The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 5

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In following up the sources of the Book of Mormon, there is given a reconnaissance map of the author's mind. From the way he took in both current archæology and its errors, and Calvinism and its contradictions, it is evident that, while his mental horizon was widening, his receptivity was greater than his reasoning, his imagination stronger than his discrimination. Furthermore, a volume that took at least two years to excogitate, plus nearly two years to write, should manifest some logical development. Such is not the fact: in I Nephi the writer swallowed Calvinism in a lump, in II Nephi he mixed with it some liberalism, but there the leavening process stopped. In the midst of seeming consistency there appear undigested fragments. One such is the speculation regarding the usefulness of evil. The prophet falls foul of the problem of sin and this is his solution:—

This is a fair sample of Joseph's early reasoning powers, yet what he lacked in logic he made up in feeling. Of impulsive nature, taking up thoughts as he found them in the air, he was forced at last into an emotional revolt against Calvinism. These were the days of total depravity, when the preacher affirmed that 'Adam's sin, being made ours by imputation, has exposed innumerable infants to Divine ​wrath.^[2] There was of course a public reaction against such teachings,^[3] shown in the increase of more humane sentiments.^[4] But since these moving forces were, as yet, in the background, it speaks well for the young prophet's heart, if not for his head, that he could misinterpret in such kindly fashion the abstract injustice of dogma. Like another writer, not far off, he makes a short apology for infants.^[5] In the book of Mosiah, he says, 'infants fall in Adam, or in nature, yet none shall be found blameless before God, except it be little children.'^[6]

​Thus far it is clear that the author could manage a metaphor better than a syllogism. But this is only a tenth part of the ancient record, the remainder of which, according to the revelation of July, 1828, 'does contain all those parts of my gospel, which my holy prophets desired should come forth unto this people.' This body of divinity is what Smith constantly referred to as the 'plain and simple gospel.' That it was not plain is seen from its distortions of Presbyterianism, and that it was not simple from its other dogmatic borrowings. In evidence, one need but briefly glance at the other two sects which Joseph mentioned at the time of his first vision. With the spread of Baptist principles at this time,^[7] and with seven varieties of the denomination existing near by,^[8] it is natural that there should be set forth such variations as adult baptism, total immersion and baptism unto repentance.^[9] Furthermore, in this Western Circuit, there was another ​denomination of larger numbers,^[10] and of greater influence upon the youthful convert. In after years Smith acknowledged that in 1820 he was 'somewhat partial to the Methodist sect.'^[11] This admission goes far to explain the rhetorical tone of his book,—the peculiarity that the speeches of the ancient prophets are filled with camp-meeting echoes, and catchwords of the old-time Methodist exhorter. Take for example the following:

Amulek's speech, with its offer of a present, free and full salvation, is reminiscent of the Wesleyan pietism once taught in Palmyra.^[13] Elsewhere in the book there are the more ordinary Methodist teachings, as to backsliding and restoration.^[14] Yet on the whole, the influence here exerted was more practical than theoretical; one cause of the rapid spread of Mormonism was its partial adaptation of the ways and means of Methodism. Out of the latter's marvelous organization of local and itinerant clergy, with their various conferences, societies and circuits, the founder of the church of the Latter-day Saints extracted a dislocated hierarchy with unprecedented functions. What were the offices and duties of Mormon apostles and elders, evangelists and bishops, priests and teachers and deacons, may be obscurely seen in the last of the fourteen books. ​Judging from a parallel revelation given in June, 1830,^[15] this little book of Mormon is essentially a book of discipline and has presumably been added as an afterthought.^[16]

Without entering the penumbra of minor creeds,^[17] some idea has been gained of 'the confusion and strife among the different denominations,' in Joseph's fifteenth year. It is now ten years later and he has done little to reconcile the differences; instead he has but transferred to paper his own obfustication; his ancient record, like an old-fashioned mirror, gives back images vague and ill defined.

