ARTICLE IX.

SHORT SERMONS.

"Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see.”— Isaiah xlii. 18.

A BLIND man must look in order that the physician may restore him to sight. The act of seeing must be the blind man's. If the deaf man have no confidence in his restorer, and no genuine desire to be restored, he will never hearken. The ear long unaccustomed to hear is torpid, and effort is necessary.

The Old Testament harmonizes with the New in making a willing and obedient faith essential to the spiritual life of the utterly helpless and powerless. It may have been for the purpose of illustrating this fundamental Gospel principle of both Testaments, that our Saviour required those whom he miraculously healed to put forth the exercise which was appropriate to the restored state. He said to the man who had the withered hand, "Stretch forth thy hand." How could he? It was withered, palsied, helpless! But this is the requirement of Jesus. And until he obeys he will not be healed.

Do you say, we cannot regenerate and renew our own hearts; we have no feeling, no interest; our hearts are hard and dead; we do not perceive spiritual things; we are not moved at the warnings of God any more than the deaf and the blind? Admit it; but says God, (ver. 7 and 16,) I have sent my Son "to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house. And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known ; I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them and not forsake them." Do you plead that you cannot comprehend all my deep councils and mysterious doctrines? But the best Christians cannot do that, and yet they serve, obey, and love me acceptably. How little, even, my prophet knows. "Who is blind but my servant? Or deaf as my messenger that I sent? who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord's servant?" (Ver. 19.)

Do you say that the dawning light is so faint, and your strength so small, that you fear to enter the narrow way, lest you should not hold out to the end? But God would take the last excuse from you. He has committed your rescue to a condescending, sympathizing Re

deemer, who will be ever with you, mighty to save. "A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench." (Ver. 3.)

"Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him."-Proverbs xxvii. 22.

A FOOL is unteachable. You may by pounding and rubbing wheat in a mortar divest it of its husk or hull, but no amount of chastisement will impart wisdom to a person who is destitute of common

sense.

The text is probably intended to represent the stubbornness of men in clinging to error and sin. The wicked are in the Bible compared to fools, and are often called such, because they act so unreasonably in their relation to God and their spiritual interests. Men are proud and selfish in their opinions. We often come in contact with persons who have adopted false theories either in politics, science, or religion. They have started upon false premises, and founded their belief upon uncertain evidence, and, having established their conclusions, no arguments, and no amount of evidence will avail to convince them of their error. Some men will cling to the wrong, even, when they see and know the right. Through bigotry, or pride of opinion, they will not embrace the truth; so their folly will not depart from them.

Then there are men who have very ill tempers and deep-seated prejudices, and if they get their tempers roused toward others through some fancied wrong or real ill-usage, their minds ever afterwards continue turbulent toward the offenders. The spirit of forgiveness does not control them.

All men are sinners, and are naturally stubborn in their rebellion against God, and if they permit sin to work out its legitimate results in a confirmed and consolidated sinful character, repentance becomes morally impossible. Consider how few, in comparison with the great mass of men, ever turn from their sins unto God; while the great majority of those who do repent are converted early in life, and a sinful character is yet in a measure unconfirmed. Not more than one in a thousand of those who neglect to secure the salvation of their souls in youth, is converted in old age.

Again: consider the great strength of the motives and instrumentalities which are brought to bear upon sinners to lead them to repentance, and which are resisted by them. The glories of heaven and the fires of hell are set before them; the love of God as manifested in

the atonement, the influences of the Holy Spirit, the church, and ordinances of God's house, all seem to have no effect upon them. God's providential dealings with them, also, fail to lead them to bow to Him. They are brayed among the wheat in the mortar of God's afflicting providence, but while the righteous are sanctified the wicked are hardened. Their foolishness will not depart from them. "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death;" and so when the confirmed sinner goes into eternity, the fires of hell will have no tendency to purify him. He will be stubborn still, growing harder and more awfully wicked as his misery increases.

There is, then, a fearful risk in delaying the work of repentance, even for a day; for as persons advance from childhood to age, the power of sin over the character increases, so that, "his own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins."

ARTICLE X.

LITERARY NOTICES.

The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California, &c., &c. By RICHARD F. BURTON. New York: Harpers. 8vo. pp. 574. 1862.

