By the time the Mormons had moved to Missouri, the congregation had grown to

Question

In the history of religions, few stories are more dramatic than that of the Mormons. It is a story of divine revelations and of persecution. In the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith, Jr., went into the woods near Palmyra, New York, to seek divine guidance. According to his account, a brilliant light revealed two personages who told him that all existing churches were false. Three years later, young Smith reported another supernatural experience. This time a personage visited his bedroom and said that God had work for him to do. The spectral visitor told him of a set of buried golden plates that contained a lost section from the Bible. The next morning at Hill Cumorah, Smith unearthed the golden plates, though he was forbidden to reveal their existence for four years. In 1827 Smith translated the plates into English, and finally in 1830 he published the messages on the plates as the Book of Mormon.
Establishing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Smith attracted several thousand followers from rural areas of the North and the frontier Midwest. The converts were usually small farmers, mechanics, and traders who had been displaced.
Because Smith said that he conversed with angels and received direct revelations from God, local authorities threatened to indict him for blasphemy. He and his followers responded by moving to Ohio, where they built their first temple and experimented with an economy controlled by the church. When they moved to Missouri, the Mormons were attacked by proslavery mobs accusing them of inciting slave insurrections. Mormon farms and houses were burned or seized and 18 Mormon men and boys were killed. Fifteen thousand Mormons fled Missouri after the governor proclaimed them enemies who “had to be exterminated, or driven from the state.”
Moving again, this time to Illinois, trouble arose again. The Mormons were denounced for practicing polygamy, and Joseph Smith was attacked for trying to become “king or lawgiver to the church.” Under the protection of the Illinois governor, Smith and his brother were then confined to a jail cell in Carthage. Late in the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a mob broke into Smith’s cell, shot him and his brother, and threw their bodies out of a second-story window.
Today it is hard to believe that the Mormons were ever regarded as subversive, and that Reverend Finish Ewing announced that “the Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.”

A) 18.
B) 50,000.
C) 15,000.

Answer 1

C) 15,000.