The freedom of the 19th century has been prolific of religious fads, fancies and monstrosities. The preceding centuries of superstition and despotism which dominated the human conscience and enforced conformity to human creeds were productive, on the one hand, of a dead formalism, and on the other of the miseries of persecution—all in the name of orthodoxy. Millions went to the dungeon and the stake for the testimony of Jesus Christ; but the horrors of religious sterility and tyranny were largely compensated by martyr zeal and spirituality constantly kindled by suppression. The reign of light and liberty which dawned in the Reformation of the 16th Century opened the world to the truth which might have a fair field upon which to combat error; and the great floodgate of evangelical Christianity has been lifted and the tide of salvation turned upon the nations of the earth. With this great boon and blessing, however, came a flood of evils, only not so bad as the former because bereft of the power to enforce their authority. Other forms of false religion have multiplied and been propagated by the very liberty won for conscience at the hands of evangelical Christianity. Satan, who once forged physical chains for the bodies of men, knows how to break the golden bands of enlightened freedom and turn loose the demons of licentious anarchy; and there never was a period in which religious and political freedom was so prostituted, or so greatly in danger of usurpation, by false ideals of Christianity, as the present. The demons of Spiritism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Adventism, Faith Cure, Holiness, Socialism and the like are everywhere posing in the name of Christ and Christianity; and there is nothing so false or so bad under the pretension of religion that it does not have a deluded following.

One form of these latter day developments, the worst of all, is Mormonism which, like a great Python, trails its slimy length over the vast regions of this and other countries. The title of the present volume has been rightly called: "The Mormon Monster." The religious system of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young is not only a stupendous humbug which ought to be patent to the most stupid, but it is a moral and spiritual enormity—a vicious departure from the true type of the Christian religion—an abnormal development and horrible deformity—which, though disguised in the very terms and titles of the gospel, ought to be abhorrent to the most wicked. It is ostentatiously paraded as the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints," established under a fraud-' ulent revelation; and in the habiliments of pompous titles' and pretentious sanctity it incarnates every unclean beast of lust, guile, falsehood, murder, despotism and spiritual wickedness in high places. It is polytheistic in theology, polygamistic in life and polypragmatic in zeal and activity; and tolerated or encouraged it engulfs religion, society and government in the deepest debauchery, superstition and despotism known to Paganism, Mohammedanism or Mediaeval Papacy. Its chief cornerstone is polygamy. It reveals God as the very impersonation of anthropomorphic licentiousness. Its Christ is the redeemer of those only who are sealed in polygamous matrimony— himself being a polygamist; and its Paradise is only a celestial harem for God and for men and women ransomed from the doom of anti-polygamous infidelity— essentially nothing more.