Winchester, Benjamin. An Examination of a Lecture Delivered

Winchester, Benjamin. An Examination of a Lecture Delivered by the Rev. H. Perkins on the religious opinions and faith of the Latter- day Saints, and some of his most prominent errors and misstatements corrected, 1– 12. 1840. AN EXAMINATION OF A LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE REV. H. PERKINS On the religious opinions and faith of the Latter-Day Saints, and some of his most prominent errors and misstatements corrected. BY B. WINCHESTER, MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL. ON Thursday, the seventh of May, A.D. 1840, I left Philadelphia, to visit my friends in the state of New Jersey. No sooner had I reached Cream Ridge, Monmouth county, than I was informed that the Rev. H. Perkins, a Presbyterian Priest, of Allentown, N. J., had made an appointment to deliver a public lecture on Sunday, May 10th, 1840, at four o’clock P.M., in Imlay’s Hill meeting house, refuting the doctrine, or tenets believed by the Latter Day-Saints, (Mormons.) When the hour for meeting had come, several of my friends requested me to go with them and hear what the Rev. gentleman had to say: accordingly I went. The meeting was opened by singing and prayer. Mr. P. then arose and commenced his Lecture in a very sanctimonious way, and with a long face, (Pharisee like,) expressed his pretended desire that his auditors, together with himself, might be guided by truth and charity. Indeed, from the drawing of his words, and his apparently half crying tone of voice, one who was not acquainted with the deception would have supposed he was all piety from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. During his lecture, with a pretended sympathy for the poor deluded Mormons, as he called them, and with this strange tone of voice, he described the awful delusions palmed upon the public by the Mormons. Some few of his female auditors, who sat near me, uttered some tremendous long sighs, as though they or some body else were on the eve of making an everlasting leap into eternity, to be tormented with the damned. In this theatrical way he endeavoured to work upon the animal feelings of his auditors: this also being his most effectual way in getting converts. And, of all the absurdity, contradiction, and nonsense, that I [1] ever heard drop from the lips of a man who professes literary talents, Mr. P’s. crowned the climax.