| 184 preaching of the word, and by the "exercise of their privileges," have been parties to the efforts made and the means used by which this result, progressive or otherwise, has been attained; the glory of the achievement is of right partly theirs, if glory is to follow; and they must share a part of the censure and the loss; if there has been a loss and censure is to be visited upon any.
Again, now that President Young is dead, it is an admonition that men of similar age, who have been his coadjutors, must soon follow him; younger men, the children of those laboring fathers in the church, must take up the burden laid down by them in departing; and if they are men-men worthy of waging a successful battle as survivors and successors of the heroes dead and gone-it behooves them in taking up the burden left them to know why they carry it, what it is, and how they shall best acquit themselves in bearing it. As one of those to whom fell the heritage of Mormonism, an heritage left us by one of the "first elders of this church," we propose not to bear the burden thus left us, fitted and revisited by other hands since its bequest, without inquiry as to why the burden has been so revised.
To account for this disparity in numbers, this evident loss, and to make inquiry why it has occurred, is the first apparent duty of those upon whom the burden of carrying on the work of the last days will devolve; for at the same rate of progression, it will hardly do to say that the "stone cut out of the mountains" is gaining in its rolling. The boast put upon the walls at Union Fort, and we suppose at other places in Utah,
"Brigham rules, the kingdom grows,
The stone is rolling, mind your toes,"
becomes a taunt, because not true.
That this decrease in the aggregate number of the church left at the death of the martyrs, is not chargeable to the tenets taught by the elders of the Reorganization, is shown in the fact of the comparatively rapid increase of the latter body; which, when the writer became a communicant with it in 1860, had barely numbers enough to fill a small hall (possibly three hundred), and which now numbers nearly, if not quite twelve thousand, the result of sixteen years ministerial labor by elders of the church, some of whom stood with the martyrs; many others of whom, however, have been won from the world and differing faiths by the preaching of the word, openly denying polygamy as a tenet of the church, and all unaided by the natural increase of that system.
That these facts must, in the eyes of many, write mene, mene, upon the walls of the kingdom, if it still be called the kingdom, in which the seeds of decrease and death have been sown by some hand, good or evil, should not be wondered at. Nor, that now the scepter has fallen from the hand that ruled in that interest so long, there is an emergency in which there may occur division and distress, need there be any wonder.
That there are safety and rejoicing for the honest-hearted must be
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