Page:History-of-the-saints-by-john-c.-bennett.djvu/19

that invariably attend an Indian war. Suppose that by going to them, and professing to be their friend, you knew that you would be received by them freely, and admitted into their councils, and could, by the intelligence you would thus gain, be enabled to frustrate their plans, and avert from your country the evils and dangers which these savages would otherwise bring upon it. Would you for a moment scruple to make such pretensions? especially if, as in the case of the Mormons, there were no other possible way to do what the safety of the west demanded,—viz., expose the imposture.

The fact that in joining the Mormons I was obliged to make a pretence of belief in their religion does not alter the case. That pretence was unavoidable in the part I was acting, and it should not be condemned like hypocrisy towards a Christian church. For so absurd are the doctrines of the Mormons that I regard them with no more reverence than I would the worship of Manitou or the Great Spirit of the Indians, and feel no more compunction at joining in the former than in the latter, to serve the same useful purpose.

I was perfectly satisfied, even before the Mormons went from Ohio, that it was the intention of Joe Smith and those who possessed his confidence, to destroy the sacred institutions of Christianity, and substitute, instead of its powerful restraints upon the unholy passions of the human heart, a frightfully-corrupt system, that would enable them to give free course to their lust, ambition, and cruelty—a system than which, one more abominable the arch-enemy of mankind himself could not have invented. Persons unacquainted with the subject can scarcely imagine the baseness and turpitude of Mormon principles, and the horrid practices to which these principles give rise. When they learn how habitually the Mormons sacrifice to their brutal propensities the virtue and happiness of young and innocent females, how they cruelly persecute those who refuse to join them, and how they murder those who attempt to expose them, they will look with indulgence upon almost any means employed to thwart their villanous designs and detect and disclose their infamy.

There was—I repeat it—no possible way for me to ex-