ou
can, if you are false to one trust, you shall be stripped naked before
Jehovah of all your anticipations of greatness. And you have failed in
your work; you have been false to your trust; you have been lax and
wicked, and you have temporised, nay, affiliated with Gentiles. I have
asked myself if this, after all, may not have been the chief cause of
God's present wrath upon us. The flesh is weak. I have had my own hours
of wrestling with Satan. We all know his cunning to take shapes that
most weaken, beguile, and unman us, and small wonder if many of us
succumb. But this other sin is wilful. Not only have Gentile officers,
Federal officers, come among us and been let to insult, abuse,
calumniate, and to trample upon our most sacred ordinances, but we have
consorted, traded, and held relations with the Gentiles that pass by us.
You have the term 'winter Mormons,' a generation of vipers who come
here, marry your daughters in the fall, rest with you during the winter,
and pass on to the gold fields in the spring, never to return. You,
yourselves, coined the Godless phrase. But how can you utter it without
crimson faces? I tell you now, God is to make a short work upon this
earth. His lines are being drawn, and many of you before me will be left
outside. The curtains of Zion have been spread, but you are gone beyond
their folds. You are no longer numbered in the household of faith. For
your weak souls the sealing keys of power have been delivered in vain.
You have become waymarks to the kingdom of folly. This is truth I tell
you. It has been frozen and starved into me, but it will be burned into
you. For your sins, the road between here and the Missouri River is a
road between two lines of graves. For your sins, from the little band I
have just brought in, one hundred and fifty faithful ones fell asleep by
the wayside, and their bodies went to be gnawed by the wolves. How long
shall others die for you? Forever, think you? No! Your last day is come.
Repent, confess your sins in all haste, be buried again in the waters of
baptism, then cast out the Gentile, and throw off his yoke,--and
thereafter walk in trembling all your days,--for your wickedness has
been great."

Such was the opening gun in what became known as the "reformation." The
conditions had been ripe for it, and in that very moment a fever of
repentance spread through the two thousand people who had cowered under
his words. Alike with the people below, the leade