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Show Page 165 more decades), and even for "a museum for specimens of the works of nature and art" at Great Salt Lake City.11 He scoured the craftshops of Liverpool for all the stuff of a civilization that was to be built from the bottom up ~ tools for clockmaking, engineering, copying, crockery for households on the desert, knives and forks, "white handles would be preferred, and 12 half a gross of pocket tweezers." With all the urgency of the gathering - Orson calculated it would take three hundred ships to move the British Saints to Zion - he still had to deal with Babylon and with calling as many out as would come. His main voice was the Millennial Star, the little periodical inaugurated by Parley nearly ten years before. It had a big circulation, and the Mormons drank in every word; Orson took over this organi with all the energy of a pent-up evangelist, and announced the Star office would also be printing a series of pamphlets on first principles, a definitive theological statement of Mormonism, to be dumped in the laps of the stagnant orthodox of Britain. He was as good as his word. On September 30, the manuscript of Orson's first installment was delivered to the South Castle Street printing house of Mr. R. James. Entitled Divine Authority, an edition of ten thousand went out to be circulated through the missionary system, attacking the foundations of the priestly arrogance of Anglicanism. Subtitled "Was Joseph Smith Sent of God?", Orson's tract was designed to "cut asunder the deeply-rooted prejudices, the iron-bound sinews of ancient error and tradition, 13 made sacred by age and rendered popular by human wisdom." Well aware of the iconoclastic nature of Mormon claims, Orson presented in his usual "practicum" voice, a series of numbered arguments, the first in a long series of forensic-style treatises designed to establish as much by a tone of sweet reasonableness as by direct persuasion the authenticity of his -»•"-. nriosthood. |