To complete the framework of environment, and to show how it quadrates with the book, it is needful to examine a few incidental references, certain semi-political movements which disturbed the new settlements. These were,—fear of the Church of Rome, hatred of Infidelity and the agitation against Free Masonry. The strongest hints against Roman Catholicism occur early in the book, such as in the preface of Nephi's vision of the future of America:— ​

This covert and virulent attack may perhaps be traced to Joseph's reading; for it is in keeping with the sentiments of the day. In 1831, the prophet condescended to approve of Fox's Book of Martyrs.^[19] ​If before this he had not run across one of the popular 'Cruelty Books,' yet, as a boy, it is not unlikely that he had a look at the ubiquitous New England Primer with its gruesome woodcuts of the victims of Bloody Mary, burning at the stake.^[20] At any rate, the young convert's spiritual advisers fomented the hatred of Roman Catholics. Any back-country exhorter was welcome to throw a stick at the Man of Sin, while the anti-popery campaign literature comprised works fit only for the expurgated list of decency.^[21]

But in this era of political good feeling, bigotry did not stop with words. On the very field, where two centuries before Brébeuf and other Jesuit missionaries had suffered death at the hands of the savages,^[22] a Protestant family, it was alleged, now ran a fearful risk in harboring a Romanist.^[23] Finally the ​opposition took an organized form, and the Protestant Association, with its organ The Protestant gathered old calumnies and framed new ones. To trace the growth of this early form of the A. P. A., is going beyond the limits of the Book of Mormon. All that should be noted is that the author shared in the popular narrowness and misapprehension.

To proceed to another sign of the times, which left a water mark in the Mormon documents. The agitation against Papistry was matched by the agitation against Infidelity. For the sake of continuity a specific line of resistance may be followed as far back as 1735. In the first heresy trial in the Presbyterian church in America, one of Benjamin Franklin's friends^[24] was condemned for preaching that Christianity was largely a revival or new edition of the laws and precepts of nature.^[25] But the deistic drift could not be stopped. Especially after the Revolution, was the critical period in politics, enjoined with a critical period in orthodoxy. Then came the strictures of the General Assembly of 1798, which fulminated against the abounding infidelity, . . . which, in many instances, tends to atheism itself which assumes a front of daring impiety and possesses a mouth filled with blasphemy.'^[26] ​The New England clergy also warned against the danger of infidel philosophy,^[27] and, in 1810, a missionary of the Connecticut Society, who had penetrated into the neighborhood of Lake Erie, reported that infidelity abounded to an alarming degree and in various shapes in the district, west of the Military Tract.^[28]

The rate of movement in philosophic thought is one thing, how it affected the masses another. The tastes of the people being given so largely to affairs of state and matters of theology, greater political freedom was followed by greater religious freedom. Indeed, to many eyes, after the second war with England,^[29] the land of liberty threatened to become a land of license.^[30] The political relations with France had already prepared the way for French infidelity.^[31] On the Ohio there arose freethinking societies, affiliated with the Jacobin club ​of Philadelphia;^[32] on the Genesee^[33] there was an infidel club, with a circulating library comprising the works of Volney and Hume, Voltaire and Paine.

It is with the last writer that the concern lies. The others were discussed in educated circles; 'Tom' Paine's sayings were bandied about by the ignorant.^[34] His Age of Reason being sold cheap or sometimes given away, Joseph may have laid hands on a copy,^[35] but, as heretofore, other than literary sources were open to him. The people's lyceum was now in its golden age, and the boy who was noted among his companions for his seriousness,^[36] would have taken naturally to the portentous gravity of the local Thespian society or debating junto.^[37] Even without membership in the latter, the topics of the day reached the lad's ears; he now made visits to town to get the weekly paper,^[38] and to sit chatting in the rustic row. There, in the ​country store, the subjects of discussion were as varied as the wares, and in the tavern, religion, like politics, was the delight of those that talked for talk's sake. As the boy, through inclination and through poverty,^[39] was less of a reader than a talker, it is not meant to connect him, except remotely, to the culture of the day. In truth, as regards polite learning, he was on the margin of cultivation; the recent awakening of American letters had no influence on him; he was farther in spirit than in space from such contemporaries as Brockden Brown, Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. For all that, he had his intellectual interests; local creeds were his aids to reflection, and freethinkers his stimulus to controversy. Before discovering how, in the Book of Mormon, he incorporated, only to refute, the current deistic arguments, the narrow spirit of the times should be noted.

