The Evening and the Morning Star

Vol. 2. Kirtland, Ohio, January, 1834 No. 16

De: Oliver Cowdery

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

There is a peculiar temptation in every civilized nation to imagine that evil always arrives wearing the face of barbarism. We expect tyranny to come with chains, swords, and foreign banners, when in truth it often appears clothed in respectability, patriotism, and even religion. The tragedy recounted in this January 1834 edition of The Evening and the Morning Star reveals precisely such a danger. The Saints, it seemed, were a people odd in belief and unsettling in their claims of angels and revelation. So they were driven from their homes, not because they had broken the law, but because their very existence disturbed the spiritual comfort of their religious and political neighbors. The persecutors themselves confessed that the civil law gave them no justification. And that, perhaps, is the most alarming detail of all. When men abandon law in the name of “self-preservation,” they reveal not strength, but a fear that their own convictions may not be sturdy enough to endure the presence of people they do not identify with.

Rumors and suspicions of the Saints were treated as though they were proof, though no court sustained a charge, no evidence survived careful scrutiny, and no lawful judgment was rendered. It is one of the oldest tricks of fallen humanity: first decide whom you fear, then search desperately for a moral excuse to justify your hostility. We are often less troubled by actual wickedness than by those who challenge our settled imagination of the world. The Saints’ true offense, according to the letters from Missouri Saints in this edition, was not rebellion but revelation. Jackson County could endure ordinary corruption more comfortably than men and women who sincerely believed God still spoke through prophets.

What makes the affair especially tragic is that it occurred in a republic founded upon liberty of conscience. America had inherited the noble dream that no man should suffer for worshiping God according to the dictates of his soul.

However, laws, after all, are only paper shields unless animated by virtue. One cannot preserve freedom merely by praising it ceremonially; freedom survives only where men are willing to defend the rights of those they dislike. The moment liberty is reserved only for the familiar and respectable, it has already begun to die.

And yet there is another side to this story. Persecution has an odd tendency to strengthen what it seeks to destroy. These Saints endured exile, humiliation, and uncertainty, but they did not surrender their convictions. They believed themselves bound to a covenant larger than comfort, and therefore suffering became, in their minds, not evidence of abandonment, but part of a divine drama moving toward redemption. There is something profoundly Christian in that paradox. The world assumes suffering disproves faith; Christianity insists suffering may instead refine it. A people deprived of property may nevertheless retain hope, and sometimes hope, strangely enough, proves stronger than violence.

The closing reflection concerning Moroni’s lament is perhaps the most haunting image of all. Instead of triumphant hymns, the newspaper ends with mourning—a sorrow echoing across centuries from another fallen people who watched their civilization collapse amid bloodshed and unbelief. Yet even there, the editors did not descend into despair. The following issues continued not only to recount injustice, but to speak of prophecy, instruction, and faith. And this reveals the deepest truth in the entire narrative: evil may wound a society, expose its hypocrisies, and drive the innocent into exile, but it cannot wholly conquer souls that refuse to surrender either conscience or hope.