Religious Forebodings
Nearly sixty years since, Southey wrote his famous anticipation of Mormonism, and of some other matters as important as Mormonism, in a letter to Rickman (1805), as follows:
“Here I do not like the prospects: sooner or later a hungry government will snap at the tithes; the clergy will then become State pensioners or parish pensioners; in the latter case more odious to the farmers than they are now, in the former the first pensioners to be amerced of their stipends. Meantime, the damned system of Calvinism spreads like a pestilence among the lower classes. I have not the slightest doubt that the Calvinists will be the majority in less than half a century; we see how catching the distemper is, and do not see any means of stopping it. There is a good opening for a new religion, but the founder must start up in some of the darker parts of the world. It is America’s turn to send out apostles. A new one there must be when the old one is worn out. I am a believer in the truth of Christianity, but truth will never do for the multitude; there is an appetite for faith in us, which if it be not duly indulged, it turns to green sickness, and feeds upon chalk and cinders. The truth is, man was not made for the world alone; and speculations concerning the next will be found, at last, the most interesting to all of us.”