A LAND FOR NEW RELIGIONS.
A 1LELIGIOUS war is raging in the state of Illinois : not a secta- rian war such as for three centuries has been often witnessed in Europe, but a war by which a new religion is sought to be crushed. The founder of the Mormons laid claim to a new revelation : he was a kind of Mahomet in his way. His followers, like the be- lievers in Mr. Owen, founded a city—Nauvoo; but, unlike those Of Mr. Owen, they reared in it the temple of their new faith. Mormonism is, like Mahometism a political religion ; the faith gives form to the civil polity. The Mormons have had their martyrs, and now they have their armies. Under Mr. Bachenstos, a Sheriff appointed by the Government of Illinois, the Mormons have occupied and entrenched themselves in the towns of Car- thage and Warsaw ; they have fought a pitched battle, in which eighteen of their antagonists and three of their own number have been killed ; and they offer terms to the citizens, on which, if agreed to, they will evacuate the country. Mormonism, to judge of it by the writings which have reached this country, is a crude digest of doctrines and ceremonies from the Judaic and Christian Canon: its "Bible," " however, is not much more incoherent than the Koran, and much less so than the fragments from Egyptian my- thology that Homer picked up and retailed. The truth is, that the ravings of Johanna Southcote and the founder of Mormonism are not less intellectual than the oracles of the founders of many religions. The beautiful architecture and sculpture of the clas- sical nations—their poetry—blind us to the incoherence of the creed which still lingered in the popular belief of the ages which gave them birth, and were idealized or treated civilly by their authors. The accomplishments acquired by the Arabs when they came in contact with the Hellenized portion of the Roman empire, gave birth to a literature through which the inco- herencies of the Koran is viewed. New mythologies cannot spring up in old-settled and civilized countries : their incon- gruities are detected ; the sources whence they are pilfered are own ; they derive no adventitious beauty from connexion with a national literature ; their folly can be exposed without fear of giving umbrage to popular sensitiveness. But the back-woods of a new country, are full of energetic ignoramuses—men for whom the most disfigured copy of literary or artistical ideas possesses a charm—men who feel the want of a religion, have never been taught one, and have enjoyed no intellectual training to teach them to detect absurdities. The camp-meetings brought many close to the verge of that state of mind in which Py- thonesses and Thaumaturgi have been able to mould nations into believers ; and the Mormons have fairly plunged into it. In the back-woods of America religion-makers may still have a chance. But they must make haste, else the rapid progress of intercom- munication will forestal their market.
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