The Sun.
London, England, 1867-01-24 00:00:00

Holy Land." Passing over, as he does, thus in-
stantly, so to speak, from Palestine to " New
America"—it is for all the world like taking the

one step from the Sublime to the Ridiculous. And

here we cannot but take exception, without one
instant's further delay, to a remark thrown out by

Mr. Dixon upon the very first page of his brief
and manly Preface, a remark involving as it ap-
pears to us an almost painfully flagrant non

sequitur—that is, if we are inclined to judge of any-
thiug whatever by its results or consequences—

and Heaven and Earth know we have been told

by Divine lips to judge of a tree by its fruits! The
observation we are here alluding to is one to the
effect that thc_planting of the Free States of Arnericl
is referrable originally to the influence or incentive

of two great passions, " a large love of Liberty and
a deep sense of Religion." If the former, then it
has run into License. If the latter, then it has lapsed

nto extravagances worse often in their way than

what is ordinarily meant by Irreligion. As to the
latter branch of this same bifurcating non sequitur,

has not Mr. Dixon himself supplied us with abun-

dant evidence of the fact we would hero more

especially insist upon ? N amely, that the Christi-
anity carried across the Atlantic by the Pilgrim
Fathers, and there planted by them in America, has
been transformed and disfigured, has been de-
graded and polluted by every conceivable abjec-
tion, by every imaginable distortion, nay, we have
no other word for it, by all kinds of abominations.

Insomuch that, under all their scarcely calcul-
able forms and cognomen; under all their eccen-
tric phases and fantastic designations, if they can

be said to present to us any view at all of
Christianity, it is of Christianity Caricatured !
Muggletonians and Southcottians are simply
nothing to them—are just mild and rational
by comparison: The raving madness of Revi-

valism represents no more than the chronic con-

dition of many among these transatlantic Reli-
gionists. Jumpers and Shakers rival in the midst
of them the Dancing Dervishes of the East—
whirling and humming themselves into a delirious

vertigo. Any one, in fast, who is familiar (and

who is not ?)with Southey's rhythmical celebration
of the Cataract of Lodore might readily enough
travestie that famous clatter of rhymes by a simple

enumeration, thus, of—

The Ranters and Jumpers,
Revivalist Lumpers,
The Quakers and Shakers
And other Saint-Makers,
The Bawlers, the Drawlers,
The Psalm and Hymn Spa Hers,
Anabaptists and Arians,
And Predestinarians, •
Moravians, Arminians,
Ghost-rapping Socinians—
with countless other sects, some among them hardly

admitting of denomination sects that have
streamed in a fast-multiplying concourse along the

mighty river-shores and across the gigantic wastes

of v the rolling prairies of America, not so much
like any Old-World cataract of Lodore or Tivoli, as
like the New World's own peerless and stupendous

Niagara. Whether it be that the latent irony of Mr.
Dixon's descriptions of the more exceptionally eccen-
tric among these American Religionists be so subtle
of its kind as to have altogether escaped our recog-

nition, or whatever else may be the cause of it, he
appears to us to write about the Mormons in one

instance, in another about the Shakers, and so forth,
as if he had a secret leniency or tenderness for
them, as if he regarded them, as one might say,
with a kind of a left-handed respect for their
astounding Creeds and their still more astounding
Institutions. So comprehensive is his humanity—
we honestly take this to be the meaning of it—so
all-embracing are his principles as a philanthropist,
that he describes men like Brigham Young, the
Prophet of the Mormons, the Patriarchal Despot of
the Salt Lake City of Utah, the irresponsible ruler
of that vast polygamous herd of human animals,
upholding by their credulity the system now-
adays notorious by the name of Mormonism— he
describes, we say, men like Brigham Young, frankly,
philosoph;cally, exactly as they are, exactly as he
sees them, and without introducing one faintest
touch of ridicule into his clearly-drawn, sharply-
defined, and most truthful portraiture. Take, in
evidence of this, his sketch of Brigham Young—a
sketch dashed off manifestly to the very life :
We saw Brigham Young for the first time in his pri-
vate box. A large head, broad, fair face, with blue eyes,
light brown hair, good nose, and merry mouth ; a man,
plainly dressed ; in black coat and pantaloons ;
white waistcoat and cravat ; gold studs and
sleeve-links, English in build and looks—but Eng-
lish of the middle class and of a provincial town ;
such was the Mormon prophet, pope, and king, as we first
saw him in the theatre among his people. A lady, one of
his wives, whom we afterwards came to know as Amelia,

sat with him in the box ; she, too, was dressed in a quiet
English style ; and now and then she eyed the audience
from behind her curtain, through an opera-glass, as Eng-
lish ladies are apt to do at home. She was pretty, and

appeared to us then rather pensive and poetical. The pit
was almost filled with girls; on many benches sat a dozen
damsels in a row; children of Kimball, Cannon, Smith,
and Wells ; in some places twenty or thirty girls were
grouped together. Young, as he told me himself, has
forty-eight living children, some of whom are grown up
and married; and, since he sets the fashion of attending

