"For ye shall have great joy and be exceeding glad, for great shall be your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you."
Now, I cannot pursue this subject longer. I will say this, that these are the doctrines of Jesus Christ. These are some of the words that He uttered to the people upon this continent, and these are the words that He uttered to the people upon the old continent, or over there in Jerusalem. Other words He uttered which we will not have time to refer to; but He taught as never man taught, and the doctrines that He taught are yet—almost at least—as high above the conceptions of mankind and their ability to carry them out, as the heavens are above the earth. Yet, His doctrine is true; His precepts are righteous; His gospel is the power of God unto salvation; and in proportion as man rises to a conception, and an acceptance of and obedience to the principles taught by the Son of God, the nearer he becomes like Him and like the Father of our spirits and the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He was God in the flesh; He was Emmanuel or "God with us," the Savior of the world. The Latter-day Saints believe in Him not only because of the testimonies borne of Him in the Bible—in the four gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament, and the predictions of the prophets in the Old Testament of the Bible, concerning His coining and mission; not only because of the evidences we have here in the Book of Mormon, where it is still more plainly given than it is in the Bible, nor because we also have further and stronger evidences of the divinity of His mission in the revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith, but also because we have the testimony of witnesses of these divine things and, especially, of the divine mission of Jesus Christ, by and from men whom we have seen in the flesh, with whom we have conversed, with whom we have associated and whom we know to have been, in their lives, pure, upright, honest and faithful servants of the living God. Beside all this we know the truth by the witness of the spirit to ourselves. Now, may the Lord bless you.
Of course, we understand that this is not, indeed, the natal day of the Savior. He was not born on the 25th day of December; but this is the day that has been accepted by the world, at least by the so-called Christian world, as His natal day, and we have accepted it with them. It would be difficult, indeed, to break away from it and celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the Lord on the day that He was really born. So we meet, today, to celebrate that important event and to praise His name. I thank my Father in heaven for the faith He has given me in the divinity of the mission of Jesus Christ. I thank Him for the blessings of the holy priesthood that He has restored to the world in this dispensation. I thank Him for the organization of His Church. I thank Him for the ordinances of the gospel of Jesus, from baptism for the remission of sins, and the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost, all along to the endowment and sealing and higher ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which were designed to prepare men, by ordination, appointment and faithfulness, to dwell with God in the eternal world. May the Lord bless us and help us to be faithful always, to the end, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus. Amen.