Minutes and Discourses, 6–8 April 1844, as Reported by William Clayton
Source Note
General conference of the church, Minutes, and JS, Discourses, Nauvoo, Hancock Co., IL, 6–8 Apr. 1844; handwriting of ; dockets in handwriting of Robert L. Campbell and Jonathan Grimshaw; thirty-eight pages; General Church Minutes, CHL.
If I comprehend so that the spirit seal it upon you hearts let every man and woman put his hand on his mouth & never say any thing against the man of God again but if I fail it becomes my duty to renounce all my pretensions to inspirations &c and if I should do so should I not be as bad as all the rest of the world. not a man would not breath anathema if they knew I was a false prophet some would take my life. If any man is authorised to take my life because I am a false teacher then upon the same principle and am I authorised to take the life of every false teacher and who would not be the sufferer— but no man is authorised to take away life in consequence of their religion all laws and government ought to tolerate whether right wrong If I show that I have the truth of God & 99/100 are false teachers while they pretend to hold the keys of God & go to killing them because &c would it not deluge the world in blood. Want you should all [k]now God— be familiar— If I can get you to know I can bring to him, & if as you will cease to persecute me I speak in authority.— What kind of a being was God in the beginning. hear all ye ends of the earth, I am going to prove it by the bible & the relation the human family sustains with God. 1st God that sets enthroned is a man like one of yourselves— that is the great secret. If the vail was rent to day & the great God who holds this world in its sphere in its orbit— the planets— if you were to see him to day you would see him in all the persons image very form of man. for Adam was created in the very fashion of God. Adam received instruction walked talked as one man with another In order to understand the subjects of the ded for the consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friends necessary they should understand Going to tell you how God came to be God We have imagined that God was God from all eternity. These are imcomprehensible to some but are the first principle of the gospel— to know that we may converse with him as one man with another & that he was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh— [p. 13 [25]]