this theatre among his people, it is only right that he
shoiild encourage his children to appear both before the
foot-lights and behind them.
Forty-eight children born from various wives to
this exemplary Prophet, whose harem numbers up,
by the way, a round dozen ! From the inspired lips
of this human ram there have fallen, by the way,
among other words of wisdom reported by Mr.
Dixon, and reported by him to all appearance quite
seriously, at any rate not by any means sarcasti-
cally, the following
Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ " (Mr.
Dixon reports Brigham Young to have said as the sum
and substance of what is at any rate an eminently
terse and practical sermon) "you have been chosen
from the world by God, and sent through His
grace into this valley of the moutains, to help in
building up His kingdom. You aro faint and weary
from your march. Rest, then, for a day, for a second day,
should you need it ; then rise up, and see how you will live.
Don't bother yourself about your religious duties ; you have
been chosen
.for this work, and God will take care of you
in it. Be of good cheer. Look about this valley into which
you have been called. Your first duty is to learn how to
grow a cabbage, and along with this cabbage an onion, a
tomato, a sweet potato ; then how to feed a pig, to build a
house, to plant a garden, to rear cattle, and to bake bread ;
in one word, your first duty is to live. The next duty—
for those who, being Danes, French, and Swiss, cannot
speak it now—is to learn English; the language of God,
the language of the Book of Mormon, the language of these
Latter Days. These things you must do first ; the rest
will be added to you in proper seasons. God bless you ;
and the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. "
The drivel of the Mormon Scriptures, the preposter-
ous chronicles of the Lamanites and Nephites—put
forth in the name of the Prophet (not Figs but)
Smith !—the sheer carnal animalism of the belief
and practice of the Mormon Initiated, the taking to
wife by them of any number of pretty girls they may
please to select for that privilege, their caring first
of all for food and raiment and procreating, for eat-
ing and drinking and so forth betimes and ad libitum
(to all appearance simply because of the considera-
tion that to-morrow they die)—for none of these
things, has the keen-witted and manfully outspeak-
ing author of " New America," one syllable of
derision or of indignant denouncement. His
equanimity, his perfect self-possession as the
narrator of these wanderings and observations of
his among the sectarians of New America, among
the upholders of Mormonism especially, fairly
bewilder us. They fill us, that is to say, with
amazement at a self-command that we must frankly
acknowledge we ourselves must have proved
wholly incapable of under similar circumstances--
a self-command that would have been sufficiently
astounding, supposing we had had to regard Mr.
Dixon simply as the historian of such men as Penn,
and Howard, and Blake, and Bacon, but that abso-
lutely passes our comprehension when we bear (as wo
do) in very grateful remembrance his reverential
pilgrimage among the hallowed places of Palestine.
According to Mr. Dixon's account of the Leader
of the Mormons, Brigham Young sees no harm
whatever in a man marrying his sister.! Accord-
ing to the system in vogue, there, in New America,
among the Perfectionists, again, marriage is an
abolished institution Yet, instead:of speaking, as
we must acknowledge that we should inevitably
have been tempted to speak of Mormon or of
Perfectionist, as of " that incestuous and adulterous
beast"—words that Shakspere hesitates not to put

into the mouth of a Prince, and of a Prince, to

who is both by temperament and by intellect a Philo-
sopher—Mormons and Shakers, Perfectionists and
Spiritualists, Promoters and Practisers of Revi-

valism, with countless other descriptions of so-called

Christians clean gone mad—are depicted,here in these
wonderfully truth-telling pages with the utmost

possible precision, distinctne s, and accuracy in
the drawing of every bold outline, of every delicate

. _
shade, of every minutest speck in their portraitures•

For the trathfulcalinuess with which all this is done,

we cannot but have, of course, as we have, the
very highest admiration. Bewildered we are, as we
have said, as to how Mr. Dixon has contrived to
write thus dispassionately. But, however, he

has contrived it, he has thus written, and those
who consult his book are in consequence clearly
the gainers. Nor is it any diminution to the diffi-
culty of his achievement, but absolutely the reverse,
being in fact an enormous enhancement of that diffi-
culty, that while scanning New America with his clear
bright eyes, while scrutinising calmly and observ-

_
_ .
aatly the Mormons, and the Shakers, and all the
restof them, while descanting thus about them, as we
have said, quite dispassionately, without once evi-
dencing in their regard one solitary arriere
pensee of prejudice, our author writes throughout
with a sort of abandon of vivacious ease, currents

calamo, helter-skelter almost, and always without any
abatement, certainly without any deliberate repres-
sion of what is among his most conspicuous cha-
racteristics as an observer of men and things—to
wit, an exquisite sense of the humorous. Mormon-
ism, he thus delineates—

