John Taylor

“ Are we careless? Are we indifferent? Are we covetous? Do we love the world more than we ought to do, and allow our minds, our feelings and affections to be carried away by the transitory things of time and sense? Yes, yes, to our shame, in many instances, be it spoken; this is true. Do we violate in many instances the great principles that God has revealed? We do, to our shame be it spoken, many of us; but we do not violate the law of God nor the laws of chastity in that thing. Well, what are we to do? God has revealed a principle to us ”

“ Who can penetrate its mysteries? What really do we know? To commence with, who can understand the designs of God in relation to the organization of this world, or in relation to the position of man and his destiny? His past operations, his present dealings with the nations and his designs in the future, to the uninspired, are all a profound enigma. Who knows anything about it? We find all kinds of theories, notions and opinions in existence at the present day, but what do they amount to? ”

“ This Gospel reveals to us, as it did in former days, the light and intelligence of God. It opens up the visions of eternity; it places us in communication with the Lord. It prepares us for life and for death and for exaltation, and we are going to go on with our temples and administer in them in the name of the Lord. ”

“ But when you come to understand, to fully comprehend the priesthood held by our forefathers, you can see by what authority the Holy priesthood is conferred upon you. Well, then, where did you get this authority from—from the world? No, the world did not have it to give, and consequently you could not get it from them; and if God has not spoken, if the angel of God has not appeared to Joseph Smith, and if these things are not true of which we speak, then the whole thing is an imposture from beginning to end. There is no half-way house, no middle path about the matter ”

“ The Gospel is an everlasting Gospel as spoken of in the Scriptures, and associated with that Gospel is the priesthood that administers in time and in eternity. And Moses, who had led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, and had conversed with God and given the law of the Lord unto the people, with Elias the prophet, who was also a man of God—the Melchisedec priesthood, which held the keys of the mysteries of God, and it ministers in time and in eternity. ”

“ God says this is an eternal law associated with the eternal perpetuity of lives in time and throughout the eternities that are to come; that a man having a wife must have her sealed to him for time and for all eternity. Why, long ago we have heard of a religion to live by but none to die by; none that could reach to the other side of the vail and prepare us for eternal associations and eternal lives in the eternal world, or eternities that are to come. But this principle involves that thing and places us in this position: God says "Go and obey my law." ”

“ You can find very few people who will do what thousands of our elders have done—go out without purse or scrip to proclaim the glad tidings of salvation, things that they not only believe in but know for themselves before God that they are true—go out as the friends of mankind to publish the same Gospel under the same authority that others had in former ages. ”

“ Can we conceive of a greater principle, of one more majestic, and grand, and noble, and exalted. What is man? A poor feeble worm of the earth, going forth in the name of God to call upon the human family to repent and be baptized for a remission of their sins, and after the name of God, he lays his hands upon their head, for the reception of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Theories, hypotheses, notions, dogmas and opinions amount to very little when associated with the great and eternal principles connected with the welfare of mankind, and the salvation of a world. And hence we need something higher, something of more intelligence than anything that man possesses to give unto us information pertaining to these matters.
When God created the world and placed man upon it he had certain ideas and designs that were fixed, immutable, and eternal, they were based or predicated, in the most consummate wisdom; the most profound intelligence ”

“ It was an unpleasant thing for a man to rise up and tell the people they were wrong. To go to our divines—our right reverend divines —and their followers and tell them they were all out of the way! I expect they would be no more satisfied with such a message than the same class were with the teachings of Jesus when he spoke of the Scribes and Pharisees and called them hypocrites, like unto whited sepulchres which appeared fair on the outside to men, but inwardly they were nothing but rottenness and dead men's bones. ”

“ That is the opinion that many men have formed of him—that he was something like our backwoodsmen, some of our farmers who have not mixed up with the elite of society, or made themselves familiar with the intelligence that pervades the world. ”

“ There were many prophets in those days and they prophesied of a prison house that God had prepared, told the people of the destruction that was coming upon the earth: that they should be swept off the face of the earth by the waters of the flood and that none should be spared except a few to perpetuate the name and fame of the Almighty and again propagate their species. ”

“ Well, then, if God does not send men, of course they cannot act under the authority of God; if they do, they act fraudulently. Now, how can men go in the name of God when they tell you that God has never spoken for the last eighteen hundred years, and that he does not now reveal himself? ”

“ We know a good deal more about them than they know about us. We know their crimes, we know their licentiousness, we know of the millions of murders that are perpetrated by mothers and fathers of children and they know it. ”

“ When we understand the nature of man, when we consider that he is a dual being, that he is possessed of a body and spirit, that he is associated with time and with eternity, that according to the Scriptures the spirits of all men were created before this world was made, and that God is the God and Father of the spirits of all flesh ”

