The Johnson has requested that I take some of the time I'm going to do it. Pray for the Spirit of God to continue with us and to bless me with the advantages that I could expect on mutual benefit. Recognize my weaknesses by the grace of God. Continue in my life and my legacy. Know that the work that we're engaged in is true. One of the things that is beginning to impress itself upon my mind, is creating a condition of me, and me is now to the picture, and beginning to find respect for the principles of the gospel, something that maybe I've always had to a more or less degree, but is beginning to shape up in my mind to a place where I can see the tremendous worth and influence on the lives of the people.

The gospel is the story of God, and we take it as a game of thought sometimes, and it's just the gospel that Mother and Father always talked about and are trying to comply with. It still has a meaningless place in our lives, I understand. We have yet to come to greater understanding, greater appreciation, greater response, greater animation over these matters than we've ever done before.

Before we can be brought up to a place where we can be used and blessed and exalted. And as this people needs to be blessed, it's just about as animated and better where I said that they should be. There's still a bunch of, still like the animation, vitality to come up and reform ourselves. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, when it was introduced to us in our spirit condition.

Certainly meant a good deal more to us there than it's meant to us here. That I'm sure of. I'm sure it animated our elder brother Jesus Christ to a place where he stepped forth in an act of grandeur and elegance and dignity that has had few equals. He was able to anticipate and recognize the condition that our father's children would slip into when he came to this earth and brought them into a condition of mortality.

When he was able to contemplate that, and the great labor of renovation and redemption and atonement that must be planned, and then he offered himself. Through that I see some maze of devotion. It makes me feel pretty lowly and humble and weak and shabby. When we see what the principles of life and salvation have done for our Father, then we get to a place where we can understand and have some respect for the great devotion.

suffering that he possessed. Having gone to a mortal state and brought himself to a condition where he can endure the glory and the great capacity that beset his bosom now, he then could begin to have greater respect for the gospel, and could cherish it more and would have a greater desire to apply it to others. I'm Fred Young, thinking to this as I pass Phil Clemson. I remember when I was Being treated by a brother of George's mother when I was in Idaho and trying to go along at the church and he snubbed me to that post and says, don't you dare do anything that will justify those people cutting you off from the church. And I tried to go along and I was blabbing to this woman there about the principles of the gospel and my former bishop turned on me and he says, Miriam, he says, I don't want to do it. So I go out and speak to my old dumb whore and try to teach righteousness to him.

to a people that don't want to be exalted in the kingdom of God. Isn't that so? Any here that has such feelings that they're so lazy, physically and mentally, and so void of a love of duty and responsibility that they don't want to progress in the kingdom of our Father, that they're left to labor, so drowned of being, and so...

generous in all their better, and the blood of the prophets be spilled upon the ground for their sake, for not, in depth of our ambition, have I been considered a lazy man. There is certainly a few things that guide me. Surely, for any, for I have to ginger up and clean them up, for the power and the hardship of the labor. And I can't stand to see people sacrifice for me, for I can't sense the gratitude being manifest on my own. Go through my life, and I see the power of God.

Going before me, day after day, and I see the buoyancy that comes up with me in the morning when I lay down at night, willing to die and never be resurrected. And I'm beginning to appreciate that God does these children. What He does for me in a personal way. Great mercy and patience. You people can think what you please. But I know, that God knows, that I desire the assignment. So is a good deal of charity and mercy. Be serious.

God do the best I can. I often feel ashamed of this congregation, if you don't tell everybody. A lot of the conditions that exist among these people danger a lot of things. I'm ashamed of our pride in our hiding place, thinking all year of it, both times, in the midst of these people whom we haven't got much to be proud of yet. It's a self-sufficiency. It's really a pride, a measure of pride and self-sufficiency that we manifest among each other.

There's very little ground. If you don't know it now, I know your hair gets just a little yellow. It's something that God puts in use that certainly is necessary. It's a great boon to them. You have to have it there in order to get things done. And they go along and do lots of things in their ignorance and take it for their own strength. But finally when you come to this place where your hair gets thin, and then you begin to understand it's by the grace of God that you accomplish these things.

