OCR Text |
Show Page 182 The "Gauge of Philosophy" had not intended to leave England without publishing a fully developed rationale for Mormon claims - not so long as he had exclusive editorship of the Star and unlimited opportunities for disseminating his ideas through the rag-tag missionaries flung across Britain. Now he was back. In the closing months of the year 1850, Orson Pratt flooded the Isles with new writings, pouring out page after page of numbered theological arguments. His style was stripped for debate, at times charged with a certain venomous delight in turning the tables on his interlocutors, but generally spare and rational in tone. The autumn saw publication of six tracts grouped under the heading Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon - although the tracts dealt chiefly with the indispensable nature of "new revelation" in general. He finds it inconceivable that the Christian churches denied even the possibility of revelation: "But we ask, what do modern Christendom know about God? They have not heard his voice, nor received a revelation from him...for the last seventeen centuries." Orson s incredulity is aroused over the Protestant maxim that in the person of Christ we find the ultimate revelation, the incarnation of God himself. Therefore, goes the reasoning, no additional "messages" from heaven need appear - all is revealed in Christ. For Orson Pratt, this is a terminological dodge. It violates reason to suppose that Christ's church should be cut off from receiving additional instruction, as though every spiritual principle had been defined beyond question "unto the perfecting of the Saints." Pratt denies this, pointing at the "whole of Christendom quarreling about (the) 3 true meaning (of the scriptures)." He declares the Bible, his pungent sarcasm aimed at its sectarian interpreters, to be "an insufficient guide" not because it is inherently false, but because it has been stripped |