| 15 to assume the responsibilities and discharge the duties of an office, which said President Young has carried for years without having ever given a bond in pecuniary, or personal penalty for the faithful performance thereof.
We pity the character for honesty which this exacting of bonds from George A. Smith, as principal; and John Sharp, Joseph F. Smith, Thomas Taylor, and others as assistants, gives to them as compared with President Young; for they are required to give bonds, while he would have been insulted if he had been requested so to do; the inference being, that he was sufficiently honest without bond, but that they are not. Of course we can have no objection to their method of doing their own business, as it is "none of our business;" but that is the look it has to one reading the minutes of the session of conference at which such appointments were made.
Another feature of church government to which we were attracted by reading the minutes, as published in the Deseret News, was the selection by President Young of five additional counselors to himself, as President of the church.
By this selection he practically, and directly, ignores the organic law of the church, and the long usage by which he has himself been governed hitherto. It is evident that President Young, by this act, quietly sets aside the long-established customs of the church; also some of the aged and trusted ministers to the people, and lays down the lines of a new and deep-rooted policy to perpetuate something, to the existence of which he sees danger.
Whatever the object may be, which President Young has in view in these new departures, so manifestly in violation of the rules of church government, as laid down in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, it is to be earnestly hoped, that their force for injury to a long-suffering people may be broken by a refusal to be silent under so flagrant forgetfulness of the principles of true religion, and the revelations upon which the church was originally founded.-The Saints' Herald, vol. 20, pp. 264, 265.
The same issue of the Herald contains items of interest concerning progress in the field, as follows:
Bro. Joseph C. Clapp held a discussion at Princeville, Illinois, lately, with Mr. Isaac Paden, once a Latter Day Saint, as we are informed, now of spiritualistic tendencies. The debate was to have lasted six nights; it closed at the third, at Mr. Paden's request. . .
Eight were baptized lately in the region of country, in Wisconsin, where Brn. Amos Bronson, C. W. Lange, and Marion Cooper are laboring. . . . Also eight at the Jonesport session of the Eastern Maine District conference. . . .
Bro. Brand had baptized three at Atchison, Kansas. The Saints now have an excellent hall at Atchison. . . .
Bro. T. W. Smith is at Millersburg and Buffalo Prairie. His health
(page 15) |
