Early in this dispensation, a revelation was
given in which the Prophet was addressed as
follows: “Be patient in afflictions for
thou shalt have many,"
Near the end of his life, the Prophet wrote:
“I have become accustomed to swim in deep water,"
In the same epistle, he said, “The envy
and wrath of man have been my common lot all
the days of my life.”
But, he added, “Every wave of adversity has only wafted me that much closer to divinity." A magnificent statement.
Now, lets go back to the beginning. We have Mother Smith's record. There were some over the last
three decades who have felt that since these recollections were dictated by the mother of the Prophet
in her late years, and had been somewhat altered in the writing, that they were not reliable.
A fellowship was given to Doctor Richard L. Andersen some three years ago to study the originals and
compare them to the published. The overall verdict, with two or three minor exceptions,
the overall verdict is that Mother Smith is exceptionally reliable, and that the names, the places,
the dates, and the events that she chronicles can be confirmed in other sources.
"You have," said Father Smith to Mother Smith once, "one of the most remarkable families in the world."
On that same occasion, Father Smith gave a
blessing to each of his assembled children,
blessings that not only prophesied but also
reflected the monumental struggle that the
Prophet and those around him would have to go through.
In a revelation given in 1829, the year before
the Church was organized, Joseph had been
admonished, “Repent and . . . be firm in
keeping the commandments . . . and if you
do this, behold I grant unto you eternal life,
even if you should be slain.”
One month later both Joseph and Oliver were
addressed with this counsel: “And even if
they do unto you even as they have done unto
me, blessed are ye, for ye shall dwell with me in glory."
In fact, the Prophet once said, "If you cannot endure persecution," And I quickly add that enduring isn't just
going through, most of us get through our trials, if that means merely surviving. To endure, in the Christlike way,
is something more. "If you cannot endure persecution," said Joseph Smith, "you cannot endure
the glory of the Celestial Kingdom."
This is an interesting test each of us might
apply to ourselves.
“Many of the elders of this Church will
yet be martyred,” Joseph said on one occasion,
and one wonders whether the long shadow of
his own martyrdom was in his mind at that time.
Persecutors did do unto him and his brothers
as they had done unto the Lord.
They fought, they vilified, they attacked.
They perceived him as a threat to them, and
they did all within their power to stop him.
Someone has suggested that the worst difficulties
that came to the early Church arose from its
clash with other organized religions. That, I think, is a half-truth.
The Church did suffer immensely from what
could be called “officialdom” in the religious
world, and it suffered more in political and
social areas.
By all odds, the opposition that was the most
difficult and painful and hurtful to the Church
was that which arose from apostates. The difficulty!
The ancient ministry of Christ faced betrayal from within, and it was so also in this modern dispensation.
A revealing conversation once occurred between
Joseph Smith and a brother named Isaac Behunnin.
He had seen men involved in the quorums and
in the high spiritual experiences of the kingdom
who had subsequently become disaffected, and
it was a mystery to him why they had then
devoted their zeal and energy to attacking
the Church.
He said to the Prophet: “If I should leave
this Church I would not do as those men have done.
I'll go away, I'll buy an acre of ground somewhere else, I'll never even mention even mention the Mormon Church,
and I'll forget it." The Prophet smiled wisely, and then said, "Brother Behunnin, you do not know what
you will do.
When you joined this Church you enlisted to
serve God.
When you did that you left the neutral ground,
and you never can get back on to it.
Should you forsake the Master you enlisted
to serve it will be by the instigation of
the evil one, and you will follow his dictation
and be his servant.”
Happily, Brother Behunnin was faithful to
his death.
What Joseph said there became a genuine description
of case after case.
To name a few: William McClellin, to some degree Thomas B. Marsh.
William Law, John C.
Bennett,
Up until the Nauvoo era every one of the Prophet’s
own counselors, with the sole exception of
his brother Hyrum, either betrayed him, went
astray, faltered, or failed in some way.
Some, glorious to report, found their way
back.
Orson Hyde, not a member of the First Presidency
but one of the Twelve, under oath endorsed
terrible things said against the Church, of which he later repented.
In the case of our first martyr, David W. Patten, the senior member of the Twelve, he too, under the Kirtland fire,
became disaffected, and then repented. In his case was "so anguished," was he, in what he had done, that he
said to the Prophet, "I have prayed to the Lord, and asked if I could give my life to wipe out what I have done."
The Prophet sorrowed and said, "Oh Brother, a man of your faith may receive what he prays for."
Brother Patten died in the skirmish in Missouri. As the Prophet stood over his limp body, he said,
"There lies a man who has done just what he said he would. He has given his life for the Lord.