I think there's very few people that's ever lived upon the face of this earth. Very, very few. That have had self-control enough, self-discipline enough, that they have gone through life and haven't made a lot of blundering mistakes. And consequently, I think that we ought to sense this. And I don't like to drive people into despair and make them feel that they're nothing. But I don't know how we're ever going to accomplish this.

the things we need to accomplish in our lives until we see us arriving at it. When we see that, then we will begin to understand what we need to do. And I don't think that you'll ever come to an understanding of these things until you can develop some appreciation for what they'll do for you. For instance, when I see certain qualities of character being manifest in my brethren, and I see them grow and grow and grow, and then I begin to get some respect, for those qualities in another man. And so when I see what the principles of the gospel have done for our Heavenly Father, then I am beginning to get some respect for those principles. I had some occasion to think today, and I can repeat it to you, of what virtue, in and of itself, is the ordinance of darkness. Now you take our Gentile neighbors, I think that in their private moments that they have listened.

and snort that this ordinance of God given that people go down and they get some water and then they come up and say that their sins have been washed away. Boy, is that ridiculous. And it comes to the wisdom of man, doesn't it? There's an element of ridiculousness. And what appreciation can a person have for such an ordinance unless he believes or has a hope springing within his business or has a confidence in God? Can't have it.

But after you've once partaken of its fruit and obtained the blessing, why then you're confident to act with God and you can testify with boldness that the miracle is performed. We men can testify to it. I can testify to it. I can testify to the propriety and the truthfulness and the veracity of what the Lord says about the ordinances of baptism. That if we'll go into the waters and say, with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, that I...

sins will be washed away because i've had the experience i've looked upon this ordinance of marriage you talk about respect for a principle for around two years here she's lived 75 years about she knows all the ways of the world and take her religion away and she'd look at me and say to us mr hammond have you got to adapt would you stand there and tell me that you or anybody else or some other man can take a man and woman by the hand and join them together in healing for time and all eternity? That they can come up in some kind of a resurrection and live eternally? Have you got the audacity to tell me that? I have time to change. Missing, isn't it? You're trying to impose it on my whole human mind. But having had the experience, I know, power of God vested in men, properly God-bearing and concerned about you, can heal for time and all eternity.

I don't know where they got the bug, but they thought that they had it there. He got me crying and said, Brother Hammond, have you had a baptism of fire? And I said, yes, I've had a baptism of fire. I've had my body burned so I thought I would be consumed. It wasn't by the power of man either. And I don't care whether they believe it or who believes it, I know it. That's the experience that I have. You people or any other people can do or believe what you please. But I know that I've had it and I know that other men have had it too. I know that Joseph must have had it.

I knew that he knew what he was talking about, because I knew the same thing by the dictates of the same spirit. And so my Gentile friends can kiss and ridicule and make fun of my clear notions, and the clear notions of my friends as long as they want to. But within me, I have a profound respect for the laying on of hands, for the gift of the Holy Ghost and the concern of the people. He says no to the Lord, but I'm not alone. Any of you dead in the city?

and had similar experiences, haven't you? And you may say, yes, and that's the kind of people that God is hoping to obtain and have the experiences for them. How could we ever impose or persuade these people to so conduct themselves that they could obtain the Spirit of God unless they had tasted it? If that isn't another ridiculous thing, I don't know how to do it. For me to say to myself, I can so live that I can obtain the Spirit of a person that I haven't seen before.

Years and years and years, and I couldn't prove to my contemporaries that I had ever seen it. For me to try to tell them that I had seen history. I can listen to the poets who do it, and the problems that they're confronted with concerning it. I couldn't see what made any difference to them, or what they didn't think, or what they were going to do, or what they didn't do. I have an insurance in me. The labors and workers I follow this time have no concern about the threats that...

There are anticipated operations against this people only to be wise and true. To watch them and to overcome them and to take my affairs and go on through and get as many people to come along with me as I can. I've read that it's been written by the prophets that at the terrible end it's going to be set those that fight against the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I know it's ridiculous to them. I believe it.

So if it dictates me in relation to many other things, it dictates me in that. That this world is heading for destruction. Hacking up an awful booth, but they don't think that they're being hacked up because God has decreed their destruction. They just, they figure that they've hacked it up because they're not too smart for their business. And I guess they're both too. And I'm just as curious at the work of God's recurrence as I am that I'm standing here. But these temples, it has made our heavenly father.

of great and wise and capacitated to do the same thing for anybody else that would have tried them. I think in the other day, things would have been said, especially in the Book of Mormon by Father Lehi, when he had that vision of that great and narrow way that the saints had to follow in order to obtain eternal life. You used to think it was certainly a pretty good, very straight and narrow. There's certainly a lot of people going in. But I can see now that it's a single-sided proposition.