The hard lot of the thinker who would be free was recorded by the novelist and observed by the traveler. One of Cooper's heroines is applauded for being 'properly impressed with the horrors of a deist's doctrine,' while another 'shrunk from his company.'^[40] A foreign traveler observed that unbelief was treated as a crime.^[41] This social ostracism ​came near leading to political disability. Some wished to see regulations made by which deists should be excluded from office. But the Jefferson administration, although suspected of infidelity,^[42] allowed no tampering with the rights of conscience.^[43] But the good sense and moderation that forestalled any approach to a reunion of church and state, was not to be found in the sectary. The author of the Book of Mormon represents America as indeed a land of free speech, yet the advocate of a prehistoric deism is called Anti-Christ. He quotes opaquely from the Age of Reason and for his hardness of heart is punished both by the High Priest and the Chief Judge:—

​The spirit of intolerance diffused through the ​Book of Mormon has meaning; it places the document well within the first third of the century, the 'fermenting period' of American thought. And there is a third and final popular movement herein reflected, which fixes, not only the time, but the place of the record. The frequent allusions to 'wicked and secret societies, wicked and secret combinations,'^[45] point to the agitation against Free Masonry in New York State, beginning in 1826. The abduction and alleged murder of William Morgan by some of the Masonic fraternity, although without the consent of the central authority, caused an unparalleled excitement. This mechanic of Batavia, reported to be preparing a book divulging the secrets of the order, was seized, haled off to Fort Niagara and suddenly made away with.^[46] It was believed that judges, juries and witnesses, if Masons, would exonerate the culprits; at any rate, the outrage resulted in the abolishing of local lodges,^[47] and in the rise of the Anti-Masonic party. It is not because of its political,^[48] but its religious effects that traces of this agitation are to be found in the Mormon Bible; the testimonies of Masons were considered to be ​Jesuitical evasions, and, above all, the so called deistical tendencies of their formulæ were alleged to be destructive of Christianity.^[49] Inasmuch as this affair took place in the year in which Joseph came of age, as the victim was arrested at Canandaigua, only nine miles away, and as rumor, even in the wilderness, was swift,^[50] without the aid of the current pamphlets of exposure,^[51] the Morgan excitement got into the young prophet's brain and was bound to come out in his writings.^[52] The passage from the 'abridgement taken from the Book of Ether,' may be offered as a final bit of internal evidence, as to the time, place and circumstances at the coming forth of the Book of Mormon:

Without further quotation or digression, it remains to get at a psychological estimate of the Book of Mormon. As literature it is not worth reading,—the educated Mormons fight shy of it;^[54] as history it merely casts a side light on a frontier settlement in the twenties; but as biography it has value, it gives, as it were, a cross section of the author's brain. The subject may be most inclusively studied from the standpoint of the constructive imagination, its materials and range, its phases æsthetic and intellective, its aspects emotional and possibly moral.^[55] So first, as in the case of the progenitors and their dreams, the objects and scenes and inci​dents of experience furnished the stuff for the growth of Joseph's mental inwards. In sticking to the plenary inspiration of the Book of Mormon, the Saints make Smith greater than a genius, for whom there is no such thing as a perfectly new creation, or freedom from the bounds and checks of his situation. But to go on: like the events already cited, this entire 'Sacred History of America' is woven out of those ideas which interested the people of Western New York about 1830. Despite such limitation, the range of Joseph's fancy was extensive; his imagination was not trammeled by his understanding; his information came orally, and there were few books to check him: hence his anachronisms. From the same lack of knowledge, his precognitions of the future are naught. Joseph's prophecies are pseudographs,—events that had happened put as if they were yet to happen.^[56] And the æsthetic was as lacking as the prophetic. The 'poems of Joseph' are not half bad, but they are not his; while the picture of his favorite Lamanites is not poetic but prosaic; Cooper idealized the Indian, Smith made him repulsive.

