On Monday, July 8th, 1850, he was in his class-room as usual. Although the weather had been for some time unchangeable, no solicitations could keep him back from his wonted task at the university. On that day, however, it was observed, notwithstanding all his efforts, that his voice failed him in the delivery of his lecture-a thing altogether unusual with him. Still he persevered to the close, when he was only able, by the help of some of the students, to dismount from the platform on which he lectured; and completely exhausted, he returned home. One of his hearers on this occasion, deeply moved with the too evident signs of his approaching decay, exclaimed, with a mournful emphasis in his voice, "That is the last lecture of our Neander." On reaching home, he would get to his work as usual: called his amanuensis, and began the dictation of his "Church History," which he continued, without intermission, for three hours. At length the power of nature could bear up no longer, and he sought repose-but only after repelling for some time the affectionate remonstrances of his sister, with a "Let me alone cannot every workman still work while he will." On the following day, violent diarrhoea attacked him, and all hope of continuing his professional duties was necessarily abandoned. Still only "for one day" would he allow his lectures to be postponed. Next day he hoped he would be able to resume his duties. But although the physician succeeded in temporarily checking his disease, the springs of life were too thoroughly exhausted within him to permit of any well-founded hope of his recovery. So far, however, | did he rally, that he conceived himself sufficiently able to rise and re-commence work; and scarcely the most powerful entreaties could prevent his doing so. His voice, which had never before been heard, but in the mildest accents to the servant, now rose in commanding address to her to bring him his clothes that he might get up. There is to us something inexpressibly touching in this little and so purely child-like incident. But his sister at length soothed him with the words, "Think, dear Augustus, what would be said if I disobeyed the orders of the physician. It is God's doings, and

therefore we must cheerfully submit." "That is true," he replied, with suddenly hushed voice, "all is from God, and we must praise him for it." Now, quiet and resigned, he requested to be removed from the darkened chamber in which he had hitherto lain, to the open, sunny room in which for twenty years he had pursued his untiring studies. Brought thither, he seemed to drink in with eager eyes the golden light, after which he ever so longedchild as he so truly was of the light; and as, indeed, he had only a few days before playfully said of himself, that he was an оrados Tоu nov. (a follower of the sun.) Somewhat revived by this change, and by the sight of the dear familiar companions of his lifelong studies-his books-the old spirit returned upon him; and his thoughts wandered, now to his class-room, now to the favourite subject on which he had proposed lecturing during the following session "The Gospel of John, contemplated from its truly historical point of view," and again, to his "Church History," some further sentences of which he dictated regarding the German mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the so-called Friends of God." At length, some one having replied in answer to his enquiry as to the time, that "it was half-past nine o'clock," he said "I am tired, I will now go to sleep," and laying himself down, he breathed softly, "Good night;" and after a few hours' disturbed and painful slumber he was no more. On the stillness of a Sabbath morn, that great and gentle spirit departed to the God who gave it.

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On the Wednesday following his funeral took place, attended by an immense concourse of people, and the whole extent of its procession, along two miles of the city, (Berlin) lined with profoundly interested spectators. The hearse was surrounded by students, some of them from Halle, carrying lighted candles, and in advance was borne the Bible and Greek Testament which had ever been used by the deceased. At the grave, music was sung and addresses delivered; and "It was a truly solemn sight to see the tears gushing from the eyes of those who had been the pupils and friends of Neander."-British Quarterly Review.

JOSEPH SMITH, the reputed, founder of the system, first solicits our attention. This pseudo-prophet was born Dec. 23, 1805 at Sharon, in Windsor county, Vermont, where his father had a farm. Neither of his parents was educated or religious, and in Joseph's tenth year, they, with nine other children, six sons and three daughters, made one of those emigrations not uncommon in the United States, removing into the western part of New York, where they resided eleven years, first at Palmyra, and afterwards at the village of Manchester. Growing up here, he followed his father's occupation, never gaining much skill in reading, writing, or arithmetic.

In 1821, when he was fifteen years of age, a "revival" began in Manchester, under which his mother, three brothers and one sister joined the Presbyterian church; but Joseph remained unattached to any body of christians, professing his inability to decide which was right and which was wrong. Up to this time, and it is said beyond it, the reputation of himself and his family connections was exceedingly low, all notoriously spending much time "in digging for money which they pretended had been hidden during the revolutionary war!" One of his zealous partizans, Mr. Orson Pratt, who was once sta tioned at Liverpool, and is (or was) one of the "twelve apostles of the church of Joseph Smith," claims for his leader the honour of enjoying at this period a supernatural manifestation of resplendent light, and of "two glorious personages" who announced the forgiveness of his sins and promised a more copious revelation at another season. But Mr. Pratt confesses that "being young, he was again entangled in the vanities of the world" -a discreet confession,-since during 1823, 4 he was following his moneydigging trade with the pretence that a curious stone, (found in 1822 by a person named Chase, from whom Smith obtained it), enabled him to discover where treasures had been hid! The mode of divination used by the adept was to put the stone into his hat, and then to do the same with his face. At this childish game of "I can see what you can't," Joseph Smith continued for some years,-being

