“Mormonites.” Working Man’s Advocate (New York) 2, no. 39 (1

“Mormonites.” Working Man’s Advocate (New York) 2, no. 39 (14 May 1831).
MORMONITES.—Many of our readers, we suspect, are scarcely aware that a new religion has sprung up in the west, which numbers many hundreds among its professors, and, as far as we can learn from the papers, is on the increase. From the serious and earnest manner in which some of the papers speak of the new religionists, we are almost inclined to think that their editors are really alarmed for the safety of their own faith. Ridiculous as is the idea that the founders of this new religion discovered their Bible inscribed on sheets of gold, which vanished as soon as it was translated, it is not more ridiculous than the stories of the origin of some other books which are now referenced as holy by large portions of this earth’s inhabitants; nor more ridiculous than the idea of a Christian editor, in a Christian country, solemnly writing articles to prove the inauthenticity of the “Golden Bible.” The following is the latest notice we have seen of the Mormonites. One would imagine from its tone, that the editor was trembling in his shoes when he wrote it. It is from the Painesville (Ohio) Gazette: “Last Thursday evening, for the first time, we heard a rigmarole called a Mormon sermon. It was delivered by a ‘teacher’ of the name of Pratt, who has returned from far west. His object was, of course, to establish the divine origin of his book, by showing that the had as good evidence for it as we have for our scriptures. To make out the comparison, he made a lean and jejune attempt to weaken the evidence of the revealed religion, and insisted that they all depended on human testimony, and of no better authority than that by which the Mormon bible is attempted to be established. In short, were it not that he professed to come ‘in the name of the Lord,’ we should have considered his discourse a miserable effort to promulgate infidelity.” By the “far west” mentioned above, we suppose the land of promise is intended, the new country whither the Mormonites are journeying.