| OCR Text |
Show Page 241 came to his house in the Nineteenth Ward to find him desperately pained by pleurisy; following a priesthood anointing, Orson felt much better, but soon fell ill again. He was eaten away inside by his own treacherous chemistry, which made him susceptible to bad infections. For a year, one whole wasted year, he lay abed, preaching faintly but twice in the tabernacle when winter came and he began slowly to improve. In the early months of 1864, Orson roused himself enough to participate in the evening lectures of the expanded free high school. Others had picked up the program and enlarged its scope, with Elias L. T. Harrison conducting lectures on "modern" writers, Edward Tullidge on "The Universality of Mormonism," T.B.H. Stenhouse on the New York press, 13 and now Orson once again on principles of electro-magnetism. His associates, all British converts originally swayed into Mormonism by Orson's pamphlets, formed a coterie of well-educated, promising men of affairs in the growing business community of Salt Lake. Harrison, who had served Orson as a district president in England, soon enlisted Tullidge and the others to write for a publication he envisioned. Designed as a general interest magazine, the Peep-o-Day served primarily as an outlet for Salt Lake intellectuals; though Orson never wrote for the short-lived periodical, he thought it delightful and rejoiced in the attention given serious scientific and philosophical issues in its pages. Another liberal-toned sheet came out bi-weekly in St. George under the editorship of one "Veritas," in real life Orson Pratt, Junior. In his late twenties, Orson had come home lukewarm from a mission; unlike his father, he could not reconcile the occasional un-Christian attitudes of his St. George neighbors with their pretensions to Saint-hood, and brought out a newspaper which he called "Veprecula." Its columns defiantly echoed Apostle Pratt's heterodox views, mixed with objections to what the young |
