Brigham Young

“ To me it is more rational for an intelligent being to embrace truth, than it is to mix up a little truth with a great deal of error, or to embrace all error and undertake to follow a phantom. Have you embraced truth, Latter-day Saints? ”

“ We believe in God the Father, in Jesus the Mediator; we believe in the ordinances that He has placed in His house, we believe in keeping the laws that He has left on record by which His Saints are required to square their lives, and to direct their steps. We do all this and we keep the moral code. Others do this, and when we reflect upon the righteous course of many of those who have lived before us, who have observed this moral code, we can see that great good has been done. But why should we be considered so strange by those who profess to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? ”

“ We are creatures susceptible of continual education and improvement. And we take this book, the Bible, which I expect to see voted out of the so-called Christian world very soon, they are coming to it as fast as possible, I say we take this book for our guide, for our rule of action; we take it as the foundation of our faith. It points the way to salvation like a fingerboard pointing to a city, or a map which designates the locality of mountains, rivers, or the latitude and longitude of any place on the surface of the earth that we desire to find, and we have no better sense than to believe it ”

“ Is the apostate on safe ground? What has he got? If he has found truth, it is here. We have embraced all truth in the heavens, on the earth, under the earth, on other planets, and in every kingdom there is in all the eternities. ”

“ When I look at universalism, deism, atheism, and at the various sects of the day, I feel that if we fail they are ready to catch us; but if we are right, they are wrong, and we must officiate for them and bring them up or they are forever lost. Who is right and who is wrong, who are on sure ground and who are not? ”

“ One says, "You believe in baptism by immersion, and we do not believe in it; you Latter-day Saints believe that a person should come to the years of accountability before he is baptized, but we believe in taking our infants and dipping our fingers, or in the priest dipping his fingers in the water and touching the children's foreheads and that they then become members of the living church and heirs of salvation." ”

“ Every truth in every kingdom that exists is embraced in our faith, and the Lord reveals a little here and a little there, line upon line, and He will continue to do so until we can reach into eternity and embrace a fullness of His glory, excellency and power. Who are on safe ground, then? These poor despised "Mormons" are the only people who live on the face of the earth that we know anything of who are on safe ground. Whether the Bible is true or not, no matter. ”

“ The strangest phenomenon to the inhabitants of the earth to-day is that God, the maker and preserver of the earth and all it contains, should speak from heaven to His creatures, the works of His hands here. ”

“ The ideas of the inhabitants of the earth with regard to their own creation and destiny, and with regard to the destiny of the earth, are very crude and vague. But we must all acknowledge that some individual, being, power or influence superior to ourselves produced us and the earth and brought us forth and holds us in existence, and causes the revolutions of the earth and of the planetary system. These are facts that neither we nor all mankind can controvert; the whole Christian and even the heathen world will acknowledge all this ”

“ We know that this age, by the outside world, is considered a fast age; we think it is very fast, so far as unbelief goes. The people now-a-days profess to be very enlightened and they say, "Don't be so superstitious as to believe the Bible;" and the idea of Jesus being sacrificed for the sins of the world is ridiculed by many. They say, "Oh, don't have any such ideas, be more liberal, be as we are;" and I heard of one man who said he would not believe in, worship, nor acknowledge a God who would command a man to sacrifice his only son, as Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac. ”

“ What would there be strange in the mechanician, after constructing the most beautiful and ingenious piece of mechanism it is possible to conceive of, speaking to it and admiring the beauty, regularity and order of its motions? ”

“ You all know that I have got eyes, for you can see them; you know I can speak, for you can hear my voice; you know that you are here in a building, rude as it may be, and you know that you walk on the ground; you know that you breathe the air, and you also know that when you are thirsty you desire water to drink, and that when you are hungry you want something palatable to eat. ”

“ All live so as to produce intelligence, light and happiness, or misery, confusion and destruction. A person before he can understand the law and government of God, must see and understand the propriety of it and see its beauties. So it is with the whole system of salvation. Not that I would say we are machines, for we have our agency; but God has placed us here, and He exacts strict obedience to His laws before we can derive the benefit and blessings their observance will yield. ”

“ The whole infidel world cannot prove that we are not here on this earth, that the sun does not shine, that we do not speak and hear, that we do not see with our eyes and handle with our hands, that we have not the power of tasting and smelling and have not the use of our natural senses. ”

“ The Priesthood of the Son of God, which we have in our midst, is a perfect order and system of government, and this alone can deliver the human family from all the evils which now afflict its members, and insure them happiness and felicity hereafter. ”

“ Leaving the difference between the good and the evil, between light and darkness, and between right and wrong, truth and error, as marked out by the dividing line, let us glance at the effects of the two principles. ”

“ They are found to be inapplicable to the situation and condition of the people, and hence they become obsolete. We may take the laws contained in the Old and New Testaments, and if they were good in the days of the Apostles, Prophets and Patriarchs, why are they not good to-day? It is not because they are not good that they are passed over, but in some respects they are not as applicable to the feelings of the Christian world now as when they were given, because of the traditions of the fathers. ”

“ I can say that if there are no public schools there are plenty of private schools, and there are no people on the face of the earth that support as many children in private schools as the people of Utah, according to their numbers. ”

“ So it is with the whole world of mankind. They say it is folly in the extreme to believe as we Latter-day Saints believe; it is all nonsense. They say, "Jesus will never call us to judgment; he will never come to receive his own; he will never come to reign on the earth;" ”

“ Because we can lie more and better than others? Well, can you steal better than others? No; I will defy you to do that. Are you better gamblers? No. Do you intrude more on your neighbors' rights than others? ”

“ And this latter is precisely the condition of the ungodly world, and, as fast as the wheels of time can roll they are going downward, downward to confusion, distress, anarchy and ruin. Their much boasted liberal feelings and extended views will not bring peace or truth to them ”

“ You may take a beautiful machine of any kind you please, and when the machinist has finished his work and set it in perfect order, how could it be expected to operate satisfactorily if a hook here or a journal yonder were to say, I am not going to stay here, or I am going to jump out of this place and am going somewhere else ”