“ Trace things forward to the time that Jesus appears upon the earth, and we see something then pertaining to these very individuals, in the acts of the Almighty, as they transpired at that time. When Jesus accomplished his work, when he had fulfilled the mission that he had to do here upon the earth, and when he was put to death in the flesh and quickened by the Spirit, he went and preached to the spirits in prison "that some time were disobedient when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah;" ”

“ And it is emphatically stated in the Scriptures that "the things of God knoweth no man but by the Spirit of God," and hence when men assume to comprehend principles pertaining to futurity, predicated upon the learning, the wisdom, the intelligence or the science of the world, they are always very much at fault. Who can comprehend the Almighty or under-stand his designs? ”

“ Many of these murders are committed while the children are pre-natal; they kill them either before or after they are born, just as it happens. We also know of this horrible social evil that exists among them, and of the corruption, degradation and rottenness that exist in their midst. And as I have said to some of them sometimes, "You come from these dens of infamy, reeking with corruption and rottenness, steeped in crime and bloodshed and you will come here, will you, and teach morality to us? ”

“ The position that we occupy in the world, our ideas of the mutability of affairs of time and sense, the continuous departure of one after another from this stage of existence to another, leads us, as well as other portions of the human family generally, more or less to reflect upon those things pertaining to the future. ”

“ The people had corrupted themselves very much, departed from the law of God, violated his ordinances, and committed all kinds of iniquity, so that, as the Bible tells us, all the thoughts of their hearts were only evil and that continually, and it repented the Lord that he had made man because of the wickedness and corruption that then existed. ”

“ It shall make you acquainted with the things pertaining to eternity, and you will be enabled to square your lives according to the eternal principles of intelligence as it dwells in the bosom of God, and as the Holy Ghost will make known and reveal unto you. ”

“ Hence we find the acts of God justified in relation to these matters, and while he had power to destroy, while he had power to send them to prison, he also had power to conceive a plan for their deliverance therefrom, when the time should come that they should be delivered after they had suffered sufficiently for the crimes, evils and iniquities that they had committed upon the earth. There are many singular things associated with these matters that men do not really comprehend. ”

“ The organization of the heavens and the earth, the creation of the world as we understand it, and also the creation of man and beast, fowl, fish and insect, and everything that exists upon the face of this earth. ”

“ But in relation to religious matters there is no one can have any true or correct conception of a hereafter unless it has been revealed by the Almighty, who alone is able to comprehend the end from the beginning and is acquainted with the position and destinies of men and of the world. ”

“ We would like to submit ourselves to every ordinance of man. We would like to be good and peaceable citizens, which we are. We don't wish, however, to follow their corruptions—don't we know enough of them? ”

“ Go home, attend to your own business, cleanse yourselves from your corruptions, for they are a stink in the nostrils of Jehovah, and of all honest men, and don't come to set us right in regard to things that God has given us to do, and which with the help of the Lord we will carry out. ”

“ In regard to other principles, of a more material nature that we are intimately associated with there are certain facts that scientists and men of intelligence always wish to be demonstrated, and unless they are, they pay very little attention to any unsupported hypothesis. ”

“ We have a very short account of this in the Scriptures, but through other means that have been communicated to us we have received a further knowledge of these matters; for other men that embraced the Gospel in former ages became preachers of righteousness as well as Enoch. They had the Spirit of the Gospel as Moses had it, as Jesus had it, and as we have it. ”

“ There is something associated with these matters that has generally attracted the attention of the human family in all ages, among all peoples, and under almost all circumstances. There is and always has been a feeling of reverence existing among the human family for a Divine Being of some kind and of some form, even amongst the most low and debased people of the earth. ”

“ These spirits, that he was the father of, had their rights and privileges and immunities; and as he had created man upon the earth or prepared a tabernacle, or a body, if you please, for these spirits to inhabit, it became his interest, as the Father of the human family, to look after their welfare. ”

“ Various ideas and theories have existed amongst different peoples. Some have worshipped a great variety of Gods of their own making, while others have followed the notions and theories of men in regard to certain doctrines formulas theories and ideas that have been promulgated among what would be termed the wise, the prudent, and the intelligent of the earth. ”

“ Power and authority, Supposing a man was to come here as Governor or Secretary, or holding any other office under the government of the United States; he comes in the name of the United States, or by the power or authority of the United States, does he not? ”

“ There are many remarkable things in the old antediluvian history of the world, that we have only very imperfectly related to us in the Bible. We read, for instance, of a man by the name of Enoch—we are told in the Bible that "Enoch walked with God ”

“ We come again to another prominent character, that is Abraham, a very remarkable man in his day and age; although at the present time men look upon him as a kind of an old shepherd, a man that attended flocks and herds and sheep, a sort of herdsman and a shepherd ”

“ They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." Here was something practicable, something real, something intelligent, something that was worthy of a God, communicated by the Son of God for the welfare of the human family. ”