to trample it down, was also increased; the prayers of the Hebrew Psalmist against the enemies of Israel were constantly upon his lips.  More than once when at Quincy he preached to the little flock there with great effect from the blessings and cursings conditionally delivered to Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy, arguing that evils of a very material kind were to befall apostates, and blessings of a like kind were to be given to the faithful in the new city.

“It is not true,” Susannah said to him defiantly.  “There is no righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing.”

“Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not teach a true religion?” As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon Emma’s centre table.

In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word “apostate.”  Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community, the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them.  Personally she had no fear.  The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny.  Yet it was but natural, she admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his liberty.  The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.

Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn importance of these things.  He said to her that her judgment would always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if they had lived.  He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship between herself and Emma.  He spoke also of Emma’s worthiness, and of her devotion to himself.

His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken of her in the first years.  Susannah perceived a change analogous to that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself.  In the beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith’s words and ways.  Now she was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children, and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith’s vagaries as unworthy of