| 643 never saw before, in extent as well as in clearness of visions. We are almost ready to persuade ourselves the experience of the past is of little value to us; that the change of circumstances is so great, that what was wisdom once is no longer such;" that the political or religious systems which we now rear on the ruins of the old ones, must ever endure as the monuments of superior wisdom. Gibbon informs us that it was while viewing the ruins of ancient Rome, that he first formed the idea of that gigantic work, to which he devoted so large a portion of his life; a work replete with instruction from the dead in our dangers and our duties he thought that history was philosophy teaching by example: and indeed it is so.
We may gaze with speechless admiration upon the monuments which fallen nations have left of their glory, on the Ionic elegance of the temples of Apollo at Miletus, and Diana at Ephesus, the Doric grandeur and sublimity of the temple of Theseus at Athens, what are these confessed standards of excellence in the fine arts, compared with the price at which they were purchased-the price of liberty?-Where are Athens and Rome? These once glorious republics have become blended with the chaos of the past; they live only in our memories; their downfall may be traced to their departure from those virtues which were the foundation stones of their strength. Who will look for one moment at modern Rome, where he may see the ruins even of the ancient city? What is true of nations is equally true of the people of God, if they depart from his counsels, their destruction is sure, and God leaves them to rear their own systems upon a heterogeneous mass of error and truth, which they vainly suppose are decided improvements of his plan of salvation, and must eventually supersede it. But who I ask, that is not thoroughly imbued with the common spirit of ultraism and innovation, will regard for a moment, the religious systems of man, when he may behold in all its native simplicity and dignity, the plan of salvation as devised by Almighty God?
Like the early christians, the Latter Day Saints are charged by the priests of the day, with being innovators, a charge which they indignantly disdain, and which is truly farsical [farcical], considering the source from whence it emanates; from those miserably flimsy pretenders to christianity, who wield an influence decidedly inimical to her extension, and indeed hostile to her very existence, for while the avowed infidel attempts openly, but fruitlessly, to sap he [the] foundation upon which rests Christ's Church. These with the more specious appearance of friendship and zeal for her doctrines, wage war not merely with her enemies, but covertly with christianity herself. These pseudo friends in the persons of ministers and church members, have taken her under their insidious protection, only to dishonor her at their leisure, and use what advantages they have acquired by faithless and hollow professions, to give an air of probability to the plausible mischiefs which they have prepared against her, and to plunder her by stealth of some of her fairest distinctions, so that we are wholly unable to recognize her in the painted, patched, and disfigured garb in which they have arrayed her.
It was once said by Talleyrand, of a celebrated physician, that he knew a little of everything, even of medicine. But it may not be said of these persons, with all their professions, that they have embraced even the first principles of the doctrine of Christ. I write with warmth but with no roots of bitterness in my heart; I write with the solemn conviction of my responsibility as one who has embraced the truth in the love of it, and in view of the august tribunal before which all men must one day appear. Oh! that God would inspire me with wisdom from on high, to present truth in such plainness that some wayward wanderer in the wilds of error may fall in love with her who is coming out of the wilderness, leaning on the arm of her beloved. Any person but tolerably conversant with the annals of history, must know that there is no principle which is so directly opposed to the tastes and views of the formalist or profligate, as revelation from God; a principle which God's people have always held, and for which martyrs have died in every age-a principle (this fact none dare dispute) which has always distinguished the people of God in the days of their obedience and prosperity. When men have rejected revelation, and hewn out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, which can hold no water; then it is that God has left them in their flagrant wickedness, to all the distraction of division and uncertainty, to the worse than Cimmerian darkness of an enslaved mind-Thus it was with the Jews; they killed the prophets which were among them, and God left them to their own ways: and immediately they divided into different sects. Herodians, Pharisees, Saducees, Samaritans, and others, just like the sects of the present day, without any bond of union, all of them utterly destitute of a knowledge of God; their natural inclinations and blindness led them to place
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