until the beginning of His reign on earth, He had brought the Gentiles
upon them in overwhelming numbers. Where once a thousand miles of
wilderness lay between them and Gentile wickedness, they were now hemmed
about with it, and even it polluted the streets of the holy city itself.

Far on the east the adventurous Gentile had first pushed out of the
timber to the richly grassed prairies; then, later, on to the plains,
scorched brown with their sparse grass, driving herds of cattle ahead,
and stopping to make farms by the way. And now on the west, on the east,
and on the north, the Lord had let them pitch their tents and build
their cabins, where they would barter their lives for gold and flocks
and furs and timber, for orchard fruits and the grains of the field.
Little by little they had ventured toward the outer ramparts of Israel,
their numbers increasing year by year, and the daring of their
onslaughts against the desert and mountain wastes. With the rifle and
the axe they had made Zion but a station on the great highway between
the seas; a place where curious and irreverent Gentiles stopped to gaze
in wonder at and perhaps to mock the Lord's chosen; a place that would
become but one link in a chain of Gentile cities, that would be forced
to conform to the meretricious customs of Gentile benightedness.

It had been a fine vengeance upon them for their sin; one not unworthy
of Him who wrought it. It had come so insidiously, with such apparent
naturalness, little by little--a settler here, a settler there; here an
acre of gray desert charmed to yellow wheat; there a pouch of shining
gold washed from the burning sands; another wagon-train with hopeful men
and faithful women; a cabin, two cabins, a settlement, a schoolhouse, a
land of unwalled villages,--and democracy; a wicked government of men
set up in the very face and front of God-governed Israel.

At first they had come with ox-teams, but this was slow, and the big
Kentucky mules brought them faster; then had come the great rolling
Concord stages with their six horses; then the folly of an electric
telegraph, so that instant communication might be had with far-off
Babylon; and now the capstone in the arch of the Lord's vengeance,--a
railway,--flashing its crowded coaches over the Saints' old trail in
sixty easy hours,--a trail they had covered with their oxen in ninety
days of hardship. The rock of their faith would now be riven, the veil
of their temple rent, and