An Examination of a Lecture Delivered by the Rev. H. Perkins

              Winchester, Benjamin. An Examination of a Lecture Delivered by the Rev. H. Perkins on the
religious opinions and faith of the Latter- day Saints, and some of his most prominent errors
and misstatements corrected, 1– 12. 1840.
AN EXAMINATION
OF A LECTURE
DELIVERED BY THE REV. H. PERKINS
On the religious opinions and faith of the Latter-Day Saints, and some of his most prominent
errors and misstatements corrected.
BY B. WINCHESTER, MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL.
ON Thursday, the seventh of May, A.D. 1840, I left Philadelphia, to visit my friends in
the state of New Jersey. No sooner had I reached Cream Ridge, Monmouth county, than I was
informed that the Rev. H. Perkins, a Presbyterian Priest, of Allentown, N. J., had made an
appointment to deliver a public lecture on Sunday, May 10th, 1840, at four o’clock P.M., in
Imlay’s Hill meeting house, refuting the doctrine, or tenets believed by the Latter Day-Saints,
(Mormons.)
When the hour for meeting had come, several of my friends requested me to go with
them and hear what the Rev. gentleman had to say: accordingly I went. The meeting was opened
by singing and prayer. Mr. P. then arose and commenced his Lecture in a very sanctimonious
way, and with a long face, (Pharisee like,) expressed his pretended desire that his auditors,
together with himself, might be guided by truth and charity.
Indeed, from the drawing of his words, and his apparently half crying tone of voice, one
who was not acquainted with the deception would have supposed he was all piety from the
crown of his head to the soles of his feet. During his lecture, with a pretended sympathy for the
poor deluded Mormons, as he called them, and with this strange tone of voice, he described the
awful delusions palmed upon the public by the Mormons. Some few of his female auditors, who
sat near me, uttered some tremendous long sighs, as though they or some body else were on the
eve of making an everlasting leap into eternity, to be tormented with the damned. In this
theatrical way he endeavoured to work upon the animal feelings of his auditors: this also being
his most effectual way in getting converts. And, of all the absurdity, contradiction, and nonsense,
that I [1] ever heard drop from the lips of a man who professes literary talents, Mr. P’s. crowned
the climax.