enjoyed a brief season of prosperity such as few men have ever attained, and finally * * * went cheerfully to a martyr’s death.  When he surrendered his person to Governor Ford, in order to prevent the shedding of blood, the Prophet had a presentiment of what was before him.  “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter,” he is reported to have said, “but I am as calm as a summer’s morning.  I have a conscience void of offense, and shall die innocent.”

The “Mormon” people regarded it as a duty to make every proper effort to bring the perpetrators of the foul assassination of their leaders to justice; sixty names were presented to the local grand jury, and of the persons so designated, nine were indicted.  After a farcical semblance of a trial, these were acquitted, and thus was notice, sanctioned by the constituted authority of the law, served upon all anti-"Mormons” of Illinois, that they were safe in any assault they might choose to make on the subjects of their hate.  The mob was composed of apt pupils in the learning of this lesson.  Personal outrages were of every-day occurrence; husbandmen were captured in their fields, beaten, tortured, until they barely had strength left to promise compliance with the demands of their assailants,—­that they would leave the state.  Houses were fired while the tenants were wrapped in uneasy slumber within; indeed, one entire town, that of Morley, was by such incendiarism reduced to ashes.  Women and children were aroused in the night, and compelled to flee unclad or perish in their burning dwellings.

But what of the internal work of the Church during these trying periods?  As the winds of winter, the storms of the year’s deepest night, do but harden and strengthen the mountain pine, whose roots strike the deeper, whose branches thicken, whose twigs multiply by the inclemency that would be fatal to the exotic palm, raised by man with hot-house nursing, so the new sect continued its growth, partly in spite of, partly because of, the storms to which it was subjected.  It was no green-house growth, struggling for existence in a foreign clime, but a fit plant for the soil of a free land; and there existed in the minds of unprejudiced observers not a doubt as to its vitality.  The Church soon found its equilibrium again after the shock of its cruel experience.  Brigham Young, who for a decade had been identified with the cause, who had received his full share of persecution at mobocratic hands, now stood at the head of the presiding body in the priesthood of the Church.  The effect of this man’s wonderful personality, his surprising natural ability, and to the people, the proofs of his divine acceptance, were apparent from the first.