Today the "Mormon" Church is known by name at least throughout the civilized world as well as amongst most of the semi-cultured peoples in the remoter parts of the earth and on the islands of the sea. Since 1830 every year has witnessed an increase in membership and an extension of "Mormon" propaganda. The six have increased to over half a million adherents. In Utah and adjacent States, in Canada and Mexico, between seventy and eighty "Stakes of Zion" have been established, each Stake comprising several Wards, of which there are now over seven hundred and fifty; and the greater part of North America outside the established Stakes, as also many foreign countries, are covered by well organized Missions, each with its component Conferences and Branches.
The growth of the Church is apparent to even the poorly informed. But the Church has not only grown; it has developed. Between growth and development there is a difference of the most essential kind; and not a few of the grave mistakes of men, even in every day affairs, in business, in politics, in statesmanship are traceable to our confusing and confounding the two. Growth alone is the result of accretion, the accumulation of material, the amassing of stuff. Development involves an extension of function, a gradation of efficiency, a passing from immaturity to maturity, from infancy to manhood.
Growth produces big things, and not only things of this sort but men. Between bigness and greatness, however, there is a distinction of kind, not alone of degree. Growth is a measure of bulk, of quantity; it is defined as "so many" or "so much." Development is a gradation of quality; its terms are "so good" or "so bad." America boasts of a constantly increasing host of big men; the great men of the land may be more easily counted. And as with men so with institutions.
Dead things may grow, as witness the tiny salt crystal in its mother-brine at first a microscopic cube, then a huge hexahedron limited only by the size of the container or other external conditions. Development, however, is the characteristic of life to which mere growth is essentially secondary and subordinate. The acorn holds in potential reserve all the possibilities of the stately oak; within the tiny egg of the butterfly lies the future caterpillar and the hidden glory of the mature imago.
The vital character of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was evident from the first. In masterly parable, superb in conception and application, the kingdom of heaven has been likened unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal; and, behold, from it the mass became leavened. I make bold to affirm that the leaven of "Mormonism" is leavening the world and its theology.
The most objectionable feature of "Mormonism" today appears to be its name. The fundamental principles of the system, its revealed truths, are more readily accepted when unlabeled. Every studious reader of recent commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, and of theological treatises in general, is aware of a surprising progressiveness in modern views of things spiritual, amounting in many instances to an abandonment of what were once regarded as the fundamentals of orthodoxy.
In the new theology "Mormonism" has pioneered the way