In my childhood, too, I was instructed to believe in the divinity of the mission of Jesus Christ. I was taught by my mother, a Saint indeed—that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that he was indeed no other than the Only Begotten of God in the flesh, and that, therefore, no other than God the eternal Father is his Father and the author of his existence in the world. I was taught it from my father, from the Prophet Joseph Smith, through my mother who embraced the gospel because she believed in the testimony of Joseph Smith, and she believed in the honor, integrity and truthfulness of her husband; and all my boyhood days and all my years in the world I have clung to that belief; indeed, I have never had any serious dubiety in my mind, even in childhood; and when I could only imperfectly understand things with reference to the divinity of the mission of the Son of God, I accepted it as being true in the sense in which only it can be true; for in no other than the literal sense, as it is described in the scriptures of divine truth and in the testimonies of the prophets, can it be true that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I believe it. I have believed it all my life; but I owe to the Prophet Joseph Smith the fixed and unalterable confirmation of that belief, until it has come to be, in my soul, a knowledge of the truth; and in so far as I have continued in the word of the Lord, I believe, I have been led to know the truth. I believe that I possess that freedom that comes from a knowledge of the truth, which teaches all men righteousness, virtue, honor, faith, charity, forgiveness, mercy, longsuffering patience and devotion to that which is good, and abstinence from that which is evil.
"The truth will make you free." Free from what? From error, free from doubt, and uncertainty, free from unbelief, free from the powers of darkness, free from the possibility of being tempted beyond your strength; but to resist error and to shun even the appearance of sin. This truth makes a man a Latter-day Saint. This knowledge of the truth makes you free to worship God and to love him with all your heart and mind and strength, and to do the next best thing—to love your neighbor as nearly as you possibly can as you love yourselves.
The truth that I have received teaches me that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, teaches me to accept without recourse, other than the full and free acceptance of that truth, that God Almighty, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Father of our spirits, the maker of heaven and earth, condescended to come down to this our mother earth, in person, in company with his beloved Son, and show themselves to Joseph Smith. I believe it. The truth has made me feel that this must be true. It cannot be error, for the Lord God Almighty could never build the structure that he has built upon the testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith, if it had been founded in error or untruth. This people never could have combined and adhered together, never could have been united, never could have seen eye to eye, never could have been one, in order that they might be acknowledged of God as his own, if we had been building upon error. If our foundations were laid in untruth and unrighteousness this could not be. But the Lord is at the bottom of this. Joseph Smith was not at the foundation of it. He was not responsible, only so far as he was obedient to the will of the Father. God is responsible for this work. The Lord Almighty has made the promises concerning this work, not Joseph Smith, not Hyrum Smith. No other man has made true promises with reference to the future of Zion and to the building up of the kingdom of God in the earth, except God inspired him to do it. Not of himself has man ever done anything of that kind. The Lord is at the bottom; the Lord is at the top; the Lord is all the way through this work, and every fibre of it is in his keeping and is moved by his magic power and by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit. That is my testimony to you.
I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, because more than ever I come nearer the possession of the actual knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, through the testimony of Joseph Smith contained in this book, the Doctrine and Covenants, that he saw Him, that he heard Him, that he received instructions from Him, that he obeyed those instructions, and that he today stands before the world as the last great, actual, living, witness of the divinity of Christ's mission and His power to redeem man from the temporal death and also from the second death which will follow man's own sins, through disobedience to the ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank God for Joseph Smith. I believe in his mission, having accepted this great truth and his narration of it.
The greatest event that has ever occurred in the world, since the resurrection of the Son of God from the tomb and his ascension on high, was the coming of the Father and of the Son to that boy Joseph Smith, to prepare the way for the laying of the foundation of his kingdom—not the kingdom of man—never more to cease nor to be overturned. Having accepted this truth, I find it easy to accept of every other truth that he enunciated and declared during his mission of fourteen years in the world. He never taught a doctrine that was not true. He never practiced a doctrine that he was not commanded to practice. He never advocated error. He was not deceived. He saw; he heard; he did as he was commanded to do; and, therefore, God is responsible for the work accomplished by Joseph Smith—not Joseph Smith. The Lord is responsible for it, and not man.
I am happy to express to this audience my knowledge of the successors of Joseph Smith. They reared me, in part, so to speak. In other words, with them I journeyed across the deserts, by the side of my ox-team, following President Brigham Young and his associates to these barren wastes, barren as they were when we first entered this valley. I believed in him then, and I know him now! I believed in his associates, and I know them now; for I lived with them; I slept with them; I traveled with them; I heard them preach and teach and exhort, and I saw their wisdom which was not the wisdom of man but the wisdom of Almighty God. When President Young set his foot down here, upon this desert spot, it was in the midst of persuasion, prayers and petitions on the part of some Latter-day Saints who had gone forward and landed upon the coast of California, that beautiful, rich country, semi-tropical, abounding in resources that no inland country would possess, inviting and appealing for settlers at that time, and just such settlers as President Brigham Young could have taken there—honest people, people who were firm in their faith, who were established in the knowledge of truth and righteousness, and in the testimony of Jesus Christ, which is the spirit of prophecy, and in the testimony of Joseph Smith which was a confirmation of the spirit of Christ and of his mission.
These people pleaded with President Young: "Come with us," they said, "and go to the coast. Go where roses bloom all the year round, where the fragrance of flowers scents the air, from May until May; where beauty reigns; where the elements of wealth are to be found, and only need to be developed. Come with us."
"No," said President Young, "we will remain here, and we will make the desert blossom like the rose. We will fulfil the Scriptures by remaining here."
I heard him tell one of the Battalion boys who came back from California with a little buckskin sack of gold nuggets, and who shook them in the face of President Young, and said to him: "Look what we could get if we were to go to California! The land is full of gold;" but President Young pointed his finger (I was there and saw and heard it), and he said: "Brother ————, you may go to California, if you will. Those who want to go there can go, but we will remain here; and I want to tell you that those who remain here and obey counsel, in a few years will be able to buy out every one of you who go to California—ten-fold over."
(Bishop George Romney: "That is true; I know the man.")