“And you can’t always be sure of the Holy Ghost, either,” he continued.  “When the Lord pours out the Holy Ghost on an individual, he will have spasms, and you would think he was going to have fits; but it don’t make him get up and go pay his debts—­not by a long shot.  Of course I don’t feel to mention any names, but what can you expect, anyway?  A flock of a thousand sheep has got to be mighty clean if some of them ain’t smutty.  This is a large flock of sheep that has come up into this valley of the mountains, and some of them have got tag-locks hanging about them.  But it don’t seem to pester the Lord any.  He sifted us good in Missouri, and He put us into another sieve at Nauvoo, and I reckon His sieve will be brought along with Him on the day of judgment.  And if there are some lost sheep in the fold of Zion, maybe, on the other hand, there’s some outside the fold that will be worth saving; that will be broke off from the wild olive-tree and grafted on to the tame olive-tree to partake of its sap and fatness.”

Joel Rae would have taken more comfort in this championship of his views if it were not for his suspicion that Elder Wardle sometimes spoke in a tone of levity, and had indeed more than once been reckoned as a doubter.  It was even related of him that a perverted sense of humour had once inspired him to deliver an irreverent and wholly immaterial address in pure Choctaw at a service where many others of the faithful had been moved to speak in tongues; and that an earnest sister, believing the Holy Ghost to be strong upon her, had thereupon arisen and interpreted his speech to be the Lord’s description of the glories of their new temple, which it had not been at all.  Such a man might have a good heart, as he knew Elder Wardle to have; but he must be an inferior guide to the Father’s presence.  He was even less inclined to trust him when Wardle announced confidentially at the close of the meeting that day, “Brother Wright talks a good deal jest to hear his head roar.  You’d think he’d been the midwife at the borning of the world, and helped to nurse it and bring it up—­he’s that knowing about it.  My opinion is he don’t know twice across or straight up about the Lord’s secret doings!”

Yet if he had sought to render a little elastic the rigid teachings of the priesthood, he had done so innocently.  The foundations of his faith were unshaken; for him the rock upon which his Church was built had never been more stable.  As to doubting its firmness, he would as soon have blasphemed the Holy Ghost or disputed the authority of Brigham, with whom was the sacred deposit of doctrine and all temporal and spiritual power.

So he sighed often for those Gentile sheep on whom the wrath of God was so soon to fall.  Even with the utmost stretching of the divine mercy, the greater part of them must perish; and for the lost souls of these he grieved much and prayed each day.