Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Brigham Young (September 23, 1847): The Enemies of the Church are "ignorant & darksome"

  

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)