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Show CHURCH SCRUTINY. The Utah correspondent of the New York World makes the following comments upon the character of our people: "I assure my readers that the standard of public morality among the Mormons of Utah is such as the Gentiles among them are either unable or unwilling to live up to, and such as would be considered admirable in any country in the world. The individual immorality of certain Federal officials here who have been prominent in decrying Mormon polygamy is a point to which I will recur in another letter when referring to their criticisms but it suffices for to-day to say that, among the Mormons, female chastity has one safeguard, over all those of other countries, in the severe surveillance of the Church. I have enjoyed while in Utah such exceptional advantages for arriving at the truth as both Gentiles and "Mormons" say have never been extended to any other writer for the press, and among other facts with which I have become acquainted is the silent scrutiny into personal character which the Church maintains. Profanity, intemperance, immorality, and back-biting are taken quiet not of, and if persisted in against advice, are punished by a gradual withdrawal of "fellowship," and result in what the Gentiles call "apostacy." Among the standing instructions of the teachers of the ward is this: "If persons professing to be members of the Church be guilty of allowing drunkenness or unrighteous dealing, they should be visited and their wrong doing pointed out to them in the spirit of brotherly kindness and meekness and be exhorted to repent." If they do not repent, they find the respect, friendship, association, of their co-religionists withheld, from them and thus tacitly ostracized by their own Church, they "apostatize" and carry their vices into the Gentile camp, and there assist to vilify those who have already pronounced them unfit to live with honest men or virtuous women!" |