Читать книгу The Lions of the Lord (Western Novel) - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 10

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The hosts of Israel had been forced to tarry for the winter on the banks of the Missouri. A few were on the east side at Council Bluffs on the land of the Pottawattamie Indians. Across the river on the land of the Omahas the greater part of the force had settled at what was known as Winter Quarters. Here in huts of logs, turf, and other primitive materials, their town had been laid out with streets and byways, a large council-house, a mill, a stockade, and blockhouses. The Indians had received them with great friendliness, feeling with them a common cause of grievance, since the heavy hand of the Gentile had pushed them also to this bleak frontier.

To this settlement early in November came the last train from Nauvoo, its members wearied and wasted by the long march, but staunch in their faith and with hope undimmed. It was told in after years how there had leaped from the van of this train a very earnest young man, who had at once sought an audience with Brigham Young and certain other members of the Twelve who had chanced to be present at the train’s arrival; and how, being closeted with these, he had eagerly inquired if it might not be the will of the Lord that they should go no farther into the wilderness, but stand their ground and give battle to the Gentiles forthwith. He made the proposal as one who had a flawless faith that the God of Battles would be with them, and he appeared to believe that something might be done that very day to force the matter to an issue. When he had made his proposal, he waited in a modest attitude to hear their views of it. To his chagrin, all but two of those who had listened laughed. One of these two, Bishop Snow,—a man of holy aspect whom the Church Poet had felicitously entitled the Entablature of Truth,—had looked at him searchingly, then put his hand upon his own head and shaken it hopelessly to the others.

The other who had not laughed was Brigham himself. For to this great man had been given the gift to look upon men and to know in one slow sweep of his wonderful eyes all their strength and all their weakness. He had listened with close attention to the remarkable plan suggested by this fiery young zealot, and he studied him now with a gaze that was kind. A noticeable result of this attitude of Brigham’s was that those who had laughed became more or less awkwardly silent, while the Entablature of Truth, in the midst of his pantomime, froze into amazement.

“We’d better consider that a little,” said Brigham, finally. “You can talk it over with me tonight. But first you go get your stuff unloaded and get kind of settled. There’s a cabin just beyond my two up the street here that you can move into.” He put his large hand kindly on the other’s shoulder. “Now run and get fixed and come to my house for supper along about dark.”

Somewhat cooled by the laughter of the others, but flattered by this consideration from the Prophet, the young man had gone thoughtfully out to his wagons and driven on to the cabin indicated.

“I did think he was plumb crazy,” said Bishop Snow, doubtfully, as if the reasons for changing his mind were even yet less than compelling.

“He ain’t crazy,” said Brigham. “All that’s the matter with him, he’s got more faith than the whole pack of us put together. You just remember he ain’t like us. We was all converted after we got our second teeth, while he’s had it from the cradle up. He’s the first one we’ve caught young. He’s what the priesthood can turn out when they get a full swing with the rising generation. We got to remember that. We old birds had to learn to crow in middle life. These young ones will crow stronger; they’ll out-crow us. But all the better for that. They’ll be mighty brash at first, but all they need is to be held in a little, and then they’ll be a power in the Kingdom.”

“Well, of course you’re right, Brother Brigham, but that boy certainly needs a check-rein and a curb-bit right now,” said Snow.

“He’ll have his needings,” answered Brigham, shortly, and the informal council dispersed.

Brigham talked to him late that night, advancing many cogent reasons why it should be unwise to make war at once upon the nation of Gentiles to the east. Of these reasons the one that had greatest weight with his listener was the assurance that such a course would not at present be pleasing in the sight of God. To others, touching upon the matter of superior forces they might have to contend with, he was loftily inattentive.

Having made this much clear, Brigham went on in his fatherly way to impress him anew with the sinfulness of all temporal governments outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Again he learned from the lips of authority that any people presuming to govern themselves by laws of their own making and officers of their own appointing, are in wicked rebellion against the Kingdom of God; that for seventeen hundred years the nations of the Western Hemisphere have been destitute of this Kingdom and destitute of all legal government; and that the Lord was now about to rend all earthly governments, to cast down thrones, overthrow nations, and make a way for the establishment of the everlasting Kingdom, to which all others would have to yield, or be prostrated never more to rise. Thus was the rebuff of the afternoon gracefully atoned for.

From matters of civil government the talk ranged to affairs domestic.

“Tell me,” said the young man, “the truth of this new order of celestial marriage.” And Brigham had become animated at once.

“Yes,” he said, “when the family organisation was revealed from Heaven, and Joseph began on the right and the left to add to his family, oh, dear, what a quaking there was in Israel! But there it was, plain enough. When you have received your endowments, keys, blessings, all the tokens, signs, and every preparatory ordinance that can be given to a man for his entrance through the celestial gate, then you can see it.”

He gazed a moment into the fire of hickory logs before which they sat, and then went on, more confidentially:

“Now you take that promise to Abraham—‘Lift up your eyes and behold the stars. So shall thy seed be as numberless as the stars. Go to the seashore and look at the sand, and behold the smallness of the particles thereof’—I am giving you the gist of the Lord’s words, you understand—‘and then realise that your seed shall be as numberless as those sands.’ Now think for a minute how many particles there are, say in a cubit foot of sand—about one thousand million particles. Think of that! In eight thousand years, if the inhabitants of earth increased one trillion a century, three cubic yards of sand would still contain more particles than there would be people on the whole globe. Yet there you got the promise of the Lord in black and white. Now how was Abraham to manage to get a foundation laid for this mighty kingdom? Was he to get it all through one wife? Don’t you see how ridiculous that is? Sarah saw it, and Sarah knew that unless seed was raised to Abraham he would come short of his glory. So what did Sarah do? She gave Abraham a certain woman whose name was Hagar, and by her a seed was to be raised up unto him. And was that all? No. We read of his wife Keturah, and also of a plurality of wives which he had in the sight and favour of God, and from whom he raised up many sons. There, then, was a foundation laid for the fulfilment of that grand promise concerning his seed.”

