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Show Page 59 Messenger and Advocate: "I commenced lifting a warning voice...exposing their religious systems by contrasting them with the system of the bible which not unfrequently produced no small stir, for the craftsmen, not of the great goddess Diana, but of great Babylon, brought no small gain unto themselves by making not silver shrines but religious systems by which...they could make merchandise of the people." 22 In other words, the responsibility for the perpetuation of a "mercantile church" lay with the clergy, the "craftsmen of great Babylon" with their sterile, gilded traditions. In the meantime, his nineteen-year-old bride waited for him as she would continue to wait in later years. Orson dropped in now and then in late August, but it was not until October that he acceded to the approaching winter, terminated his mission, and started with Sarah for Kirtland. The steamboat from Sackets Harbor took a little company of Saints to Fairport, thence to Kirtland, around the twelfth of October. The Pratts found Kirtland changing. Prosperity and the influx of new members of the Church had created a booming economy that reflected the optimism then prevalent throughout the Western Reserve. The completion of the Cleveland Canal and a concomitant flow of staples led to a tenfold increase in the wealth of the region between 1830 and 1836. Houses and commercial building drove Kirtland's land prices to a giddy $2,000 per acre. The city now boasted mills, a brickyard, a printing shop, a dozen factories in all, not to mention numerous little mercantiles that had 23 popped up in Orson's absence. The young apostle soon began "trading considerably" himself, as he went into the retail business, selling stoves and 24 ironware, and he and Sarah rented an upstairs room for a dollar a month. Business left Orson with some leisure for study, and he relished the |