The following are excerpts from:
W. W. Phelps, Deseret Almanac,
for the Year of Our Lord, 1854 (Salt Lake City: W. Richards, 1854)
The
Lord says, tithe, to wave burning. . . . None are as wise as God. . . .
We have a father and mother in heaven. (p. 5)
Gideon
knew God in the wool: and Balaam by an ass braying. (p. 15)
To
hide is human:
To reveal, divine. (p. 21)
Spirits.
To
give a full history of Spirits, begotten, raised, educated, and destinated, in
the celestial world, would require the ‘memory’ and ‘experience’ we left there
when we chose to take our mission for this world.—But little has ever been
revealed on the subject. The common occurrences of life teach us however, that
spirits had knowledge in the elder world: whether human or not human. The
wisdom of God is plainly manifest in his creations: so that a “life-giving
power” animating man, beast, fowl, fish, reptile, and insect, “spreads
undivided, and operates unspent” from age to age. And when we read that Jesus
Christ was with the Father, in the beginning, and came down from the Father,
and was begotten of the Father, and born of a woman, like ourselves, and raised
up among his brethren; suffered in the flesh as mortal, was buried and arose on
the third day in newness of life, we certainly have one chain of evidence, that
spirits had an existence with God in another world.
.
. .
There
is one thing still father in relation to the spirits before they come into the
flesh, and that is, that they have a body and live by sustenance, the same as
mortals: for Jesus said to the brother f Jared: “Behold, this body, which you
now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of
my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in spirit, will I appear unto
my people in the flesh.” And again, when this same Jesus, long afterwards,
visited Abraham, he killed a calf and made cakes, and HE DID EAT with the old
patriarch, in company with others, and blessed Sarah at ninety years, to bring forth
Isaac. So it seems that Jesus Christ had a body and lived by eating before he
was born of Mary. And more than this, he had a Father and Mother in heaven: for
in the forty-fifth Psalm (literally from the Hebrew) is read these sublime
sentences:--“Thy throne (is as) the Gods of eternity; and the eternal red of
justice (is) the red of thy kingdom. Thou lovedst righteousness and hatedst
wickedness, therefore the Gods with thy God anoint thee with the oil of joy
over thy household.—Myrrh, aloes, and eassia for all thy garments from palaces
of ivory are bestowed to gladden thee. The daughters of kings stand among thy
honorable wives: The Queen on the right hand in gems of Ophir.”
So
reads a portion of the blessing of the King and Queen of heaven, upon their son
before he came down, upon his mission to Idumea, or the world. And as he makes
his brethren, who come and take a body of flesh, “equal with him in power and
glory,” they must receive the same blessings of the spirit world before they
come.
One
idea further: Good angels and spirits never leave the realms of glory without
permission or commission: and when they arrive on the earth, the first salutation
is, (if an angel) I am Michael: I am Gabriel: or I am one of thy fellow
servants the prophets—worship God. No clairvoyance: no mesmerism: no spiritual
rapping: nor no making medicine. No, they come like a God and act like a God. (pp.
22, 24)
FATHER
of all, who dwellest in the midst of thy kingdoms in heaven . . . (“The King
Jester’s Prayer,” p. 28; note the plural kingdoms in the singular heaven)
THE BOYS OF THE KINGDOM.
BY W. W. PHELPS.
I.
O,
what army is that, with an armor so bright,
That it shines like the Gods’—in the regions of light?
Though their numbers are many—their hearts are but one,
And they go out to battle as if it was won.
II.
They’re
the boys of the Kingdom—the soldiers of God,
With the waves of two oceans to waft them abroad;
And they’re wearing the mantles the old prophets wore,
With a concourse of angels behind and before.
III.
And
they go from the mountains with new panoply,
from the desert and valley,--the home of the free;
To assemble the remnant—the priest-chosen seed,
Where the rocks rent asunder when Jesus did bleed.
IV.
And
the nations of earth are amazed at these men,
As they show forth the “myst’ry”—the now and the then,
E’en the wonder of ages—the harvest of man.
V.
They’re
the servants of Jesus—by kindred concern’d,
Out “to gather the wheat that the tares may be burn’d”--
With the four winds of heaven to blow off the chaff,
And a furnace well heated to melt “Aaron’s calf.”
VI.
They’re
endowed with that wisdom that surely will cope
With the spirits of “tares,” which exist without hope:
And the black-coated greatness that troubles mankind,
In a world of great sin, where the “blind lead the blind.”
VII.
Hear,
ye nations that cumber the vineyard of God,
From the days of the rebel, the wicked Nimrod:
All ye races from Babel, the mightiest “great.”--
Lo! The last days are here, with your folly and fate!
VIII.
There’s
a great noise like thunder—Jehovah hath spoke--
And the universe trembles—the first seal is broke!
And the white horse of heav’n with his rider and bow,
Neighs a “conq’ring to conquer” the legions of woe! (p. 29)