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Source: Church History Vol. 3 Chapter 34 Page: 675 (~1872)

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675 officers, to the loss of spiritual prestige and power. We have been told, and we believe it to be partly true, that after a certain time, political partisanship ran to so sad an extreme, that one of the chief officers of the city was hemmed in by a cordon of office-seekers, and political spoliation appropriators, to the exclusion of good and true men who loved the cause of Zion, and were alarmed at the drifting tide of events. So officious and so zealous were these political hucksters, that it soon became a matter of difficulty for an honest, outspoken man to get the ear of the highest spiritual authority in the church, so closely were such men watched and their efforts forestalled. Such is the legitimate result in every society of modern times, when politics become a trade, and when political wire-workers obtain preferment in the church in the place of honest, religious-minded men; and we may well be pardoned if we see some traces of such state of affairs in the later years of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.

"It would have been difficult, when once the restraining influence of a spiritual life had relaxed, to take up the broken threads and knit them into so perfect and so strong a cord as it should have been originally; and for this reason, if for no other, the men upon whom the burden of the great spiritual work of the last days rested, should have held themselves aloof from active participation in political strife. It was not a crime to aspire to high political station in itself; but the influences by which preferment is obtained, and which too frequently accompany it, give rise to undue ambition, and are too easily prostituted from right uses to base and ignoble ends. We believe that when men lost sight of the dignity of the title of 'elder in the Church of Christ,' it was an error, and when this was followed by a love for political power to the lessening of the love for spiritual advancement, it was a graver error still.

"We class the cultivation of the spirit of war with the error spoken of above, but do not regard it as one of such dangerous character, from the fact that a real necessity for bloodshed might never have arisen after the year 1840, if right counsel had prevailed. We do

(page 675)

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