was accidental, its connection with the grandson was not.

The inference is obvious; Joseph Smith, junior, inherited through his mother, what may be called for the present a liability to neural instability. So far as the records go, Lucy Mack has given disproportionately fewer details of her own state of health, than of her seven brothers and sisters. She had her mental delusions, but her physical constitution was strong,—judging from the amount of work she did to support her young family. Her ​shiftless husband deserves little notice, except that his 'excitement upon the subject of religion' was followed by an annual vision. Until his death, at three score and ten, he seems to have fallen ill but twice. Now in any hunt for neuropathic antecedents, it is alleged that the collaterals are of importance, especially on the female side. It is, then, significant that Joseph's uncles were robust men, but that his aunts were a morbid and unhealthy lot. Lovisa Mack, 'cured by a mericle,' died two years after of consumption; Lovina succumbed to the same disease, after lingering three years.

Coming down to the third generation, Lucy Mack Smith's ten children ran the usual gauntlet of juvenile ailments. There are but too exceptions: Sophronia recovered of a 'typhus, through prayer'; the first-born, Alvin, was 'murdered' by a doctor through an overdose of calomel. Concerning the ailments of the incipient prophet no details are omitted, and it is in giving these that the materfamilias inadvertently lets go the truth. In describing the boy's nervous disposition, and the ravages of an infectious fever at the age of six, and also the ancestral ulceration calling for a painful surgical operation, most pluckily borne, the fond mother piles up the preconditions for that 'strange and unusual' something which afflicted her offspring. Besides the remote causes, the exciting causes of the ​seizures were equally marked. Chronic religious excitement at the age of fourteen was brought to a head by a bad fright from the discharge of a gun, and this was followed by what was known as Joseph's first vision.

Taken by itself this initial abnormality may be attributed to a sense illusion, such as affected the grandfather. But the second vision demands more specific description, and also a more specific exciting cause. The latter has been supplied by the prophet himself in a suspiciously enigmatic form. What took place between the first and second visions was described by Joseph as the 'weakness of youth, foolish errors, divers temptations and gratifications of appetites offensive in the sight of God.' Stripped of verbiage this means, for one thing,—drunkenness. Concerning this unpleasant fact no reliance is to be placed in the multiplied affidavits of jealous neighbors, who swore on oath that there was much intoxication among the Smiths; people in those days had the affidavit habit. The sources here used are provided by the Saints. Martin Harris one time said that, 'Brother Joseph drank too much liquor while translating the Book of Mormon'; upon pressure from the church council, he modified this charge to the assertion that 'this thing occurred previous to the translating.'^[48] ​For this statement the Mormon Thersites was reprimanded, yet his evidence was not quashed. But the most pertinent item is to be found in an early apologetic,^[49] which was naturally suppressed for its ingenuousness; the author grants that the prophet was intoxicated twice, but asks the reader if he would have done any better,—if he had lived in those bibulous days. This acknowledgment has much to do with the case,—alcoholism is first in the ​list of causes prevocative to those seizures which afflicted Joseph.

But briefly to interpret the first two visions. They may be put in psycho-physical terms, for the apparent objective manifestations were actually subjective symptoms. It bespeaks a good memory on the part of Smith, that the theophanic portions of his visions are precisely what occur in a certain form of visual disturbance akin to vertigo. The parallel is exact in both the variety and the sequence of the phenomena. It is told how a patient, experiencing this symptom for the first time, describes it as a dimness or blindness. followed by a dazzling comparable to that of the sun. A second time—as in the second vision—a more exact description is given:—'the luminous ball of fire enlarges; its centre, becomes obscure; gradually it passes beyond the limits of the visual field above and below, and the patient sees only a portion of it, in the form of a broken luminous line, which continues to vibrate until it has entirely disappeared.'

Up to this point, Joseph's first two visions may be put in the technical terms of ophthalmic migraine. Further explanation is needed of his additional statements that 'I was seized upon by some power . . . as to bind my tongue. . . . I was ready to sink into despair. . . . I saw two ​personages . . . one of them spake unto me.' It may be said that these phrases are the prophet's way of stating the symptoms of a certain form of melancholic depression;—in this the patient manifests a sudden terror, violent palpitations of the heart, difficulty in breathing and, along with these physical indications, hallucinations of seeing faces and hearing voices. No small psychological interest lies in Joseph's luminous phantasms and in the apparitions of known or imaginary beings, with whom converse was held. There are examples from Mohammed to Swedenborg of persons, who have similarly taken themselves for prophets, have conversed with the Deity, received predictions and commandments. But with the latter-day prophet the hallucinatory progression is more complex and more serious. The thrice-repeated vision of glory is succeeded by terrifying visions and the delirium of persecution. His father said that Joseph heard the devils shriek and felt their blows; his mother reports that the very angel of light turned and chastised him.

Thurlow Weed, when first Joseph submitted to him the Book of Mormon, said that he was either crazy or a very shallow impostor. There is no call for so harsh a judgment: the visionary seizures were not consequent on dementia, nor were they feigned. There is a truer and, at the same time, ​more charitable explanation,—it is, in a word, that Joseph Smith, junior, was an epileptic. Previous non-discovery of this condition is no disproof of its validity. The boy's parents were entirely ignorant of natural causes: his father believed in witchcraft, his mother was more conversant with demons than with diseases. For all that, both suspected that something was the matter. In the third visitation, Joseph's pallor and his vacant expression attracted the attention of his father. After the sixth visitation, from which he returned home exhausted and speechless, his mother admitted: 'We always had a peculiar anxiety about him whenever he was absent, for it seemed as though something was always taking place to jeopardize his life.' The mother also said she had 'learned to be little cautious about matters in regard to Joseph,' but the father was persistently credulous; in the last vision, when Joseph was knocked down by assassins, he 'went in pursuit of those villains.'

