AGNOSTICISM. 775 



contain. Nevertheless he must have been a man of some force of 

 character, for a considerable number of disciples soon gathered 

 about him. In spite of repeated outbursts of popular hatred and 

 violence— during one of which persecutions, Smith was brutally- 

 murdered— the Mormon body steadily increased, and became a 

 flourishing community. But the Mormon practices being objec- 

 tionable to the majority, they were, more than once, without any 

 pretense of law, but by force of riot, arson, and murder, driven 

 away from the land they had occupied. Harried by these perse- 

 cutions, the Mormon body eventually committed itself to the 

 tender mercies of a desert as barren as that of Sinai ; and, after 

 terrible sufferings and privations, reached the oasis of Utah. 

 Here it grew and flourished, sending out missionaries to, and 

 receiving converts from, all parts of Europe, sometimes to the 

 number of 10,000 in a year ; until in 1880, the rich and flourishing 

 community numbered 110,000 souls in Utah alone, while there 

 were probably 30,000 or 40,000 scattered abroad elsewhere. In the 

 whole history of religions there is no more remarkable example 

 of the power of faith ; and, in this case, the founder of that faith 

 was indubitably a most despicable creature. It is interesting to 

 observe that the course taken by the great Republic and its citi- 

 zens runs exactly parallel with that taken by the Roman Empire 

 and its citizens toward the early Christians, except that the Ro- 

 mans had a certain legal excuse for their acts of violence, inas- 

 much as the Christian " sodalitia " were not licensed, and conse- 

 quently were, ipso facto, illegal assemblages. Until, in the latter 

 part of the nineteenth century, the United States Legislature 

 decreed the illegality of polygamy, the Mormons were wholly 

 within the law. 



Nothing can present a greater contrast to all this than the his- 

 tory of the Positivists. This sect arose much about the same time 

 as that of the Mormons, in the upper and most instructed stratum 

 of the quick-witted, skeptical population of Paris. The founder, 

 Auguste Comte, was a teacher of mathematics, but of no eminence 

 in that department of knowledge, and with nothing but an ama- 

 teur's acquaintance with physical, chemical, and biological science. 

 His works are repulsive on account of the dull diffuseness of their 

 style, and a certain air, as of a superior person, which character- 

 izes them ; but, nevertheless, they contain good things here and 

 there. It would take too much space to reproduce in detail a sys- 

 tem which proposes to regulate all human life by the promulga- 

 tion of a gentile Leviticus. Suffice it to say that M. Comte may 

 be described as a syncretic, who, like the gnostics of early Church 

 history, attempted to combine the substance of imperfectly com- 

 prehended contemporary science with the form of Roman Chris- 

 tianity. It may be that this is the reason why his disciples were 



