Elder Daniel Tyler, who has kindly furnished us several
items which he recollects of the Prophet, and which have been published some
time since, adds the following to what has previously appeared:
"The Prophet Joseph Smith was a great reconciler of
discrepancies in passages of scripture which were or seemed to be in conflict
with each other. Until the writer heard the great expounder of Bible doctrines
explain the following passages he concluded there must be a wrong translation
in one verse or the other. The verses read as follows:
"'I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance,
but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shows I am not worthy to
bear; he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.'—Matthew iii.11.
"Here we have baptism with water, baptism with the
Holy Ghost, and baptism with fire, three in number. The question naturally
arises, how can this passage be reconciled with the following:
"There is one body, and one spirit, even as ye are
called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism'—Eph.
iv., 4, 5, 6.
Had one of these passages been found in the Bible and the
other in the Book of Mormon what a howl would have went up from our Christian
friends of other denominations.' It would have been pointed to by both press
and pulpit as a plain contradiction between the two books, and as a matter of
course the latter would have been condemned as false. How different was the
case with the great reconciler of one truth with another—the man who always
accepted facts and rejected falsehoods no matter whence they came.' He said,
while speaking on the subject of baptism in Nauvoo: 'There is but one baptism:
it takes the baptism of water, of the Holy Ghost, and of fire to constitute one
full baptism.' With this explanation where is the conflict, where the ground of
cavil, where the contradiction? There is none. Three abstract truths mentioned
by John the Baptist in the first scripture quoted are combined in one great
whole by St. Paul in the second.
"I recollect a so-called Christian minister once
quoting St. Paul to prove that water baptism was not essential to salvation,
because the apostle said 'one baptism,' and that was the baptism of the Holy
Ghost: but he had forgotten that Christ said, 'Except a man be born of water
and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven,' In fact, many
have tried to explain away the seeming contradiction in the two passages of
scripture referred to, but Joseph Smith is the only man I ever heard or heard of
who ever gave an explanation that was not subject to objection or in conflict
with the scriptures." (Daniel Tyler, "Recollections of the Prophet
Joseph Smith," The
Juvenile Instructor 28, no. 8 [May 15, 1893]: 332)
