business of these deities in the Celestial Kingdom is the propagation of souls to people bodies begotten on earth, and the sexual relation is made to permeate every portion of the creed as thoroughly as it pervaded the religions of ancient Egypt and India.  In the Endowment House at Salt Lake City, secret rites are practised of a character similar to the mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris.  In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with cleansed bodies and anointed hair.  Since the revelation of the processes of the Endowment, which was first fully made by a young apostate named John Hyde, other dissenters, real and pretended, have attempted to impose on the public exaggerated accounts of these ceremonies; but in justice to the Mormon Church it ought to be said, that there is no foundation for the reports that they are such as would outrage decency.  To be sure, an assemblage of members of both sexes, clad in white shifts, with oiled and dishevelled hair, in a room fitted up in resemblance of a garden, to witness a performance of the allegory of Adam and Eve in Eden, which is conducted so as to be sensually symbolic, is not suggestive of refined ideas; but it is necessary to take into consideration the character both of performers and witnesses, which is not distinguished in any way by delicacy.  According to their standard of morality and taste, the rites of the Endowment are devoid of immodesty.

In their political bearing, however, they are more important, and justly liable to the severest censure.  It is established beyond question, that the initiated, clad in the preposterous costume before described, take an oath, in the presence of their Spiritual Head, to cherish eternal enmity towards the government of the United States until it shall have avenged the death of their prophet, Joseph Smith.  And this ceremony is not a mere empty form of words.  It is an oath, the spirit of which the Endowed carry into their daily life and all their relations with the Gentile world.  In it lies the root of the evasion, and finally subversion, of Federal authority which occasioned the recent military expedition to Utah.

When the Territory was organized in 1850, the government at Washington, acting on an imperfect knowledge of the nature of Mormonism, conferred the office of Governor upon Brigham Young.  For this act Mr. Fillmore has been unjustly censured.  It appeared to him, at the time, a proper, as well as politic, appointment.  But before the succession of General Pierce to the Presidency, its evil results became apparent, in the expulsion of civil officers from the Territory and the subversion of all law.  A feeble, and of course unsuccessful, attempt was then made to supplant Young with Lieutenant-Colonel Steptoe, a meritorious, but too amiable officer of the regular army,—­the