CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. ix INTRODUCTION. ON THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. THE course of my travels having led me, a few years since, into a sort of proximity to the Mormons, I could not resist the temptation of making a push for the country of this singular people, in which I expected to find myself face to face with a religion at the very moment of its birth, and to surprise one of the great secrets of Nature, as it were, on the spot. A religious creed suddenly jetting forth in the midst of a great society, and appearing above the horizon like a new isle on the bosom of the ocean, seemed to me to be a sufficient reason for giving oneself a little trouble, and deviating from the direct track of one's journey. To deny myself the pleasure of such a spectacle was more than I was capable of; or, to express myself more accurately, I should have thought it wrong to do so, the opportunity being present, and there being scarcely more than a thousand miles of desert to cross. Had I been called upon b VOL I. to justify to my own mind the interruption which such a journey must cause to my pursuits as a naturalist,—not much of an interruption, after all,—I should doubtless have pleaded that it could be hardly time lost to examine on the very spot of its appearance, a phenomenon rare in any age, and especially rare in our own. Certain is it that had I heard in California, where I then was, of the appearance of a new island in the Pacific Ocean, I should not have hesitated to have altered my course for the purpose of seeing it. Why then should I do less with respect to Mormonism? Why should the moral be less attractive than the geological phenomenon? But what still more attracted me, independently of the spectacle itself, was, that the phenomenon in question seemed to me to have a character completely special, and to bear no resemblance to any other among the phenomena of the same class recorded in history. It presented itself to me not as a variety merely, but as a curiosity of species, a rarity if not an anomaly; like to certain plants I had met with at the Equator: as the Rhizophora, (for instance,) whose seeds germinate in its fruit, and exhibit complete individuals, perfectly formed, at the moment when they detach themselves from the parent plant and fall to the ground. Seen at a distance, it struck me, after what I had heard and known of Mormonism, that there might be some difficulty in classifying it; and yet I felt a strong objection to regard it as an anomaly; for if monstrosities displease us in the physical world, they are still more revolting in the moral world. I wished to put myself quite at ease with regard to this singular phenomenon, this moral Rhizophora, if I may so express myself, which, first brought into existence in those regions where the Niagara sends forth its eternal thunders, ought, it appears to me, to have perished in its germ on the very spot of its birth; but which, on the contrary, had, in the desert to which it was transplanted, grown, developed, and overspread with its branches an already powerful society. I desired to ascertain in a positive way, as an eye-witness, if the religion of Joseph Smith were really a novelty, or if ignorance or passion had deceived itself, or had deceived the public with respect to it. The founder of Mormonism, was he, as generally asserted, an impostor? This, when tested by the idea I had formed to myself of the genesis of religions, appeared to me to present a difficulty; and I felt anxious, were there really a divergence from what up to this moment I considered a general law, to verify the deviation. I. All religions, whatever may be the opinion we entertain of their intrinsic truth, are the spontaneous products of the human soul. They respond to primitive instincts, to powerful wants impossible to ignore. There is not a human creature who does not carry their germs in the depths of his reason, his imagination, and his heart; for there is |