1. See Mario S. De Pillis, “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Spring 1966): 68–88, for an example of an attempt to arrive at answers to this question essentially without the assistance of such information.

2. De Pillis has also attempted to find answers to these problems in his article, “The Social Sources of Mormonism,” Church History 37 (May 1968): 50–79, but again without the aid of sufficient information to justify his conclusions.

3. S. George Ellsworth, “A History of Mormon Missions in the United States and Canada, 1830–1860” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Berkeley, the University of California, 1951), p. 340.

4. Ibid., pp. 341–42.

5. Ibid., p. 342.

6. For an example of this theory, see Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960), pp. 534–39.

7. De Pillis, “Social Sources of Mormonism,” p. 79.

Laurence M. Yorgason

BYU Studies Publications