In the evening they met for the endowment; the fast was then broken, by eating light wheat bread, and drinking as much wine as they thought proper.  Smith knew well how to infuse the spirit which they expected to receive; so he encouraged the brethren to drink freely, telling them that the wine was consecrated, and would not make them drank.  As may be supposed, they drank to some purpose; after this, they began to prophesy, pronouncing blessings upon their friends and curses upon their enemies; after which the meeting adjourned.

We now return to Missouri.  The Mormons who had settled in and about Independence, in the year 1831, having become very arrogant, claiming the land as their own, saying, the Lord had given it to them, and making the most haughty assumptions, so exasperated the old citizens, that a mob was raised in 1833, and expelled the whole Mormon body from the county.  They fled to Clay county, where the citizens permitted them to live in quiet till 1836, when a mob spirit began to manifest itself, and the Mormons retired to a very thinly settled district of the country, where they began to make improvements.

This district was at the session of 1836-7 of the Missouri legislature, erected into a county by the name of Caldwell, with Far-West for its capital.  Here the Mormons remained in quiet until after the bank explosion in Kirkland, in 1838, when Smith, Rigdon, and others of the heads of the sect arrived.  Shortly after this, the Danite Society was organised, the object of which, at first, was to drive the dissenters out of the county.  The members of this society were bound by an oath and covenant, with the penalty of death attached to a breach of it, to defend the presidency, and each other, unto death, right or wrong.  They had their secret signs, by which they knew each other, either by day or night; and were divided into bands of tens and fifties, with a captain over each band, and a general over the whole.  After this body was formed, notice was given to several of the Dissenters to leave the county, and they were threatened severely in case of disobedience.  The effect of this was that many of the dissenters left.  Among these were David Whitmer, John Whitmer, Hiram Page, and Oliver Cowdery, all witnesses to the Book of Mormon; also Lyman Johnson, one of the twelve apostles.

The day after John Whitmer left his house in Far-West, it was taken possession of by Sidney Rigdon.  About this time Rigdon preached his famous “Salt Sermon.”  The text was—­“Ye are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”  He informed the Mormons that the Church was the salt; that dissenters were the salt that had lost its savour; and that they were literally to be trodden under the foot of the Church, until their bowels should gush out.