The history of the latter-day saints between the summer of 1833 and the fall of 1839 is one of hubris and affliction. Mobs and militias in Ohio and Missouri threatened the church, but so did the strenuous but erratic efforts made by the prophet to institutionalize his authority and his new theology, and so did the response that those efforts engendered among some of his earliest followers. In sum, without a drastically different political framework, the cosmology and polity of the Mormon experiment were simply too absolutist to survive challenges from within or without. It would not be until internal dissent was silenced and external hostility was held at a distance, first at Nauvoo and then in the Great Basin, that Mormon theology and society could be established on its prophet's own terms.