Orson Pratt

“ Let me candidly enquire, which is the most pleasing in the sight of God, for people to obtain the great and precious things which come through the operation of the Holy Ghost? or for people to have no information, no instruction for some seventeen hundred years, only what they could glean out of the writings of some of the ancient Seers, or Prophets, or Revelators, or Apostles, who have lived and who have died centuries ago? ”

“ God is the author, he is father of our spirits, and we were begotten before this world rolled into existence. Once we dwelt in the presence of our Father; once we were enabled to lift our songs of praise in the celestial world, from which we emigrated; once we dwelt in the society of an innumerable convention of angels, upon a world that had passed through its stages, its ordeals, the same as this world is passing through its various mutations. ”

“ He garnishes the heavens in his wisdom and builds the vast superstructure of the universe, as a very handy work. He brings into life and being new worlds and disorganizes them, scattering the elements, and again brings them together by his power or by the laws he has ordained, and by his laws makes new creations, new worlds, and new universes, and inhabits them with myriads and myriads of intelligent beings? ”

“ Here then the very first gift that the Lord set in his church, is a peculiar gift so far as the religions of the world are concerned, not peculiar so far as the Church of Christ is concerned, but so far as the religious world in the four quarters of the earth is concerned, we have something which they have not got, and something that is in accordance with the Bible. What man, I would ask further, among all the religions of the earth, for the last seventeen centuries, that has possessed the Urim and Thummim, the gift that would constitute him a seer and a revelator? ”

“ They would make man look for his origin down to the very reptile and the worm that crawls upon the earth, and to the fish of the sea—as the first father, the first origin, the first oyster. Such is the reason of the learned of the last few centuries—the evolution theory; in other words, that which you learn from books, the creation of man's folly and foolishness. But when we learn through the revelations of God that instead of man's coming up from the poor worm of the dirt, he descended from that being who controls the universe by his power ”

“ You have upon your shelves the Book of Covenants and Commandments, the revelations of heaven; you also are in possession of the Pearl of Great Price, containing the vision of Moses, that great and glorious vision which he received on the mount, revealing to him the history of the creation of the world. The Lord saw proper to descend upon a certain mountain before Moses, and showed himself to him, and the glory of God rested upon Moses so that he stood in the presence of the Lord; and the Lord showed unto Moses the works of his hands in relation to the various creations that he had made. ”

“ A great many religious people, without any reflection, have supposed there was no light, from all eternity, until about six thousand years ago; that then the Lord created the sun, moon and stars they really think that that was the first time from all the endless durations of past eternity that there was any light. I mean a great many ignorant people. But according to the revelation given to Moses, there was light before the foundations of this world were laid, before God caused darkness to come over this great deep ”

“ And what great comfort it would be for a man if he had several wives, and knew by the spirit of revelation how to deal in relation to all his domestic and temporal affairs, according to the mind and will of God. Again, how great would be the benefit to a body of people—to say nothing of households and families—located for instance, in one region of the country, a people who were united together according to the law of God, desiring to advance each others welfare and happiness, and each man was required to love his neighbor as himself ”

“ No man or woman that fails to comply with these things that I have named—believes and receives the record; they may pretend to believe the record, they may say it appears to be a very good record, and it speaks as if it might be true; but unless they do receive it, by obeying its ordinances, and its institutions, and complying with the principles of the Gospel, they would not be entitled to the promise recorded in the words of my text, "They shall know of greater things than these." ”

“ Let the trained collegiate mind, whose lifetime has been occupied in study, come forth and tell us how man obtains the first principle of knowledge, how came knowledge to be connected with matter, how came knowledge connected with flesh and bones, and blood, and skin, and sinew? ”

“ I might take up a whole discourse in showing how the Book of Mormon has been fulfilled since it has been translated up to the present time, in the bringing forth of the Gospel from among the Gentiles The persecutions that they should endure are predicted in the Book of Mormon. It is a great thing, it is a wonderful thing. In fact it is just what Isaiah said it would be in prophecying of the Book; he said it should be a marvellous work and a wonder. But the people who should receive this record should know of greater things. What greater things have we learned? ”

“ The Prophet Joseph Smith revealed to us that all the materials of our globe, and all the materials of the universe, are eternal in their nature, that their substance is eternal, not created out of nothing, according to the vagaries and foolish ideas of the religious world. The Lord told us that he created the earth out of materials that previously existed ”

“ How many organizations the materials of our earth have undergone before they were organized according to the revelations given to Moses, are not revealed. How many worlds they had entered into prior to that time; how many conditions existed through the millions of ages of past duration are nowhere revealed. A great many learned men are beginning to see that the materials of our globe have been in existence, as they say, for millions of ages. ”

