Joseph Smith the Prophet-Teacher: A Discourse

by B. H. Roberts

IV.

RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL BELIEFS OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

REVELATION: At the commencement of the nineteenth century the general idea prevailed in Christendom that a great while ago a very definite revelation from God had been given; angels had visited the earth and imparted divine knowledge to men; the Spirit of the Almighty had rested upon some and had given them understanding by which they were able to declare the mind of God and the will of God. These were prophets. Some prophets there were who even talked with God "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend." So communed Moses with God (Ex. 33:11); so, too, Isaiah (Isa. 6:1-6). But while this belief as to revelation in the past everywhere prevailed, orthodox Christendom was equally certain that no revelation was being given in their day; and not only was no revelation then being given, but neither would there be any revelation given in future time. "The volume of revelation is completed and forever closed," was dogma in all Christendom. There would be no future visitation of angels. No more would the heavens be opened, or man stand face to face with his God, or speak to his Lord as a man speaketh to his friend. All this was ended. The canon of scripture was completed, and forever closed. That canon consisted of the Old and New Testaments; all other books were secular—this alone sacred. There was no other word of God.

IDEAS OF DEITY: In regard to deity, Christian men, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed that God was an incorporeal, immaterial being, without body—that is, not material, not matter; without parts; without passions. And yet, with gravest inconsistency, they held that God was of love the essence; that He loved righteousness, that He hated iniquity; that He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life! Notwithstanding this "love" and this "hate" God was without passions! He was, too, according to men's creeds, without form. Notwithstanding Moses, one of the God-inspired teachers of men, said that "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him;" and Jesus, by a prophet of the New Testament, was declared to be the express image of God's person (Hebrews i: 2, 3). Notwithstanding this, I say, men, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, were possessed of a "morbid terror" of anthropomorphism—the ascription of human form, feeling or qualities to God—as if they could escape it and still hold belief in the Bible revelation of God! Or, for matter of that, hold to any doctrine of God taught either by religion or philosophy. At the very least, if the God-idea survive at all, God must be held to possess consciousness, both consciousness of self, and of other than self—self-consciousness, and other-consciousness; also He must be thought of as possessed of volition; and what are these but human qualities, which present God to our thought as anthropomorphic? Strip God of these attributes and He is reduced to the atheists' "force;" to blind, purposeless force, that can sustain no possible personal relationship whatsoever to men or other things in the universe. As one writer in a great magazine recently said: "If we are to know the Supreme Reality at all, it can only be through the attribution to Him of qualities analogous to, though infinitely transcending, the qualities which we recognize as highest in man, and consequently [highest] in the world as we know it."

But I must pass by these inconsistencies of the creeds of men. I shall have no time to discuss them. Indeed, I must ask you to think with me in headlines, and to think fast. We have no time for argument. We shall barely have time to pass over the ground proposed, and must depend upon the truth of our statements being self-evident, or conceded to be accurate statements of fact.

OF THE UNIVERSE: Respecting the universe, Christendom, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed that it was created of God from nothing, and that no great while ago. "Calling forth from nothing" was held to be indeed the meaning of "create." God transcended the universe; was, in fact, outside of it; was what an American philosopher (Fiske) some years afterwards called an "Absentee God." Absent, "except for a little jog or poke here and there in the shape of a special providence."

"Down to a period almost within living memory," says Andrew Dixon White, in his great work, "Warfare of Science with Theology," "it was held, virtually 'always, everywhere, and by all,' that the universe, as we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both—out of nothing—in an instant, or in six days, or in both—about four thousand years before the Christian era—and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole structure." Such were the views of men concerning the universe during the period here considered.

OF MAN: Respecting man, it was taught that while he was created of God, his origin was purely an earthly one, his body made of the earth, a spirit breathed into him when his body was made, and so man became a living soul. All taught that he was a created thing, a creature.

MAN AND HIS SALVATION: As to man's salvation, some of the creeds taught that God, of His own volition, had foreordained that some men and angels were doomed to everlasting destruction, and others predestined to eternal life and glory. Not "for any good or ill" that they had done or could do, but their fate was fixed by the volition of God alone. These whom He would save, He would move by irresistible grace to their salvation; those whom He had pre-determined should be damned might not escape, struggle they never so persistently; no prayers could save them; no act of obedience might mitigate their punishment; no hungering and thirsting after righteousness, bring them to blessedness; they must perish, and that eternally! Those who perish in ignorance of Christ—the heathen races—were damned. "The heathen in mass, with no single definite and unquestionable exception on record, are evidently strangers to God, and going down to death in an unsaved condition. The presumed possibility of being saved without a knowledge of Christ remains, after 1,800 years, a possibility illustrated by no example." So said those who expounded this creed. Others, still, taught that infants dying in infancy without receiving Christian baptism were damned, and that everlastingly. By some, unbaptized infants were denied burial in sanctified ground. "Hell's Half Acre" was a reality in some Christian graveyards.

OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SALVATION AND DAMNATION: Salvation and damnation meant, as to the former, the attainment of heaven; as to the latter, assignment to hell. The former, judging from the descriptions of it, a mysterious, indefinite state "enjoyed" somewhere "beyond the bounds of time and space * * * the saints secure abode;" the latter, a very definite place, with very definite and very hot conditions, that had power to endure and that everlastingly, to the eternal misery of the damned. Time might come and time might go, but this torture, undiminished, went on forever. If one gained heaven, even by ever so small a margin, he entered upon a complete possession of all its unutterable joys, equally with the angels and the holiest of saints. If he missed heaven, even by ever so narrow a margin, he was doomed to everlasting torment equally with the wickedest of men and vilest of devils, and there was no deliverance for him.

These were some of the prevailing ideas, of the philosophy and the religion of men at the birth of the Prophet. A philosophy inadequate for any reasonable accounting for the universe. A religion that was derogatory to God and debasing to man—errors of both philosophy and religion that it was, I believe, the mission of our Prophet to correct. Let us follow him as he proceeds with his corrections, his setting over against every error above enumerated the truth received of God.