Church of the Latter Day Saints

The Church of the Latter Day Saints enters the novel not through a meetinghouse or a community, but through a lecture delivered aboard a moving train. Elder William Hitch presents the church’s history as a story of revelation, persecution, migration, and growth, then asks his dwindling audience to join its next search for a home. The scene gives the organization a compressed historical narrative while showing how that narrative functions as missionary persuasion in the present.

A History Told in Transit

On train No. 48, Elder William Hitch posts notices announcing a lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117, scheduled from eleven until noon. The train carries about one hundred passengers, but only about thirty enter the car; Passepartout takes a front seat, curious despite knowing little about the religion beyond its association with polygamy. Phileas Fogg and Fix do not attend. Hitch opens in an aggrieved tone, declaring that Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were martyrs and that the United States Government’s treatment of Brigham Young might make him one too.

Hitch’s account reaches back to a prophet of the tribe of Joseph in ancient Israel, whose annals, he says, were passed down to Mormon. Centuries later, according to the lecture, Joseph Smith, a Vermont farmer, translated the Egyptian-written book after a celestial messenger appeared to him in an illuminated forest in 1825. The story links the new faith to biblical history and presents Smith’s revelation as the source of its authority. Hitch then describes Smith, his father, his brothers, and a small group of followers founding the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

The lecture also traces the institution through successive settlements and setbacks. In Ohio, the church established a colony, built a temple said to have cost two hundred thousand dollars, and founded the town of Kirkland. Hitch recounts Smith’s bankruptcy in 1837 and the tarring and feathering inflicted by his creditors. Smith later reappeared at Independence, Missouri, as the leader of a colony of three thousand disciples, before hostility drove him farther west. These episodes make institutional growth inseparable, in Hitch’s telling, from repeated expulsion and renewed settlement.

Expansion, Leadership, and Displacement

In 1839, Hitch says, Smith founded a community at Nauvoo, Illinois, on the Mississippi. Its population reached twenty-five thousand, and Smith held the offices of mayor, chief justice, and general-in-chief. In 1843 he announced himself as a candidate for President of the United States. The account ends Smith’s life with his imprisonment at Carthage and assassination by a masked band. By presenting religious leadership alongside civic and military offices, the lecture depicts the Nauvoo community as both a church and an organized settlement with a prominent public role.

Two years after Smith’s death, Hitch continues, Brigham Young led the followers away from Nauvoo toward the Great Salt Lake. Their new colony stood on a fertile route used by emigrants crossing Utah on their way to California, and the lecture attributes its rapid flourishing to the practice of polygamy. The geography matters to Hitch’s argument: the community is not simply seeking refuge in isolation but establishing itself along a corridor of westward migration. The novel’s account also notes that the church had members in England, Norway, Sweden, and Germany, including artisans and people in the professions, extending the institution’s reach beyond its American settlements.

Federal Conflict and the Missionary Appeal

The lecture takes place against a recent struggle over federal authority in Utah. The United States Government has brought the territory under the laws of the Union and imprisoned Brigham Young on charges of rebellion and polygamy. The disciples have renewed their verbal resistance to Congress, while Hitch is attempting to recruit fellow passengers on the railway itself. His appeal turns the train into a temporary pulpit and makes the route across Utah part of the story he tells about the church’s contested place in the country.

As listeners leave, Hitch continues without changing course. His account of expulsion—from Vermont, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah—becomes a refrain that culminates in a call to seek another independent territory and plant tents there. He addresses Passepartout as a prospective companion, inviting him to settle beneath the church’s flag. Passepartout refuses and leaves, making him the only hearer to answer the appeal directly. The audience’s steady contraction—from about thirty passengers to twenty, then ten, and finally one—gives the lecture a comic shape, but also isolates its purpose: Hitch continues preaching even when persuasion has ceased to find a crowd.

Narrative Role

The episode presents the Church of the Latter Day Saints through two voices that should not be collapsed into one. Hitch delivers an impassioned account designed to defend his community and win converts; the surrounding narration supplies circumstances about federal control, Brigham Young’s imprisonment, and the audience’s departure. The lecture therefore records the church’s history as both a set of claims and an act of advocacy, without turning Passepartout’s brief attendance into conversion or agreement.

Its placement aboard a train connects religious mission to the novel’s larger world of movement. Hitch uses a journey through the territory at the center of his account to recruit travelers, while Passepartout is himself passing through with no intention of joining the settlement. The contrast between the Elder’s persistent invitation and the listener’s decisive exit leaves the church’s appeal present but unanswered: in this encounter, its history can command attention for a time, but it cannot command assent.