Of the intellective phase of his imagination, something more favorable can be said, yet with strength ​there was weakness. The Book of Mormon, as a storehouse of sectarianism, implies a retentive memory and, at the same time, a lack of discriminative judgment. Granted that the style was inflated, because that was the style of the day,^[57] and that the thoughts were diffuse, because dictated, yet the feebleness of the critical faculty is shown in various ways. In the midst of the ancient story, modern inventions are grotesquely inserted; the language is biblical, but the ideas are local. The lost tribes of the Jews emigrate to America in vessels which are a cross between Noah's ark and an Erie canal boat. This occasional mixture of sense and nonsense may be matched among his co-religionists, for other readers took the Scriptures literally and interpreted fancifully;^[58] nevertheless Joseph's imagination appears to have been seldom controlled by the judicial spirit. In the recension of the first edition he evinced no capacity to select and reject; to this day there remain strange puerilities. After the natural ​outburst against free masonry, there occurs the following curiosity of literature:—

Joseph must have been thinking of these his prehistoric Jabberwoks, when he told his followers to ​beware of 'a fanciful, flowery and heated imagination.^[60] But seriously, whatever the sources of these humors and conceits, they are characteristic of the whole tribe of Smith. Joseph's hypertrophy of imagination was inherited: his aunt composed a vivid poem on death and the grave;^[61] his mother could almost see the flutter of demons' wings; his father had a panorama of visions; his grandfather Mack complained of his mind being 'imagining but agitated.' Environment likewise had an influence. Brought up in the arca swept by revivals—the 'burnt-over district' as it was called—his imagination was fired by his feelings. Thereby he escaped the cold logic of the schools; he also went beyond the limits of probability. All this had an effect on his character. Ignorant of the subconscious force of unchecked reverie, he considered his every whimsy to be inspired. How far his imagination fostered his credulity, how far he became conscious that his 'translating' was mainly automatic, whether as a dramatically imagined 'seer and revelator,' he was deceived or deceiving,—these are questions for the moralist to decide, after the results are in. The problem, now, is one of letters rather than of ethics,—to see how the characteristics of the book fit the character of the man.

​The four chief marks of the Book of Mormon are a redundant style, fragmentary information, a fanciful archæology, and an unsystematic theology. The redundancy of style fits the description given by a lawyer, who defended the prophet in his Missouri troubles in 1839. He says, 'In conversation he was slow, and used too many words to express his ideas and would not generally go directly to a point.'^[62] It was this verbosity that made Joseph magnify his microscopic facts many diameters. The inherent paucity of his information accords with the observation of Josiah Quincy, that the prophet 'talked as from a strong mind utterly unenlightened by the teachings of history.'^[63] The same thing explains Joseph's lifelong delight in pseudo-archæology, from his own fireside tales to the citing of Central American discoveries as 'more proofs of the Book of Mormon, as a historical and religious record, written in ancient times by a branch of the house of Israel, who peopled America and from whom the Indians are descended.'^[64] Now these very flights of fancy were part and parcel of Smith's strange being. If they are not to be connected with the roving habits of his progenitors, they were at least nurtured by the free life of the ​forest. The boy who withdrew at will into a past world of his own, was the youth who scoured the country for hidden treasure, and the young man who oscillated across the width of the state^[65] in search of the elusive gold plates.

