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Show CHAPTER XXXVII. THE DEAD PROPHET. WHILE the first edition of this work was going through the press, the telegraph announced the death of Brigham Young. To Americans generally this was simply a bit of interesting news, for this man was, in the language of Elijah Pogram, " one of the most remarkable men of our country." But what Gentile can realize the awful import of that message to the 75,000 orthodox Mormons of Utah ; to the 4,000 Saints in Great Britain ; to the converts in Scandinavia, and the " stakes of Zion" in Arizona, Idaho and the Sandwich Islands In 1870 there were, among European races, but three persons who were at once heads of Church and State : the Pope, Queen Victoria and Brigham Young. The British Church is not yet " disestablished," but the Pope has lost his temporal power and Brigham Young is dead. It was said, a few years since, anent the Beecher and Clendenning trials and similar cases, " This is a hard year for parsons." Similarly : This is certainly a bad period for theocrats. We may yet live to see the Church of England divorced from the civil power. I am no believer in that evasive maxim : De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Certainly not, when the dead are public characters. The dead were once alive, and moral responsibility is not evaded by the mere physical incident of death ; and living rulers must learn to act with the as-sured conviction that they will be judged after death. Of all, there-fore, which the foregoing pages contain regarding Brigham Young I have nothing to recant; it was my candid conviction when I wrote it it is my assured belief now. That it will be the unanimous ver-dict of posterity, I have not a shadow of doubt. It was not written without overwhelming evidence to support it ; revelations yet to be made in Utah, and hastened by Brigham's death, will only add to that evidence. I merely ask that the reader will, in previous chapters, substitute the past tense for the present where Brigham is mentioned. It only remains to add a few incidents in the life of this remarkable adventurer ; his person and character have been sufficiently described in Chapter VI. Brigham Young was born June 1, 1801, in Whittingham, Wind- ( 597) |