HOW TO MAKE A MEILICLE.
IT is Gil Bias, we think, who says that the way to establish the reputation for being a wit is, unscrupulously to say everything that comes into your head. The way to make miracles, it seems, is to keep an eye upon all accidents, to seize the lucky ones, and claim them as your own manufaPture. Thus the Mormons sat in conference at Newport in Wales; the "elders," with their bless- ing, threw out hints that probably a proof might be given of their miracle-working power,—a standing hint, we believe on most oc- casions, recorded in case of opportunity; a large part of the roof falls in, no one is much hurt, no " believer " is hurt at all, the roof over the elders holds good to the last; and that is the miracle. The greater miracle is, that the people believe in the miracle. The ill construction of the building the laws of chance, all such considerations, are irrelevant: the Mormons know how to believe, and they do it thoroughly.
This Mormon mission, however, which gathers to itself such large numbers—which can carry them across the sea, and send them to bury themselves in the desert—which has erected out of such materials as the Newport Conference a substantive State of the great American Republic, is assuredly a "great fact." We may "account for" it by the ignorance of the people, and by the insatiable appetite for satisfaction of the religious instincts ; but such kind of accounting only conveys a censure on other portions of society. It is true that the Mormons are ignorant; for soi- disant propagators of the truth are resolved that education shall not be placed within reach of the people until they can agree upon the most abstruse of questions, in order that such national conclu- sions may accompany national instruction in the rudiments of gram- mar, history, and geography. The poor Welsh are not to be taught the geography of the far West, nor the history of John of Leyden and other fanatic impostors, until sects can agree with the Church of England : the poor Welsh therefore are available as disciples of Joe Smith, and they set off for the Great Salt Lake in the State of Deseret.
The people, however ignorant in book learning, feel the instinct of religion move within them, and they desire to be told of the Divine power, of which they are conscious through all their igno- rance : but they are left to the ravings of "elders," ignorant, knavish, or crazed ; while the men specially educated and specially appointed to tell them of the Divine power, daily acquiring from science new lights to speak of that power as it is displayed in the wondrous mastery of the Universe, waste their time in bickering about baffling abstrusenesses, or in expounding dogmatic niceties, that tell nothing which the yearning mind of ignorance can re- ceive. The existence of the Mormons is one opprobrium of the National Church.
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