FROM Mecca to Mormondom is certainly not the most unnatural of transitions and we can hardly say that our lively and enterprising traveller has produced a less entertaining book out of the material of his explorations among western imposture, than he gave us a few years ago, from amidst the memorials of the great prophet of Islam. Mr. Burton is a thorough cosmopolite. He catches the profile of things about him with a ready eye; takes the wear and tear of travel with an unaffected nonchalance; makes the most of his situations, sometimes (we fancy) painting his sketches a little beyond the real life; is rather given to the bad habit of an ostentatious indifference to questions of moral and religious weight; in a word, possesses most of the good, with not a few of the decidedly evil, traits of a continual wanderer up and down in the earth. In this book, the last-named feature of his mind comes out strongly. He is very lenient to the "peculiar institution" of the Latter Day Saints. He does not, of

course, defend it. But then, it seems not particularly to disturb any conscientiousness in the Captain's bosom that a man should have a half dozen wives, more or less. It is merely a matter of taste to be settled on the "nil disputandum" dictum. Doubtless in part it is; but something beyond this, also, as a Christian man and woman might reasonably think. Our Englishman, however, appears to have no special regard for New Testament views. He repudiates fanaticism; and this with him is to regard any one system of religious opinions and practices as substantially better than another. He undoubtedly found himself very comfortable among the easy ways of Deseret, albeit that is the stronghold of a fanaticism which more mercilessly consigns the outside Gentiles to perdition than either of its old-world hierarchical cousins.

With other

This volume is replete with valuable information. easily accessible works on the subject, it presents the singular community of which it treats as gradually growing into a large, and as we must think, a formidable excrescence, upon our body politic. Of the 200,000 Mormons, or, possibly, 250,000, scattered over the world, some 100,000, in round numbers, may be set down to the territory which they have selected for their chosen land. It is difficult to get at the exact census, as they are given to multiplying unduly in this matter of population. The Great Salt Lake city is the representative and exponent of their civil and spiritual polity. It is built between the Utah Lake, whose waters are sweet and wholesome, and the Great Salt Lake to the south. Curiously enough, these sheets of water are connected by a river about as long as the Jordan, thus giving a close geographical counterpart of the physical features of central Palestine, from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. The Salt Lake of Deseret is like that which flows above Sodom in the quality of its lifeless and dense contents; but this has islands, while that of the older history has none. To the north, also, of the Mormon Gennesaret, as in the other vicinity, warm springs bring the comparison yet nearer in its salient points. Here, then, the sacred city of the Saints has found its local habitation. Its topography is apocalyptical its length, and breadth, and sides, are equal. Inside the outer limits, smaller squares of forty rods, or ten acres, are divided by streets eight rods wide, with twenty feet sidewalks. These spaces are princely. So, too, every dwelling must leave twenty feet of front ground between it and the sidewalk. House-lots are an acre and a fourth in size, or double this if the purchaser pleases. Public parks occur at intervals. The Jordan which flows down from the upper lake supplies the city with abundance of good water, and carries its sewerage off into the Salt

Sea, twelve miles below. All this external roominess and cleanliness is most commendable. Pity that it should contrast so violently with the type of civilization to which it supplies a home.

The whole of their territory is not far from six hundred miles in length by three hundred in breadth. It is dotted over with nominal towns and cities, but can scarcely be called settled beyond its main centre. The soil and climate are not desirable. It is a land of mountains and high valleys, with no large streams, but many lakes that are of little use. The weather is hot in summer and cold in winter. It is subject to drought, snow, dust, lightning, locusts, grasshoppers and early frosts. Forty-nine fiftieths of the land is unfit for tillage. Minerals of the coarser sort abound, but wood, of the harder kinds, is very scarce. A sportsman would find game enough, clean and unclean, on land and water. It is a country for cattle. Perhaps its owners like it well enough to stay; but since reading these pages we have not so much wondered at the recent hints of a Sandwich Island migration of this not as yet very stationary people.

The morals of Mormondom is as vexed a question as ever. Our traveller saw little to justify the statements of flagrant viciousness so often charged to its account, always excepting the legalized sensuality of the realm. Brigham Young is portrayed as abstemious in his habits, temperate, even to tobacco, and generally self-controlled. The police regulations are stringent against unchastity, gambling, and their concomitants; yet illegitimate offspring have equal rights of inheritance with others, a convenient arrangement for a large number of prospective expectants, if our national laws shall ever be enforced over that population. Slavery is tolerated, but restricted. The slavewoman obtains her freedom if used as a mistress. The actual number of slaves in Utah is scarcely a half hundred. Mormonism evidently does not want them much in this world, and in its heaven it has no place for them at all. It seems to think the soul of the negro as black as his body.

This mongrel ecclesiasticism does not encourage nor suppress education. It has but a limited literature, revolving in a narrow circle around its religious oracle; maintains a couple of newspapers under an easy censorship; and is trying to put the science of orthography into phonetics. A half dozen large sounding Institutes for the teaching of universal knowledge have an existence on paper, but other foundation than this they have not yet secured.

Is Mormonism a permanent addition to the so-called religious systems of the world? It certainly has not yet begun to show symptoms of disintegration and dissolution. Why should it not live as long as its