OCR Text |
Show PLEADERS AND APOLOGISTS. If the Lord's prophet lacks lucidity of expression, expres-sion, and becomes so lost in etymological blunders blun-ders and contradictions that even the laiety of whom he is the preceptor shudder thereat, it can not be said that the court of the Lord's vicegerent is at all lacking in special pleaders and official explainers of the supposedly dilvne word. Although Elder Penrose's stock of explanations explana-tions appears to be as exhaustless as the susura tions of the deep sea, it seems to have been deemed advisable to use a new brand of explanatory paint, and Major R. W. Young and W..H. King were given a chance in a trial heat. Passing the contrast between a president who requires the expert services of apologists for his divinely inspired in-spired utterances and one of the Brigham Young type, whose edicts were final, fearless and unequivocal, une-quivocal, neither Elder Young nor Elder King has done anything in the explanatory line which threatens to dethrone Editor Penrose as the star disentangler of the spoken word. Their intricate dissertations, in fact, have merely furnished a background which makes the blunders of the president stand out the more glaringly. If the Mormon faith is to stand on the original propaganda of Joseph Smith, its basic principle is revelation; simple, direct, unmistakable, unmistak-able, like the immortal utterances to the men ot Galilee. The vague and vapory distinctions of Major Young are as foreign to the very spirit of Mormonism as the Koran would have been to St. Peter, fresh from his fishing nets. This new Mormonism looks to the outside observer like a tinsel affair, lacking in all the simple vital force of the old days, when the first of the latter day prophets fearlessly announced that he was God's prophet and had spoken with the Son face to face. It seems passing strange also that apparently it has not occurred to either Major Young or Elder King that their position strangely resembles that of certain Pharisees of the olden days, who tried to confound Jesus with nice distinctions and ob-truse ob-truse questions from the ancient Scriptures. And yet President Smith and his apologists, while pretending pre-tending to propagate the pure and simple doctrines of a restored gospel, have metamorphosed the very fabric of their creed, revelation, into a meaningless meaning-less myth. |