Steeped in ignorance and superstition, it was not to be expected that the parents could diagnose the case. It required keener eyes than theirs to locate the trouble, inasmuch as veritable epileptic fits may be so slight and transitory, that bystanders do not notice them, and the patient himself underrates them. Moreover in Joseph's case there was a special limitation: with but one exception, his ​'visits from the angels' took place away from observation,—at night, or far from home. Yet the very fact that the first seizures were nocturnal, and that the severest attacks occurred in his all-day wanderings, furnish cumulative evidence of true epileptic convulsions. In the flight of epileptics, it is asserted, the patient hastily leaves his domicile and commits acts which are often strange and incoherent. So here: Joseph is away all day, on returning he gives fanciful explanations of his self-inflicted injuries. While at the hill Cumorah, hunting for the gold plates, he is hurled back upon the ground, or chastised by an angel, or assaulted by assassins. He returns home, late at night, exhausted or speechless with fright, with a bruised body or a dislocated thumb.^[50] This violent flexure of the ​thumb into the palm is one of those seemingly trifling symptoms, which—occurring paroxysmally—are said to deserve careful analysis.

But to pass on to the more obvious things. The abrupt onsets described by mother Smith are variously connected with bodily injury, loss of consciousness and protracted stupor. On the contrary the first two visions, as described by the prophet, are little more than psychic paroxysms. Was there any ulterior motive behind this limitation? Granting that Joseph did not manage to forget what was best to forget and that 'in later life he believed what he asserted,'^[51] the visions, as they stand, furnish evidence of epilepsy. The first, as a sensorial migraine, may be considered the equivalent of a convulsive paroxysm; while the second, which followed intoxication, furnishes just those symptoms premonitory of the real seizure next day. In the night the boy had a sense-illusion of dazzling flame and consuming fire; the next morning he found his strength exhausted, and, starting to cross a fence, fell helpless to the ground and for a time was quite unconscious of anything. In recounting the all-night interview with the angel, the narrator fur​nishes the very sensation warnings of epilepsy; it remains for his mother to supply the further tell-tale particulars. It is more than a coincidence that the boy's strange actions, while working in the field, precisely correspond to one of those epileptic attacks designated vacuity.^[52] Elsewhere is given a fuller examination of the rest of Joseph's seizures.^[53] The psychic premonitions and the physical aftereffects, from the delirium of persecution to the dislocation of the thumb,—all are accounted for under the supposition of epilepsy. It is no forced analogy; the details attach themselves to the scheme as naturally as barnacles to a rock.

To explain Joseph's more abnormal experiences, one must rest content with epilepsy as a working hypothesis. Yet, as such, it binds together a further series of otherwise irrelated facts: through it both ancestry and progeny fall in line. Looking backward to the first generation there is antecedent probability in the grandfather's 'fits' on Winchester Hills; looking forward there is corroboration in the ​circumstance that 'fits' have reappeared in the fifth generation. But confining attention to the life of the prophet: although he stood midway in the atavistic line of neuropathics, that was no bar to later health and strength. The long intervals between his seizures, and their cessation at about twenty-one, point to one of the more favored cases of spontaneous cure. Of his mental robustness the same may be said. It is going too high to cite the tradition of epileptics such as Cæsar and Napoleon, since epilepsy vulgarly and commonly may exist in an absolutely healthy state of mind. Contrary to the opinion of some alienists, there is statistical proof that epilepsy does not always lead to mental disorders. So on the one hand, the attenuated form of Joseph's case and the infrequency of his youthful attacks, and on the other his many successful enterprises, especially the management of his cantankerous followers, preclude the idea of absolute mental deterioration.

As to moral deterioration the psychologist is not obliged to pass judgment, except to note that the psychiatric definition of the epileptic fits the prophet to a dot.^[54] Yet this one persistent mental trait should ​be noted in youth Joseph was secretive and distrustful, after the first impulsive delirium at Cumorah he spoke of the necessity of suppressing these things';^[55] in maturity he said 'no man knows my history; I cannot tell it.'^[56] In the same way there is psychological connection between his early emotional instability and those private practices which led up to the 'Revelation on the Eternity of the Marriage Covenant, Including the Plurality of Wives.' But not to peer into this murky and disagreeable corner of his character, it remains to be said that the words of his friends speak louder than his own actions, that his self-disclosures are not so damaging as the apologies of his followers. Thus his ever-faithful scribe Cowdery says: 'While young, I have been informed, he was afflicted with sickness. . . . You will remember that I said two invisible powers were operating upon the mind of our brother while going to Cumorah. In this, then, I discover wisdom in the dealings of the Lord: it was impossible for any man to translate the Book of Mormon by the gift of God, and endure the afflictions, the temptations and devices of Satan, without being overthrown, unless he had been previously benefited with a certain round of experience.'

But to leave this anatomy of melancholy and turn ​to a less irksome task,—the Book of Mormon, its documents, its sources, and its author's mentality. To one who has waded through this sea of swash there will occur the words of Doctor Johnson concerning young Chatterton, 'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'