Democrat And Sentinel

Mormonism and its Leaders.

It is well known that Joe Smith, the founder of Mormonism, resided for many years in the village of Palmyra, N. Y. The Buffalo Commercial says that Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball are also both New Yorkers. Brigham lived near the line dividing Ontario and Monroe counties, in the town of Victor, at the time he became a Mormon. He had always manifested a proclivity to religious fanaticism, or rather he was a lazy rapscallion, good for nothing except to howl at a camp meeting. He lived in a log shanty, with a dilapidated, patient, suffering wife, surrounded by a host of tow-headed children. Occasionally he made up a lot of axe-helves, and traded them off for sugar and tea; in other fits of industry he would do a day's work in the hay field for a neighbor, hoe the potatoes in his own little patch, or pound clothes for his wife on a washing day.

But his special mission was to go to camp-meetings and revivals, where he managed to get his daily bread out of the more wealthy brethren, in consideration of the unction with which he shouted 'ga lo-rab!' On such occasions Brigham took no thought of the morrow, but cheerfully putting on his old wool hat, he would leave his family without flour in the barrel, or wood at the door, and telling his wife that the 'Lord would provide,' he would put off for a week's absence. Poor Mrs. Brigham managed along by borrowing from her neighbors, with small hope of repaying, chopped the wood herself, and with an old sun-bonnet--Navarino style--went to the spring after water, thoroughly convinced that her lot was not of the easiest.

Brigham was just the man for the religion, and the religion seemed expressly adapted to him. He became an exhorter, held neighborhood meetings, ranted and bowled his doctrines into the minds of others as weak as himself, and finally went West with the rest of them; where he has developed his powers until the poor miserable rustic loafer is Governor of a Territory, and chief prophet of a great religious sect. He has just the mixture of shrewdness and folly which is required for success in fanaticism or quackery. A wiser man could not hold his place. A man must be a half fool and half knave to be a successful quack.

Heber C. Kimball was a man of more respectability. He was born a fanatic, and if he were not a Mormon he would be something else just like it. In his church--he was a Baptist originally--he was one of those pestilential fellows who want resolutions passed at church meetings withholding fellowship from somebody else, and insist upon having a political codicil added to the Bible. We believe he had some property. He has much more talent than Brigham Young, but is inferior to him in the elements of quackery. He has very respectable relatives now living in the part of Monroe county, from which he started.

It would seem from the foregoing that the three counties of Wayne, Ontario and Monroe, which join each other, contributed the four men who have been the most prominent and successful Mormon leaders--Smith, Young, Kimball and Phelps.