Imagine that Brother Johnson finds anybody stepping on his feet. He has plenty of room. The people have gone before him. I imagine they have plenty of room. But it's a great cause of things that lead to Godhood. The attributes that are vested in the dogma of our Father are shorn of all the sadness and filth and dross that defects the human dogma. And there are mighty few people that accept the fact. There are very few people.

Could want to be that honest. Could want to be filled with that much integrity. Could have that much love for virtue. Could have that with any kind of appreciable amount of love. Because it's truth. It's pure, naked truth. Often said, and it's the truth that most of my relatives would lie in the truth of certain death. And how that they could ever bring themselves into condition to want to walk that path would be a miracle in my eyes. After coming to the place where they would love the truth better than their lives.

If you just look at them, this world is filled, literally filled with overflowing now. And I fear this circle is going to have more people of the same class. Where, where did you find one of them that loves the pure, naked truth? The attributes that our Father has acquired by applying the principles of this gospel that we've been taught. Love for the pure, naked truth. Why, what else? Cheating and lying comes under all that, remember that saying?

But how many people have any confidence in the things that I've reiterated to you tonight? In the ordinance of baptism, which power to wash a man's tears he's sinned, and that's the union to that great kingdom of God. How many people can you find that have confidence in such a thing? By those that do or be set by spiritualism or various kinds of damnable doctrines that it does away with the veracity and the virtue of the ordinance.

Because if they believe in the ordinance, they don't believe in the power to administer it. And they think it must anybody. And so that path is very narrow. How many people can you find that has an attachment in a legitimate priesthood? A curse. A curse in the eyes of people. A man that is legitimate. Why? Because he's bound, as Joseph said, to reveal the sins and the iniquities of the generation in which he lives. And if he does that, that is blood. So how many people?

Can you find a contrary, pure, true, pure, legitimate society that is reputedly to be the truth? Every nation of the Union participated in the death of the prophet Joseph Smith. Now, what class is that? Why, that was the politicians. Did you find any of them that believed in legitimate society? Why, they were clamoring to perpetuate upon the people illegitimate society.

to have their own dreams and visions and personal gains realized. In that particular day, why it was to obtain influence over the free lands and other things where they could gain to themselves tremendous wealth and take advantage of the people. Now what about this thing? Hasn't it multiplied a hundredfold in righteousness? And then you want to fix this nation or this earth for someone who has respect for legitimate authority?

Is it any wonder that we can get them all in Brother Fisher's home? It isn't to me. It used to be. But I've been around a little. I'm acquainted with the hearts of men. These hearts, I don't know why I can't find out who he was. And I don't want a legitimate society. Why? Why it requires us to lay by all these things that they have built for them through the traditions of their people and through their own vain ambitions. How can you find?

And these United States, a team of all the nations of the earth, very many men and women, who ought to be sealed together for time and all eternity, under the conditions of a new and everlasting country, so good as all is ever. By one of the greatest hardships imposed upon this priesthood generally, I mean all the better, is living the law of poor men. How do men believe it?

If something shows up in their lives, it's that they're very inexpensive in living that life. As the other tempsons often stated, they've got one standard for winning the first life, and a second standard for winning the other. They live with all the poor wives by principle, and by the first wife the way they're bound to. And that's the way the world is. They take mistresses and concubines by the dozens. If they don't have conditions, they're left with their own hearts. And they don't want them. They don't want to be sponsored by them.

I'm living after the moon of life. God taking away from the people. If the legitimacy is one thing and another, how many can you find? Whose hearts are pure and content with the kingdom of God? It's still your virtue and integrity and government. All the other things are safe. As I go along, I'm getting a good restitution for you. For you people who have this fight. Burning your fingers. If you want to rise up here and bless this place. Thanks for serving children who are being born.

And this relationship comes with a mysterious truth. Build up the kingdom of God in the circumstances of their lives. The nature of their spirit. The hungering of their hearts generally is not asked of the saints. And it proves to me that this people of the world, the people generally of this church, are of a Gentile nature. And they are of the very nature that was talked about by Mormon.

