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Show Mormonism's Growth in England THE Anti-Mormon Society in England has appealed to the British Government for help against the growing evil of Mormonism in the United Kingdom. In the present social unrest over there. Mormon missionaries mission-aries are having unprecedented success in securing converts. One advantage of being a Mormon is that, on joining the church, one becomes a saint right away. In other religions there are bothersome preliminaries. Eighty-two years have elapsed since Joseph Jo-seph Smith dug out of a hill not far from Palmyra, N. Y., the original book, written by a prophet named Mormon on thin plates of gold fastened together with three gold rings, which" contained a revelation- It- was packed in a stone box, and an angel told Smith where to dig for it. Afterward the angel fiew away with the book, so that it is no longer extant in the original, but eleven "witnesses" (two of them brothers of Smith) swore they saw it. Smith, like other great men, had his little weakness. It was for the ladies. Sixteen years after the digging up of the Mormon Bible he had another revelation. The angel came back and told bim to issue an ecclesiastical ecclesias-tical edict approving polygamy. Whereupon be himself took steps to anuex the wives of a number of the true believers. At least two of the husbands objected, and a tremendous tre-mendous row followed, the upshot being the incarceration of Smith at Carthage, 111. the Mormon settlement being then at Nats-voo. Nats-voo. A mob broke into the jail and shot bun to death. His mantle as leader-in-chief of the Mormons Mor-mons was later assumed by Brigham Young, who was one of the original Twelve Apostles. It was he who led the persecuted Latter Day Saints out to Utah, one of the wagons carrying carry-ing a small flour mill, which during the pilgrimage pil-grimage ground wheat newly reaped from fields previously sown along the route by aa advance guard. Smith started the polygamy business, but Young, an exceedingly able man, developed it. He had forty-odd wives, and under his influence the population of Salt Lake City rapidly grew. |