This guarantee, however, this fortifying this land against all other nations, is upon a certain condition: the condition that the "God of the land, who is Jesus Christ," shall be honored by them. On this head I want to read to you a passage from a certain American statesman, that I can easily believe was one of the God-inspired men appointed to assist in the maintenance of true constitutional principles, as others were inspired to found the Constitution. I refer to the great statesman of nationalism, Daniel Webster, who, before the New York Historical society, in 1852, in his last public address, said:
"Unborn ages and visions of glory crowd upon my soul, the realization of all which, however, is in the hands and good pleasure of Almighty God; but, under His divine blessing, it will be dependent on the character and the virtues of ourselves, and of our posterity. If classical history has been found to be, is now, and shall continue to be, the concomitant of free institutions, and of popular eloquence, what a field is opening to us for another Herodotus, another Thucydides, and another Livy!
"And let me say, gentlemen, that if we and our posterity shall be true to the Christian religion—if we and they shall live always in the fear of God, and shall respect His commandments—if we and they shall maintain just, moral sentiments, and such conscientious convictions of duty as shall control the heart and life—we may have the highest hopes of the future fortunes of our country, and if we maintain those institutions of government and that political union, exceeding all praise as much as it exceeds all former examples of political associations, we may be sure of one thing—that, while our country furnishes materials for a thousand masters of the historic art, it will afford no topic for a Gibbon. It will have no decline and fall. It will go on prospering and to prosper.
"But if we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political Constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity. Should that catastrophe happen, let it have no history! Let the horrible narrative never be written! Let its fate be like that of the lost books of Livy, which no human eye shall ever read; or the missing Pleiad, of which no man can ever know more, than that it is lost, and lost forever!"
Such were the sentiments of this patriotic statesman; but the beautiful and flowing periods in which he expresses his thought, are in no respects better or stronger, or more patriotic than the rugged utterances of Joseph Smith, in whose utterances throughout our sacred books, there is a wealth of pure American sentiment that is the basis of a patriotism that shall yet exceed all praise.
In view of all that is here set forth, I submit that Joseph Smith was pre-eminently the American Prophet.
Standing in the midst of these ideas to which we have ascended in thought about this man and his life's work, all which tend to establish his claims as a Prophet—"a Teacher sent of God"—how unworthy indeed seem the attempts of men to stay his work, or defame his character by their silly misrepresentations! We hear a babel of confused voices coming up from the past, "pelting his memory with their unsavory epithets," but all is vain; he may not be disposed of in such manner.
Meanwhile, the truths he taught will live to instruct mankind, and of Joseph Smith it will yet be said—as Josiah Quincy half predicted sixty-three years ago—He influenced his countrymen more than any other historical American of his time.
End of Project Gutenberg's Joseph Smith the Prophet-Teacher, by B. H. Roberts