He peered again into the fire, and added, by way of clenching his argument: “I guess it would have been rather slow-going, if the Lord had confined Abraham to one wife, like some of these narrow, contracted nations of modern Christianity. You see, they don’t know that a man’s posterity in this world is to constitute his glory and kingdom and dominion in the world to come, and they don’t know, either, that there are thousands of choice spirits in the spirit world waiting to tabernacle in the flesh. Of course, there are lots of these things that you ain’t ready to hear yet, but now you know that polygamy is necessary for our exaltation to the fulness of the Lord’s glory in the eternal world, and after you study it you’ll like the doctrine. I do; I can swallow it without greasing my mouth!”

He prayed that night to be made “holy as Thy servant Brigham is holy; to hear Thy voice as he hears it; to be made as wise as he, as true as he, even as another Lion of the Lord, so that I may be a rod and staff and comforter to these buffeted children of Thine.”

His prayer also touched on one of the matters of their talk. “But, O Lord, teach me to be content without thrones and dominion in Thy Kingdom if to gain these I must have many wives. Teach me to abase myself, to be a servant, a lowly sweeper in the temple of the Most High, for I would rather be lowly with her I love than exalted to any place whatsoever with many. Keep in my sinful heart the face of her who has left me to dwell among the Gentiles, whose hair is melted gold, whose eyes are azure deep as the sky, and whose arms once opened warm for me. Guard her especially, O Lord, while she must company with Gentiles, for she is not wonted to their wiles; and in Thine own good time bring her head unharmed to its home on Thy servant’s breast.”

He fasted often, that winter, waiting and watching for his great Witness—something that should testify to his mortal eyes the direct favour of Heaven. He fasted and kept vigils and studied the mysteries; for now he was among the favoured to whom light had been given in abundance—men at whose feet he was eager to sit. He learned of baptism for the dead; of the Godship of Adam, and his plurality of wives; of the laws of adoption and the process by which the Saints were to people, and be Gods to, earths yet formless.

There was much work out of doors to be done, and of this he performed his share, working side by side with the tireless Brigham. But there were late afternoons and long evenings in which he sat with the Prophet to his great advantage. For, strangely enough, the two men, so unlike, were drawn closely together—Brigham Young, the broad-headed, square-chinned buttress of physical vitality, the full-blooded, clarion-voiced Lion of the Lord, self-contained, watchful, radiating the power that men feel and obey without knowing why, and Joel Rae, of the long, narrow, delicately featured face, sensitive, nervous, glowing with a spiritual zeal, the Lute of the Holy Ghost, whose veins ran fire instead of blood. One born to command, to domineer; the other to believe, to worship, and to obey. For the younger man it was a winter of limitless aspiration and chastening discipline. In spite of the great sorrows that weighed upon him, the sudden sweeping away of those he had held most dear and the blasting of his love hopes, he remembered it through all the eventful years that followed as a time of strange happiness. Memories of it came gratefully to him even on the awful day when at last his Witness came; when, as he lay fainting in the desert, driven thence by his sin, the heavens unfolded and a vision was vouchsafed him;—when the foundations of his world were shattered, the tables of the law destroyed, and but one little feather saved to his famished soul from the wings of the dove of truth. After all these years, the memory of this winter was a spot of joy that never failed to glow when he recalled it.

At night he went to his bunk in the little straw-roofed hut and fell asleep to the howling of the wolves, his mind cradled in the thought of his mission. He had a part in the great work of bringing into harmony the labours of the prophets and apostles of all ages. In due time, by the especial favour of Heaven, he would be wrapped in a sea of vision, shown an eternity of knowledge, and be intrusted with singular powers. And he was content to wait out the days in which he must school, chasten, and prove himself.

“You have built me up,” he confided to Brigham, one day. “I feel to rejoice in my strength.” And Brigham was highly pleased.

“That’s good, Brother Joel. The host of Israel will soon be on the move, and I shouldn’t wonder if the Lord had a great work for you. I can see places where you’ll be just the tool he needs. I mistrust we sha’n’t have everything peaceful even now. The priest in the pulpit is thorning the politician against us, gouging him from underneath—he’d never dare do it openly, for our Elders could crimson his face with shame—and the minions of the mob may be after us again. If they do, I can see where you will be a tower of strength in your own way.”

“It’s all of my life, Brother Brigham.”

“I believe it. I guess the time has come to make you an Elder.”

And so on a late winter afternoon in the quiet of the Council-House, Joel Rae was ordained an Elder after the order of Melchisedek; with power to preach and administer in all the ordinances of the Church, to lay on hands, to confirm all baptised persons, to anoint the afflicted with oil, and to seal upon them the blessings of health.

In his hard, narrow bed that night, where the cold came through the unchinked logs and the wind brought him the wailing of the wolves, he prayed that he might not be too much elated by this extraordinary distinction.