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Show Page221 light waves were thought to move. Though the other tracts of 1856 were orthodox enough, if not even a little narrow, this sprightly proposition was to haunt Orson at home. Even during the composition of this worrisome piece, Orson was under attack by the firebrand assistant Prophet, President Jedediah M. Grant, in the Tabernacle. He accused Orson in a fiery speech of "lariatting out the Gods in his theory; his circle is as far as the string extends. 24 My God is not lariatted out." Grant's campaign against what he saw as Orson's dilettantish theories helped spark "a great Reformation" among the Saints in Utah. That autumn, bad news had come from Washington - Congress had forbidden the contracting of plural marriages in any of the territories of the United States, and no one knew quite what to expect from the incoming Democratic administration of President James Buchanan. As it turned out, they could expect the worst. The Mormons girded up with a new austerity, and apostles were dispatched to brand the Saints with hot moral irons, to re-baptize the whole Church and burn out any creeping evils in the community of Zion. Franklin D. Richards wrote to Orson and enjoined him to spread the 25 "spirit of Reformation" in England, to armor up the huge shiploads of incoming converts with a taste of desert fire so that they would not be lax and troublesome on their arrival. Orson was glad to hear of the Reformation,26 not imagining that he was one of its targets, but in Victorian England such Mosaic conflagrations seemed far distant indeed, and Orson was already pre-occupied with distilling the rudeness of Mormon rhetoric into effective and rational argumentation. He wrote to his teenaged bride Juliaet (as he called her), to develop an interest in things 27 of the mind, to go to school, and to write him more often. And in trying to get hundreds of thousands of his tracts onto the streets, he |