1833-04-13-Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate-Mormonism

Mormonism

Source: Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, v4 n15, 13 April 1833, pg 119

Mormonism

Br. J. B. Prosser, of Bolton, Warren county, writes, in a late letter, as follows:—

"The Mormon prophets are working wonders in Bolton. Fifty, or upwards, have joined the standard raised by Jo. Smith, jr. More are expected to join them speedily. I know of no Universalist that has been disturbed at all by the revelation of "Nephi." It is but a word and a blow with the prophets, with regard to initiation—they baptize in the night-time, when occasion requires. They appear to be greatly hurried."

The world has truly got a strange pass, when people in numbers and companies can be juggled out of reason and common sense, so far as to give themselves up as the disciples and followers of the miserable scapegoat, Jo. Smith, jr., a juggling knave and a lazy swindler, who, having escaped from prison and the hand of legal justice, has set up for himself in religion, by publishing what he calls his golden Bible, his own wicked invention, filled with a tissue of the most glaring absurdities and nonsensical trash. It would seem that there is no impostor too vile and scandalous to have his devoted followers, and no kind of knavery or absurdity too palpable to have its dupes and its victims. But Jo. Smith jr. is not the only impostor and religious juggler of the present age. It is our honest, serious and deep conviction of mind that Jedediah Burchard and his coadjutors in modern fanaticism, are practicing as great an imposition, as vile and imposture, a worse kind of blasphemy, and exerting a far more extensively pernicious influence in society, than that of the Mormon prophet and his followers. For Burchard and his coadjutors are more enlightene, move in a different circle, and impose on more people thatn the Mormonites have it in their power to impose on. Therefore the greater is their guilt. S.