Finally his bodily movements are matched by his mental restlessness,—the fourth mark of the man. In his logic he skips the middle term; in his theology he darts from creed to creed; as defender of the faith against Romanism or Infidelity, he is impatient, intolerant. In fine, it may be said that Joseph Smith, in all respects, although in exaggerated form, showed himself the type of Western pioneer, as he was contrasted with the Easterner. Of that type a foreign traveler observed, 'their business is conducted with an almost feverish excitement, . . . their passions are more intense, their religious morality less authoritative, and their convictions less firm.'^[66]

To adjust one's ideas of the mental ability of the imaginative, emotional, young American, a comparison may be made with a similar case in English literature. Going back to the reign of George III the origin of the Book of Mormon has an instructive likeness to that of the Rowley myth. Thomas ​Chatterton,^[67] 'the marvelous boy of Bristol, was born in 1752. He was the son of a drunken schoolmaster and a descendant of a line of sextons a century and a half long. Brought up in the shadow of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, a dreamy, secretive lad, delighting in heraldry, blackletter manuscripts and local antiquities, at the age of sixteen he brought forth a series of pseudo-antique poems, which, at first, deceived the very elect. Although taught but little and with straitened means, there rose up before the eye of his fancy the medieval walls and towers of his native town. To obtain evidence for his imaginings, a monkish pseudonym was adopted. The document, which he sent to Horace Walpole, bore the title, 'The Ryse of Peyncteynge in Englande, Wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Master Canynge.'^[68] Walpole was interested but not taken in; the dubious authorship of the Ossianic poems was still in his mind. Meanwhile the critical authorities showed up the skilful forgery, but others were gullible; the Bristol historian accepted Chatterton's fiction for fact, and there sprung up a group of clerical admirers who dabbled in the antique.^[69] As ​to the literary value of the works 'wroten by T. Rowleie' and of the 'account written by the hand of Mormon,' comparisons are odious; yet the coming forth of both arose under somewhat like conditions. In the days of each young pseudologist, the literature of disguise was rife. Chatterton was preceded by Walpole's pseudonymus Castle of Otranto, by the Reliques called Percy's, by McPherson's Fingal, and other poems attributed to ancient Scottish bards.

And such, in relative measure were the surroundings of the translator of the 'Plates of Nephi.' What happened in Britain was happening here. By his Knickerbocker History of New York, Washington Irving was showing to Anglo-Americans of culture how honey could be brought forth out of the dead lion. The Philistines also had their riddles. The puritanic who eschewed novels, were yet devouring romances. In Massachusetts a parchment inscribed with Hebrew characters, being dug up on an 'Indian hill' was accepted as an 'Indian Bible,'^[70] although scoffers pronounced it the phylactery of some wandering Jew of a peddlar. In New York state Priest's American Antiquities went through three editions in one year,^[71] while rumors of a 'Canada Gold Bible' flew over the ​border.^[72] Finally in Ohio the Reverend Solomon Spaulding's romance of ancient America, entitled a 'Manuscript Found,' was creating some stir.

How far did Joseph Smith fasten on this literary driftwood, as it floated on the current of the times? It is here unnecessary to follow the ebb and flow of the tide of speculation. In spite of a continuous stream of conjectural literature, it is as yet impossible to pick out any special document as an original source of the Book of Mormon. In particular, the commonly accepted Spaulding theory is insoluble. from external evidence and disproved by internal evidence.^[73] Joseph Smith's 'Record of the Indians' is a product indigenous to the New York 'Wilderness,' and the authentic work of its 'author and proprietor.' Outwardly, it reflects the local color of Palmyra and Manchester, inwardly, its complex of thought is a replica of Smith's muddled brain. This monument of misplaced energy was possible to the impressionable youth constituted and circumstanced as he was. The acts of Nephi are indeed the acts of Joseph:—'and upon the plates which I made, I did engraven the record of my father, and also of our journeyings in the wilderness, and the prophecies of my father; and also many of my own prophecies have I engraven upon them.'

​It is now in order to trace the public execution of the scheme,—from the first inkling of the plates in 1823 to the thrice-repeated prophecy of 1829, that 'a great and marvelous work is about to come forth among the children of men.'