“ Who among them can tell the origin of this intelligence in man, this reasoning power, and this perceptive faculty, that enables man to grasp not only a great many things pertaining to the laws connected with their own little earth, but enables him to launch out into the regions of space for hundreds of millions of miles and find out and understand many things that govern worlds afar off. ”

“ The Lord therefore gave greater things to this people who believed the record that had come unto us, by revealing directly that we were to have raised up in this dispensation twelve men, called Apostles, and that they should go forth and preach his Gospel, first to the Gentile nations, and, when the times of the Gentiles should be ful-filled, they should go forth and preach His Gospel to the scattered remnants of the house of Israel. This was taught when the revelation was given soon after the last part of the Book of Mormon was translated; that the Lord would raise up a Church ”

“ We are his offspring, we are his sons and his daughters, we are his children, he has begotten us, and we existed before the foundation of the world. Who among the wise, and the great, and those who have studied as far as human wisdom can at present reach ”

“ It is more consistent then when God should raise up a Church he should have Prophets, Seers and Revelators in that Church, inspired men, men that can receive the word of the living God, upon all subjects that should come before them which might concern the people. How many millions of questions and matters of more or less magnitude might be cited for which no instruction could be found in the Bible that would be at all suitable to the circumstances. ”

“ There may have been some seventeen thousand million of people that have passed off from our globe without such gifts being among them; and they were gifts given to the people of God before the advent of the Savior, and that were enjoyed by his servants that lived contemporary with him and with those who lived after he had performed his mission to the earth, and ascended to heaven. ”

“ Another object was that men might have more faith than what they had been in possession of in the former generations of apostacy and wickedness, and that the faith which the ancient Saints exercised might again dwell in the hearts of the children of men. For instance, a power of faith, through our repentance and through our obedience to the ordinances of baptism, to receive that greater and miraculous baptism of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ The laws by which the earth is governed, by which the materials were governed, by which intelligence produces intelligence, by which one material cleaves to another, and by which all the various mechanisms are performed, will be revealed in their times and in their seasons. ”

“ If we trace the history of the people of God we shall find it a history of revelations of God to man given for the purpose of directing them as individuals, as families, as neighborhoods, as tribes and as peoples, directing them in regard to their temporal affairs, as well as concerning the great matters that pertain to a future state of existence. ”

“ The earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the great deep, and the things of all nations will be revealed. The records of old that were kept by the people of Asia, who have since dwindled into savages by reason of the transgressions of their fathers; and those that have been kept by the ten tribes of the north countries, where they have lived for over 25 centuries ”

“ And then, if it were possible, ask the 400,000,000 of Christians, scattered throughout Asia, Europe, America and the islands of the seas, if a man can be found among them endowed, as ancient seers were, with the gift to see, or as ancient revelators were who told future events, what should befall men and nations and their final destiny ”

“ By revelations given in ancient days, and renewed through this young Prophet of God, we learn that we, ourselves, did not begin to exist when we were born into this state of existence; we learn that we are of higher origin than that assigned by poor, unbelieving man. Contrast [t] he ideas of the last few centuries with the ideas that God has revealed from heaven. ”

“ I do not suppose for a moment that there is any consistent person but that, if left to his own reasoning, would say that this is certainly the more reasonable and the more consistent; and especially when the Bible is referred to, in which there is nothing limiting the generations that have lived upon the earth for seventeen centuries in regard to these gifts. ”

“ There are many things in the new translation besides the vision and revelation in regard to the creation, written by Joseph Smith, which are far greater than anything contained in the Bible, or in the Book of Mormon, or in the Doctrine and Covenants. I bring up these things in order to show you that God has fulfilled his promises to the present time, by giving us greater knowledge concerning the creation of our globe. ”

“ Take any one individual among the many of the human family, and you could find thousands of things, pertaining to his individual welfare and temporal circumstances, that he could never learn out of the Bible. ”

“ That celestial world from whence we came, is more perfect than this earth, it is organized after a celestial order, a higher order and glorified by the presence of immortal, glorified, celestial beings. ”

“ All men and women in the beginning were created by Him, and there never was a person, there is not any one now living, and there never will be a man or woman, but what was in the beginning created in his image. ”

“ How many thousands of things does a single head of a family need to know, in regard to his own temporal circumstances, what course he should take most pleasing to the Almighty, whether to pursue this course or that branch of business, or whether to pursue some other branch of business, wherein he might do the most good ”

“ Here, then, were greater things made manifest than those in the Book of Mormon, or those in the Bible. Whoso receives this record and shall not condemn it because of imperfections, the same shall know of greater things. "But," says one, "what imperfections could there be in the writings of an inspired man?" I will tell you. Imperfections may creep in through the printing press, unless there was some expert person to examine the printing of the Book. ”

“ Perhaps strangers might claim that they have the writings of those favored men of God, and that they need no more, and that all the generations of men since the days that such men of God fell asleep needed no further instruction than that which was given to former-day Saints. ”