your fathers, the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob. I am He who led the children of
Israel out of the land of Egypt, and my arm is stretched out in these
last days to save my people of Israel.

"Fear not thine enemies, for they are in my hands, and I will do my
pleasure with them.

"My people must be tried in all things, that they may be worthy to
receive the glory that I have in store for them, even the glory of Zion;
and he that will not receive chastisement is not worthy of my Kingdom.
So no more at present. Amen and Amen!"

This was what he had longed for each winter night when he had seen the
sun go down,--the word of the Lord to follow that sun on over the rim
into the pathless wilderness, infested by savage tribes and ravenous
beasts, abounding in terrors unknown. There was an adventure worth while
in the sight of God. It had never ceased to thrill him since he first
heard it broached,--the mad plan of a handful of persecuted believers,
setting out from civilisation to found Zion in the wilderness,--to go
forth a thousand miles from Christendom with nothing but stout arms and
a very living faith in the God of Israel, and in Joseph Smith as his
prophet, meeting death in famine, plagues, and fevers, freezing in the
snows of the mountains, thirsting to death on the burning deserts, being
devoured by ravening beasts or tortured to death by the sinful
Lamanites; but persisting through it all with dauntless courage to a
final triumph so glorious that the very Gods would be compelled to
applaud the spectacle of their devoted heroism.

And now he was face to face with the awful, the glorious, the divinely
ordained fact. It was like standing before the Throne of Grace itself.
Out over that western skyline was a spot, now hidden and defended by all
the powers of Satan, where the Ten Tribes would be restored, where Zion
would be rebuilt, where Christ would reign personally on earth a
thousand years, and from whence the earth would be renewed and receive
again its paradisiac glory. The thought overwhelmed.

"If we could only start at once!" he said to Bishop Wright, who had
read the revelation with him. But the canny Bishop's religious zeal was
henceforth to be tempered by the wisdom of the children of darkness.

"No more travelling in this kind of a time for the Saints," the Bishop
replied. "We got our full of that when we first left Nauvoo. We had to
scrape snow from the ground and set up tents when it was fiftee