That is, in the Book of Mormon days, the gospel would be offered to them, and taught to them, and said among them. And if they rebelled against it, war on to them. Because it's war on to them. I don't think they can find hardly a hand for it. And these 150 million people, these things that we talk about, they can see that. See that there's very few people, generally speaking, that has any love for this rigid way of life. All that they can see is consignment.

robbing of their agency, and they haven't the foresight to see that after they've obtained these things, that they have obtained greater agency than they ever could have dreamed of. Women, women often defile and complain about a poor relationship because all that they can see is not having the husband home when they wanted. They never have any faith to look beyond.

to see an exaltation in the realms of the gods, so that they can live and dwell and reign forever, and have principalities and ties and dominions and privileges that never entered into their history at any time of the earth. They haven't got the foresight to see it, and the brethren that live in this city that God has so carefully prepared, and brought here that this work might be established and given to them if they wanted it, haven't got any hope, any aspiration.

or anything beyond the gates. I am more grateful every day that I live for my circumstances and grateful for my brethren that are in poverty. I was thinking the other day on this earth where God could get a group of men like them. They cannot be controlled by circumstances, by conditions, or by anything except the principles of the God. Politicians are excited. Tradition is excited. Relatives are excited.

Everything that can be brought to bear upon this order was tasted from the days of Joseph Smith till now. It failed to control him. Brigham Young could not be controlled. The government of the United States tried to control him, and they failed. The only thing that can control Brigham is the principles of the gospel. These things that we are beginning to see will be so much for America. Could John Taylor be controlled? There wasn't anything on this face of the earth, and he pooped.

It could control John Taylor. He stepped right there into the New York Center and New York Herald two of the greatest newspapers of his 20th century and tore them to ribbons. And they tried their level best. Johnson's army started the marching on Salt Lake City. President Young put him in the pulpit and he called him such names and made such a tirade against him and such bitterness. Governor Young told him on the pulpit and thought maybe he'd better temper him down a little bit.

We almost went into a rage of jolly. I am one of God's troops to be led into it. But as those who have gone before us, as those who left the attack, have been trained to battle at the gate in this momentous day. The state of nations is being laid on the ground. This isn't to rise as not as our contemporaries would have it to be. Have your day to come and live it up. To enjoy every felicity and everything that's made of our discipline.

I can see where we can use and put to good benefit all the things that it's provided for through our gentile friends. But if they were taken away, I, of course, would still do the same. Come to this earth with you. Take up the flesh that's provided for us. Take it to its existence and take it back into the presence of our Father in such conditions that he can add upon it a time and a life. The only why that I feel like God has given me some...

The sense of the anxiety that I might have felt in the spirit world over my condition, the condition of my body and my system when we looked upon our gates and mobile phones. Incapacities, intelligence, that they killed and didn't die. Spirits that resumed that they had got their bodies up to a condition where it was still left in our God. In fact, there is a stated prohibition there that we have to work and study and apply ourselves with all our capacities and energies.

is to come to this earth with sufficient qualifications and capacities to bring these bodies of flesh and bone into subjection. When I see the struggles that we're having, I don't think that I want to do it. I think that we labored and we labored us all diligently to get our spirits deeped and teetered and energized and educated on the rights of salvation. But then we came here that we wouldn't take. Almost here, we labored and toiled.

to get ourselves dictated and prompted by the gospel of Jesus Christ and the dictates of the spirit of our past. But when we change it, that we wouldn't miss opportunities to be numbered with the saints. So to do. On other occasions, I don't know whether I've remarked it here or not, but I've said this, that Joseph W. Musser was the first man of God that I ever laid my eyes upon. Thankful to this day, I was able to write.

He blocked her, whatever it was. I'm not going to try to feel the same way, don't you? Aren't you thankful that she was able to recognize the message when it came? That she sensed that you're among your former associates, that you're prevailing and wandering from the first world, as being friendless. The whole life of Roy Johnson, I can tell you the life of William Jeff, better guy, Richard Hill, you name him, I can tell you their lives.

While they were self-serviced, often in days of their childhood, until I found this piece of that they were wanted, every one of them, and that they were that real true friend. The contact that we've made, until we met these beddingers of the seeding nature, had a head associate here, an associate there, but they never had those qualities of integrity that could win our hearts and establish it in the earth, until we met this piece of it.

