safe in any assault they might choose to make on the subjects of
their hate. The mob was composed of apt pupils in the learning
of this lesson. Personal outrages were of every-day occurrence;
husbandmen were captured in their fields, beaten, tortured, until
they barely had strength left to promise compliance with the
demands of their assailants,--that they would leave the state.
Houses were fired while the tenants were wrapped in uneasy
slumber within; indeed, one entire town, that of Morley, was by
such incendiarism reduced to ashes. Women and children were
aroused in the night, and compelled to flee unclad or perish in
their burning dwellings.

But what of the internal work of the Church during these trying
periods? As the winds of winter, the storms of the year's
deepest night, do but harden and strengthen the mountain pine,
whose roots strike the deeper, whose branches thicken, whose
twigs multiply by the inclemency that would be fatal to the
exotic palm, raised by man with hot-house nursing, so the new
sect continued its growth, partly in spite of, partly because of,
the storms to which it was subjected. It was no green-house
growth, struggling for existence in a foreign clime, but a fit
plant for the soil of a free land; and there existed in the minds
of unprejudiced observers not a doubt as to its vitality. The
Church soon found its equilibrium again after the shock of its
cruel experience. Brigham Young, who for a decade had been
identified with the cause, who had received his full share of
persecution at mobocratic hands, now stood at the head of the
presiding body in the priesthood of the Church. The effect of
this man's wonderful personality, his surprising natural ability,
and to the people, the proofs of his divine acceptance, were