In looking over the problems involved in such a career as Smith’s, we must be struck by the necessity for able and unprejudiced research into the laws which govern apparent marvels.  Notwithstanding the very natural and sometimes justifiable aspersions which have been cast upon the work of the Society for Psychical Research, it does appear that the disinterested service rendered by its more distinguished members is the only attempt hitherto made to aid people of the so-called “mediumistic” temperament to understand rather than be swayed by their delusions.  Whether such a result is as yet possible or not, Mormonism affords a gigantic proof of the crying need of an effort in this direction; for men are obviously more ignorant of their own elusive mental conditions than of any other branch of knowledge.

L.D.

Montreal, December, 1898.

THE MORMON PROPHET.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

In the United States of America there was, in the early decades of this century, a very widely spread excitement of a religious sort.  Except in the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the settlers.  In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had been persecuted for their faith:  Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of fiery zeal, their cravings for “the light that never was on sea or land,” but not that education by contact with law and order which, in older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.

With the religious revivals came signs and wonders.  A wave of peculiar psychical phenomena swept over the country, in explanation of which the belief most widely received was that of the direct interposition of God or the devil.  The difficulty of discerning between the working of the good and the bad spirit in abnormal manifestations was to most minds obviated by the fact that they looked out upon the confusing scene through the glasses of rigidly defined opinion, and according as the affected person did or did not conform to the spectator’s view of truth, so he was judged to be a saint or a demoniac.  Few sought to learn rather than to judge; one of these very few was a young man by name Ephraim Croom.  He was by nature a student, and, being of a feeble constitution, he enjoyed what, in that country and time, was the very rare privilege of indulging his literary tastes under the shelter of the parental roof.

In one of the last years of the eighteenth century Croom the elder had come with a young wife from his father’s home in Massachusetts to settle in a township called New Manchester, in the State of New York.  He was a Baptist by creed; a man of strong will, strong affections, and strong self-respect.  Taking the portion of goods which was his by right, he sallied forth into the new country, thrift and intelligence written upon his forehead, thinking there the more largely to establish the prosperity of the green bay tree, and to serve his God and generation the better by planting his race in the newer land.