Well, I'm not surprised. I'm not at all surprised. But I've got a different spirit in me and a different nature in me and my Gentile contemporary. I couldn't expect them to understand me through time and all eternity because the same spirit doesn't dictate them what dictates me. They might have qualified themselves on the other side for a body, but they certainly didn't qualify themselves on the other side to come and participate.

and the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the bidden of the peace. That's what I'm going to talk about. The only confidence that I have in my brother can be thankful for what he did, and thankful for this. My deal is to praise God, and respect all control, that he so wonders me children, that he will see to it one way or another that we adopt the knowledge of the truth. I know he keeps his covenant, and that he's no respecter of faith. He has no cause to find me out.

The grace of God. I saw they came out this morning, the prophet Joseph Smith, and the very day that I finally got my way through the Book of Mormon, the Spirit of God settled upon me and said, as literally translated by the gift and power of God, in German, living being and not a spirit of the prophet, let the others say what they please. I'm willing to hold him as part of the Godhood. So you, such blunder and such capacity and such strength.

as he set his judgment to come into this earth and start to break down the traditions and the follies of the wicked and to those generations. And I'm willing to recognize him, with that a man up here on some kind of a throne calls himself a governor of the state, and some other man boasts of being the president of the church, but I can say what Jefferson boasts, of being one of God's nobleness, because he's principled on it. Christ would run to your attention to set his judgment.

He loved the innocent, and the virtuous, and the lowly, and the pure. He loved judgment, and most of all, to find judgment. And I tell you that they can permeate us, and that we can literally learn to love the God. The principles that can do something for us. I've told this people time and time again, that we should pray to not hold and sustain that power to conduct.

And that's good, sound judgment. It's no apple polishing. It isn't anything about it. We should have to sustain and uphold the power of God. So it's the power of God that can uphold us and redeem us and save us and exalt us and accept these principles. Here is our guide to it. We have to use and practice and incorporate into our lives that they will change our character in such a way that we will eventually be like him. This is our hope.

And I ask the way can help me look. Blessings of God be upon us. We better try to look for things that can do something for us. We certainly can manifest plenty of devotion toward things that can't. I remember that I did in giving a good jacking up one night about the women. Say, oh, I just love this girl. I just love this girl. I just love this girl. I love this. And I love that. And I better say how much I love this person.

Well, it's an illegitimate love, isn't it? It's illegitimate. It isn't based upon a true and virtuous plan. And the only thing that we could love is the principle. We can renovate our churches and change us into the likeness of God. It's the only thing that we could really love. The women's church. We'd learn to love and pray. The thing that can bless them. And cling to this world with its broken down ways.

an illegitimate hypocrisy, an immoral function. It's a sad, sad thing. I've often said this, and I'll make this one comparison and then I'll accept it. I'm thankful that there's such a broad way between the priesthood and the church. It takes care of all the poor students and the people that can't take very deep concerns. But they can just feel and see the sense of virtue and propriety.

They can tell the ways of this piece, it is the ways of God. And they can tell that the way this church is going and has been going for the last 50 or 60 or 100 years, especially, is not the ways of God. But they've been, the great majority of them, have been in a state of apostasy ever since they landed in these valleys of the mountain. And that's who you can tell it in her day and her kid days, and I can tell it in my kid days. And I can tell it now.

My sense of justice, my sense of equilibrium and well-balanced. A good, sound decision tells me that when I have those comparisons to drive. Now for you women, folks. If you need a little bit of word of comfort and encouragement. Haven't you got sense of balance and good, sound judgment in your head to tell you that this is a better way of life and the way the world is going? Your love is based upon a very steady...

While you love cars, it can be wrecked. You can love homes, it can be burned down. You can love dresses, it can wear out. And when you're finally about death, if you can make it, I don't know what you can love. But if you can learn to love God, learn to love the principles of life and salvation, if you can learn to love and carry some man that can exalt you, then you've got something that you can love eternally. But if your loves are all absorbed in things that can be destroyed, Eventually, you're going to find yourself destitute. And maybe you just feel now like my old bishop says, as I told you, when I tried to tell him about the goodies and the glories of the gospel. No, and I don't have to do that. Now, if that's your condition, I don't see any remedy. I certainly think that the worst hell each of you could be brought into would be trying to get someone to try to exalt you when you didn't want to be. And if you find some gracious way of buying out, get on your way.

But if you have some sense of justice, the spirit dictates to you once in a while. If you have the faith to change it, it will increase in your life, and it will be multiplied, strengthened, and fortified, and you'll be able to lay hold of that eternal life. God bless you.