hired in the meantime, in company with his father and others (Sep. 1823) to dig for a silver mine at Harmony on the borders of Pennsylvania and New York. According to Mr. Pratt, Smith was honoured with another "manifestation" in the evening of Sep. 21, 1823, consisting of a gorgeous illumination, and the appearance of a personage," who revealed many strange things, among which were these, that the American Indians were a remnant of Israel, and that certain records composed by their inspired writers, and which had been long concealed, were now to be divulged, preparatory to Messiah's second coming. The vision was twice renewed, and a third time in the morning, when the angel, correcting a previous oversight, "instructed him to go immediately and view the secret records": this he did, and having dug out and opened the strong stone box in which they were encased, its contents lay before him. But, "behold! the angel who had previously visited him" again made himself visible and placed his interdict upon their present acquisition. So it is to be inferred that they were restored to their hill-side sepulchre, and Smith, (in obedience to the angel's summons to prayer and faithfulness,) relapsed to his digging and divining-tricks.

While at Harmony, he lodged in the house of a hunter named Hale, a respectable person, who testifies to Smith's being at the head of the money-diggers, whose cupidity he encouraged until his stone or "lookingglass," as he facetiously termed it, ceased to act, and in 1825 the gang was broken up. Smith returned to Manchester, but having fallen in love with the daughter of his late landlord, he adopted a series of deceptions which ended in his elopement and clandestine marriage with the young lady, and in his procuring their conveyance to Manchester at the expense of a credulous Dutchman, whom he deluded with the tale of a cave in which "was a bar of gold as thick as his leg, and about three or four feet long.' During this time Mr. Pratt requires us to believe that Mr. Smith was "frequently receiving instruction from the mouth of the heavenly messenger ;" and on the morning of Sep.

22, 1827, the records were delivered into his hands-a month after he had re-visited Mr. Hale to gain his wife's property, telling the old gentleman he had abandoned "glass-looking," and was expecting to work hard for a living. But a curious story here intervenes for a person named Ingersol has deposed on oath that Smith acquainted him that after his return to Manchester, he passed off upon his family a quantity of fine white sand wrapped in his frock, as the "Golden Bible." Putting his records (sand heap) into a pillow-case, and this into a wooden box, he allowed all persons to handle but not to inspect them. At this time a patron and tool sprang up in the person of Martin Harris, a religious weathercock, and a man of strong passions, to whom Smith presented a scroll covered over with uncouth strokes, "the whole ending in a rude representation of the Mexican zodiac"; which he vouched as a transcript of part of the "golden plates." On this assurance, Harris advanced fifty dollars, and at Smith's request made a journey to the city of New York, where he submitted the mystical paper to Professor Anthon, who says, he ". soon came to the conclusion that it was all a trick-perhaps à hoax." This suspicion he communicated to the farmer who for a short time seemed inclined to quit the crazy enterprize but before he reached home the disease again attacked him, and induced him to follow Smith to Harmony, whither that schemer had betaken himself by the help of Harris's fifty-dollar gift. There the work of "translation" progressed, though Smith affirmed that the plates themselves were buried in the woods be

:

* The Mormons exult greatly over the fact that some years after this transaction, several glyphs (engraved tablets) were discovered in Mexico, similar in design to the figures on the scroll presented to Professor Anthon. But the inference they deduce in favour of the "golden plates" is more positively insisted on than logically conclusive. The size of the "curious stone found by Chase is not stated-may it not have been such a glyph? Or in his vagrant diggings it is not impossible that Smith may have discovered an antiquity of the kind: and one or other of these suppositions is rendered the more probable as

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cause of his father-in-law, who would not allow the box to remain in his house unless he were admitted to an optical demonstration of its auriferous quality. But a Urim and Thummim (formed, we are told, of "two transparent stones, clear as crystal," and found with the plates), overcame this difficulty; and stationed behind a blanket, Smith dictated to Harris who stood on the outside, of course, writing down the sublime narration! But his Urim, though "used in ancient times by persons called seers," did not enable Smith to foresee the plot devising by Harris's wife, who, having secured a hundred and sixteen pages of this manuscript, refused to deliver them up, asserting that since they were produced by miracle they could be as easily re-produced by the same infallible method: but Joseph was now prescient enough, and he refused to fall into the snare. Another scribe was employed, a schoolmaster named Cowdery, between whom and Smith so close an intimacy was formed that, according to Smith, they were visited by a heavenly messenger who gave his name as John the Baptist, and ordered them to be baptized, which they were by mutual deed on the 15th of May, 1829. No mishap recurring, the Book of Mormon was published in the early part of 1830, at the cost of Harris, who mortgaged his farm to defray the expense. The price was first fixed by revelation at a dollar and a half, (seven-and-sixpence) but the sale being slow, a subsequent revelation judiciously reduced the terms to a single dollar.

