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Show Page 257 to resist, as Brigham made clear, the inroads of Gentile commerce. But the Main Street merchants balked. Conspiring under the progressive zeal of Elias L. T. Harrison, they announced a "new movement" which, they hoped,would galvanize Utah into rebellion against the dictates, both economic and spiritual, of Brigham Young. The "liberators," almost to a man converted in Britain under Orson Pratt's written influence, banded together as "the Church of Zion" late in 1869, inaugurating their church with an account of revelations received through spiritualist "mediums" they had consulted when visiting New York's wholesale warehouses. The group included Harrison, Edward Tullidge, T.B.H. Stenhouse, and, to Orson's alarm, his benefactors and friends Godbe and Watt. Their ideology mixed curiously elements of Mormonism - they had all seen Joseph Smith in a New York seance - with the liberal social gospels of the day: universalism and a smattering of spiritualism, then thought to be a sort of para-scientific substitute for religion. But their motivationg force was mostly in their pockets, for Z.C.M.I. and other cooperative church ventures had thinned out Godbe's clientele to a disturbing extent. The "new movers" were immediately dubbed "Godbeites," and Orson was in the fight from the first. Brigham Young rightly believed that they would listen to Orson Pratt more willingly than to other authorities; Woodruff and Cannon went with him, but Orson fasted and labored with his old friends in vain. They had appealed to Amasa Lyman, now growing old and addled on his farm near Fillmore, to come up and lead them against economic theocracy and the dictatorship of the priesthood; Lyman demurred at first, but joined them years later, never really taking an active part. Orson told them candidly that he thought they were fools: "No man, when he is commanded by the voice of the priesthood...(is) to be his own judge...That is not the way of Heaven...Now these spirits have taught (you) directly contrary to this." 45 |