"Fully to comprehend these saints (he says), you must
Look beyond the beauty of their city, the prosperity of
their farms, the activity of their workshops, tho extent of

their villages, into the spiritual sources of their strength.
"Joseph taught his disciples a doctrine by no means now,
that in every religion there is a germ of good, and perhaps
a germ of evil ; and he proposed, by Divine assistance (and

;he aid of Rigdon, Young, and Pratt), to extract thq grain

of good out of every old creed and add to the church which
Ito was founding for his people. He took much from Maho -
mod, more from Paul, most of all from Abraham ; but in
his free handling of religious notions he had no scruple
about borrowing from the Hindoos, from the Tartars, from
the Mohawks. The doctrinal notes of his church may be
numbered and explained:

"1. God is a parson, with the form and flesh of man.
"2. Man is a part of the substance of God, and will him-
self become a god.
"3. Man was not created by God, but existed from all
eternity, and will exist to all eternity.
"4. Man is not born in sin, and is not accountable for
offences other than his own.

"5. The earth is a colony of embodied spirits, one cf
many such settlements in space.
" 6. God is president of the immortals, having under

Him four orders of beings-1. Gods—that is to say im-
mortal beings, possessed of a perfect organisation, of soul
and body ; being the final state of men who have lived on
earth in perfect obedience to the law. 2. Angels—im-
mortal beings who have lived on earth in imperfect obe-
dience to the law. 3. Men--immortal beings, in whom a
living soul is united with a human body. 4. Sprits
moral beings, still waiting to receive their tabernacle of
flesh.

" 7. Man, being one of the race of gods, becomes eligible,
by means of marriage, for a celestial throne; his household
of wives and children being his kingdom, not on earth only,
but in heaven.

" 8. The kingdom of God has been again founded on the
earth. The time has come for the saints to take possession
of their own ; but by virtue, not by violence; by industry,

not by force.

Entering the Mormon theatre at Salt Lake City he
looks around him and thus describes its appearance---
The pit rising sharply from the orchestra, so that every
one seated on its benches can see and hear to advantage, is
the choicest part of the house. All these benches are let
to families; and hore the principal elders and bishops may ,
be seen every play-night surrounded by their wives and
children, laughing and clapping like boys at a pantomime'
Yon rocking chair, in the centre of the pit, is Young's oivn
seat ; his place of pleasure, in the midst of his Saints.
When he ohooses to occupy his private box, one of his
_ _

- - _
wives, perhaps Eliza the Poetess, Harriet the Pale, or
Amelia the Magnificent, rocks herself in his chair while
laughing at the play. Round about that chair, as the place
of honour, cluster the benches of those who claim to stand

nearest to their prophet—of Hebor Kimball, first coun-
cillor ; of Daniel Wells, second councillor and general-
in-chief; of George A. Smith,tapostle and historian of the
church; of George Q. Cann,m, apostle; of Eiwo.rd
Hunter, presiding bishop ; of Elder Stenhouse, editor of
the " Daily Telegraph ;" and a host of less brilliant 31 or-
mon lights.

Manifestly taking Captain Cattle's advice, " when
found make note of"—wherever he goes, in his
rapid journeyings hither and thither about NO
America, Mr. Dixon jots down his facts, 1313
sketches, his reflections, just as they come to hull
drawing his portraits from the life catch-
ing the flitting shadows as they fly across the
glorious landscapeS. And as it was with hull
Eastwards in "The Holy Land," so it i 3 here
o
again with him Westwards in " New America.
The pencil with which he sketches thus front
Nature and from Life is comparable only, in its
way, in its magical capabilities, to that wonder-
ful bottle from which Monsieur Robert Houdin used

to pour out at any one's will and pleasure--chahl-
pagne, port, brandy, milk, tokay, coffee, bur-
gundy, or what you will. It is a pencil that, io
his hand, seems to have within it all the colour.
of the rainbow. They are no mere sepia draw
ings, these limnings of his of New America.
They glow upon the pages as we turn them. It
is a book the very letterpress of which is plot°.
rial. Insomuch that the engraved illustrations/
introduced here and there, as copied from original
photographs, seem t) U 3 almost like superfluitieS•
The portrait of Brigham Young, for example;
and the panoramic view of the New Jernsaleiu•
Altogether, the book is even beyond our high
expectations in regard to it. As a wonderfully
accurate and graphic record of travel, penned by
a Student of human Nature, endowed with largo
sympathies for his fellow-men of every clime,
and, we will add, especially of every Creed, the
work is one of more than ordinary value and ini-
portance. It has more than an ephemeral inte"
rest. As a truthful description of New America,
of America as it now reveals itself to us
ately after the clearing off of the tempest of the
Great Civil War, it is a work not only to be read
at this present moment with the liveliest intersst
but to be turned to repeatedly long afterwards rie
an authoritative and historical delineation of t
United States as they appeared to be immediately
after those States had been forcibly re-United.