B.
Young. I feel to bless you in the name of the Lord. We are kicked & cuffed
by our enemies. There are great & glorious things in store for the faithful
& the Saints can see them by the Spirit. We have an eye on futurity after
dissolution for our bodies, then is the time for man to enjoy; that’s what we
are Mormons for; all Creation is again us now, but all Israel will know who are
their friends. They are now ignorant & darksome, [but] we shall
approximate to the Station from which we have fallen; even the Elders of Israel
can swallow up all the religion in the world & yet they have not peeped
into the things of futurity. There never was a Company of men on the face of
the Earth from Enoch ‘till now that have gone on as easily as we have. Moses
could not find them even in Israel. There is nothing so obnoxious to an Holy
Being as a nasty, little, petulant, fault finding Spirit. It has been said of
old, all the world is a Goose & a man is a fool who has not some picking of
the Feathers. I ask, can an honest man go & live in the world? No! They
would fleece him of all he has. Every man must have benevolence & do as you
would be done by & I know by the God of Abram, Isaac & Jacob that that
people is destined to be rich. I never have put my hand to any thing since I’ve
been in the Church but I’ve prospered. All the men in this Camp know more than
they practice. Many manifest a heedless careless Spirit. Every man’s interest
is the temporal & spiritual salvation to the Four Quarters of the Earth. I
have an interest for all of you. I want you all to have an interest one for
another. No man was more sorry than I was when Joseph was taken away. The
Savior & the Apostles were plagued with dishonest men same as we are. He
then blest the brethren in the name of the Lord. (Thomas Bullock, Journal entry
for September 23, 1847, in The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847
Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock, ed. Will Bagley [Kingdom in the
West: The Mormons and the American Frontier 1; Norman, Okla.: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1997, 2022], 294-95, emphasis added)
