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Show Page 209 CHAPTER IX THE APPEARANCE OF FIRE Looking over the Mormon kingdom upon his return in the fall of 1854, Orson Pratt could see the beginnings of flowers in the dust. The city, perched on its gravel plateau, now counted its inhabitants in the thousands, and Orson could number among them hundreds he himself had dispatched, and even helped to convert, from Britain. His tracts had brought into the Church a number of intellectual men bred in the hardy discipline of English schools - men like the writer Edward Tullidge, and the scholarly Elias L.T. Harrison, who would later become a firebrand of apostasy. Among his own people, Orson was the polymath of the Church, Mormonism's official "apologist," against whose authority the feeble sophistries of sectarianism evaporated. And after the harrowing passage of the summer, Orson could once again dream of the academy in the wilderness, the great "school of progress" which would be built up here. His October addresses in the tabernacle dwelt on "The increased powers and faculties of the mind in a future state"..."On Language, or the medium of communication in the future state and on the increased powers of locomotion...." "What is the body compared with the mind?" he asks, "Just nothing at all comparatively speaking," he answered himself, proposing that the system of arbitrary sounds and symbols we call language would, in the eternities, give way to the "process and power" of the Holy Ghost. Orson set himself immediately to teaching, writing, and promoting educational interests throughout the territory. A re-elected member of the legislative "Council of Fifty," he spent the month of December in committee |