Opportunity

The Protestant Episcopal Church is discreet and polite, maintaining toward other sects an attitude of quiet, slightly superior neighborliness. Last week many an Episcopalian was startled to read in The Churchman a statement that "the Episcopal Church is not making the most of, indeed is barely touching, its opportunity in the Mormon field." In Utah there are 337,200 Mormons. The Roman Catholics, second in Utah with some 19,000 communicants, have for some time been working to build themselves up in the West (TIME, July 18). Utah Episcopalians number about 3,000. The Churchman's article points out that "seven large counties in Utah alone--and when a western county is large it is large-- have no non-Mormon church of any kind, and there are hundreds of communities where there is no regular preaching of the Christian Gospel. . . . "The breakdown of Mormon theology in the light of modern education, the drifting agnosticism of the younger generation . . . the respect and confidence of the Mormons . . . gives us the opportunity and responsibility to lead Mormon youth through their doubts into a better and more modern and spiritual faith. . . . "If the church could begin an itinerant work in Utah ... it would be a movement which . . . would . . . build up a Christian force in these intermountain sections, which will become agnostic unless we do this. It is peculiarly our job because through the past we have built up a feeling of trust and confidence. . . ." Mormon agnosticism was very little in evidence last month when the church celebrated "Pioneer Day," the 85th anniversary of the arrival of Brigham Young and 148 followers in Great Salt Lake Valley, Utah. Many Mormons went up to Palmyra, N. Y. to visit their Mt. Sinai, the Hill Cumorah where the Law was handed down to Founder Joseph Smith in the form of a book written on golden plates and the Urim & Thummim (breastplate with silver bows) which enabled him to translate it. The Hill Cumorah, humpy and treeless, is marked with a big wooden sign and "Cumorah" set in a hedge; at its foot is the Cumorah Hill Gasoline Station.

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