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Show MAY BE ERADICATED. 201 regard for the rights of individuals, rigidly required by United States civil officers, with a military force to compel respect, would secure this. Brigham Young may be defiant now, but when he finds his people emerging from their pres ent moral and political darkness, and contending only for such rights and privileges as conform to the genius of our institutions, and he sees the Government determined to pro tect them in these rights, his influence wilJ have waned. He then cannot cry " persecution and intolerance," as he has so often done, for it will be manifest to the people that the Government is protecting therrffrom the persecution and intolerance of a most intolerant leader. The time for the Church so take her stand and make use of these aids, is now fast approaching. The completion of the Pacific Railroad will usher in the fullness of that time. If she fails to improve it, the responsibility for a continuance of the present state of society in Utah, and perhaps of strife and bloodshed that may follow, will to some extent at least rest upon her. Such opportunities as the present are not often presented. I believe that nowhere will more willing converts to true Christianity be found than among the more sincere of the Mormons ; and their en lightenment is more especially desirable because of their aggressive work in error. They are in this respect different from any other people among whom missionaries are sent to labor. Their errors are not only inculcated upon their children^ and the sect increased by the multiplication of the people among themselves by natural laws, but hundreds and thousands are being led into error and added to their num ber every year, and numbers of women hopelessly degraded by their practice of polygamy. A minister in a prominent church in Washington once remarked in a missionary sermon to his congregation that the missionaries of " our rougher brethren," the Methodists, are as the frontiersmen who cut down the forests, while they followed on to grub out the stumps and cultivate the fields ; and again, he compared the former to the reapers in the field, while the more refined followed on, and gathered IO |