In April the first society was constituted at Manchester, composed of six persons, having Joseph as Apostle and First Elder, and Cowdery as Second

the Mormons have themselves published an account of the disinterment at Kinderhook, in 1843, of six plates of brass covered with ancient characters. A wood-cut of one of these is given in the Illustrated History of Mormonism (p. 279), and nearly resembles the scrawl supplied to Harris by Smith as described by the learned professor of Columbia College. If this be granted, we see Smith's shrewdness in advising Harris to take it to New York and shew it to some learned man whose favourable opinion, it was expected, would blind Harris completely to the forgery.

Elder. Joseph now resided at a neighbouring village, Fayette, and by October the perverts had amounted to seventy or eighty. A mission party of four had by this time penetrated to Kirtland, a town in the north-west of Ohio, where a Campbellite preacher, named Stephen Rigdon, was convinced (or pretended to be, for there are grounds for suspicion that the whole scene was a mockery, and the result of preconcertion); and very soon a hundred and thirty of his former people followed his example. In November he paid a visit to Smith, and under his advice Mormonism rapidly began to assume a systematic form. In January 1831, Rigdon first, and then Smith, with a train of Mormon families, removed to Kirtland, where extraordinary progress was being made, attended with the wildest fanatic outbreaks, which Joseph, wisely discerning their folly, condemned as the work of Satan. In the summer of this year he and Rigdon, with some others, went on a surveying tour to Jackson County, Missouri, with which he was enamoured as a location for the saints, and having preached and decided on a site for a temple he returned to Kirtland. He was also active in dispatching elders throughout the land to proclaim the Mormon Gospel; and in stimulating emigration to his Missouri Zion. In the January of 1832, both he and Rigdon were subjected to a most brutal mob-assault, tarring and feathering being part of the discipline inflicted; and on his way to Missouri in April, he with difficuly escaped a repetition of lawless violence. At Zion he was warmly welcomed, and found that two newspapers had been established devoted to his interest. His disciples now numbered 3000. Early in 1833 the gift of tongues again burst forth, and after being denounced as diabolic, was acknowledged as divine; and in March, he associated with himself, Rigdon and another saint, Frederick G. Williams, " in holding the keys of the last kingdom," reserving however for himself a virtual supremacy as the special organ of the celestial revelations. Troubles rose in Missouri. Meetings were held by the citizens of Jackson county, and antagonistic resolutions passed, which resulted in the destruction of the Mor

mon printing press and other excesses, and after a second gathering, and a third in October, which ended in serious conflicts, the Mormons fled over the Missouri river into other counties, suffering greatly in their flight. Smith had travelled in Canada, but returning to Kirtland, it was resolved, May 4th, 1834, that the name Mormons should be eschewed, and that the title of the new society should run, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," after which Smith proceeded with a hundred and fifty armed followers, and twenty baggage waggons, to carry relief to his people in Missouri; and in July he retraced his steps to Kirtland, where he issued a new revelation commanding all his travelling elders, about four hundred, to become learned!-which they zealously endeavour-ed to do; and in a short time the "Temple of the Lord" being completed, was dedicated with great formality. This building cost 40,000 dollars, (between £8000 and £9000) on which a debt of 15,000 dollars remained, despite the liberality of the people: a misfortune which strangely coincided with a revelation vouchsafed about this time, that Smith and Rigdon should remain poor no longer. In this year these adventurers and others established a mercantile house, and bought up goods on credit, but pay-day arriving, they were. "unable to discharge the debt of 100,000 dollars": (£22,000) as a last resource they set up a bank, in January, 1837, the notes of which gained temporary currency by a roguish ruse, but in the autumn of that year the bubble burst, and one night in March 1838, Joseph, with an escort, decamped (by revelation of course), closely pursued by the officers of the law. But he outrode them, and reached Missouri with the most valuable of his effects. Immense immigrations now swelled the Mormon community in Missouri; and enspirited by this, Smith and his coadjutor were more unreserved in their statements of the dominancy reserved for the "saints." At length a secret society was organized, which took the name of the "Big Fan," a sobriquet exchanged to the "Daughters of Zion," and again to the "Danite Band." Notice was then given that all "dissenters"-those discontented