Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Wilford Woodruff Claiming He Has a Gift from God to Record the Teachings of Joseph Smith

  

Sunday, June 10th. At St. George Tabernacle meeting, by request of Apostle Wilford Woodruff, Brother Bleak read President Brigham Young’s Discourse, delivered in Logan, Cache Co. on Friday, May 25th, 1877 at the Priesthood Meeting; held for the purpose of organizing a Stake of Zion. Brother Woodruff made some pertinent remarks on the Discourse, remaking in substance: the difference between President Young and himself was, that President Young remembered the sayings of the Prophet Jospeh in a most wonderful manner, while he, Brother Woodruff, had written the sings of the Prophet; he said he had never heard the Prophet Joseph deliver a sermon, a prophecy, or give a revelation, without writing it; as could be seen by referring to his Journals. The sermon delivered by Brother Joseph at the funeral of King Follett, he had written on the crown of his hat, standing in the congregation. He had a gift from God, it was this, that when he did not have pencil or paper with him, he could, after hearing the Prophet Joseph preach a sermon, go home and write it word for word and sentence after sentence, but after completing the writing—the sermon would pass from his mind, as though he had never heard it. At the time of doing these things in early days he did not understand that this habit of recording the words of the Prophet Joseph, was the calling to which God had called him, but the subsequent experience of the Church was, that those who had been Historians in the Church had apostatized, and had taken the Records, which they had in charge, with them. To meet this loss, he said, his Journals had proved very serviceable. (James Godson Bleak, The Annals of the Southern Mission, June 10, 1877, in The Annals of the Southern Mission: A Record of the History of the Settlement of Southern Utah, ed. Aaron McArthur and Reid L. Neilson [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019], 478-79)