But many remained bitter in their opposition
to the end.
“If it were not for a Brutus,” Joseph
said in 1844, “I might live as long as Caesar
would have lived.”
There was more than one!
So, much enmity came from within and Joseph
struggled as the revelation warned him he
would: “If thou art in perils among false
brethren.
. . .” That is only the beginning.
Think for a moment of Joseph’s physical
setbacks.
In lecture two we noted his leg operation
early in life.
He had a slight limp ever after and could
not be enlisted in the state militia in Missouri
because of that injury.
On that awful night, at the Johnson home in
Hiram, Ohio, when he was dragged out and his
body was bent and twisted by strong men, they
left him with back sprains from which he never healed.
He had two large scars on his hip where they had beaten him with guns over a period of time in a wagon,
until he had 18-inch bruises.
That night they tried to poison him with aquafortis
(nitric acid), and as he clenched his teeth
to prevent the vial from going in his mouth,
one of his teeth was broken.
It was never properly cared for, and there
was a slight lisp in his speech after that.
More than once he faced the diseases of the
time but overcame them, and he was even smitten
with cholera at the end of the Zion’s Camp
march.
In all of this Joseph struggled both to endure
and to overcome.
That is the tension we all face.
What must we simply go through, and what,
through our faith and worthiness, can we overcome?
He was never completely free of physical strains
and, again, never really free of the pressures
of the Presidency.
He was indeed in deep water.
Throughout life, in his own family some deep
cuts and wounds came to him.
For example, several of his children died
at birth or soon after.
He speculated—he did not say it was a doctrine
of the Church—that perhaps some of the choice
children born into this world and then taken
so quickly were before their births, so noble,
and so advanced in their relationship with the Lord, that the only real remaining need they had from mortality,
was to take a body, and then the Lord released them.
On the other hand, he once observed that he
did not like to see a child die in infancy,
because it had not yet, as he put it, “filled
the measure of its creation and gained the
victory over death.” Suggesting that eventually somehow, during or beyond the Millennial reign they would indeed
have to face the same basic problems you and I in mortality face.
There is, I take it, no substitute for experience. There is no magic wand that can enable us to become
what we are in the ultimate reach to become. There's only one way, no shortcuts.
A woman recorded years later that, at the
Prophet’s request, her mother “lent”
one of the family’s twin little girls to
him and Emma to assuage their loneliness at
the loss of their own children.
Joseph called her “my little Mary.”
In the morning he would come just after breakfast,
pick up the child, take her home to Emma for
most of the day, then bring her back in the
evening.
When he was late in returning the child one
day the mother went to the Prophet’s home
and found him dandling her on his knee and
singing to her, as she had been fretful.
The next morning she handed him Sarah, the
other baby.
Strangers could not distinguish one from the
other, but Joseph did.
He took a step or two, stopped, turned back,
and said, “Oh no, this is not my little Mary."
Many have observed that Joseph’s love for
children was remarkable, that he seemed to
find deep happiness playing with a child on
his knee, or helping one across a muddy field,
or picking flowers to give to children, or
wiping away their tears.
I believe that the response of those children,
and we have record of many, to him is one
of the lasting witnesses of the nobility of
his soul.
Children are not easily deceived.
Many have described how they felt in his presence.
How he loved little children!
In Nauvoo, preaching was almost always done
out of doors because there was no adequate
inside accommodation.
(The temple was unfinished.)
There was sometimes the problem of order and
decorum.
Often people stood to listen, sometimes on
the benches of their wagons drawn up near the speaker.
Occasionally the younger people would move
out behind the dais or to the side to sit.
Those charged with the responsibility for
order, the ushers and others, could be very
severe to those young people. The Prophet always chided those who went too far.
“Let the boys alone,” he would say, “they
will hear something that they will never forget.”
“May God bless you, my little man,” he
said to ten-year-old Amasa Potter, who was still
struggling to get up to four feet. "God bless you, you will yet see Israel triumph, and in peace."
Another of the Prophet’s trials in the home
related to the burdens imposed on their marriage
by his persecutors, burdens that Emma too
had to carry.
Often they would think they had a moment of
peace, and then there would come the rude
shock at the door: another lawman, another
lawlessman, another subpoena, another cry,
another warning.
At one point two little girls were charged
with keeping their eyes open for anyone who
came within a block of the house.
They would rush to the house and say, “Someone
suspicious-looking is coming.”
Sometimes the Prophet would leave, and sometimes
he would hide, and sometimes the person would
turn out to be a friend who looked disreputable,
such as bearded, long-haired Porter Rockwell.
Joseph would scoop up the children and run out and say, “Now, now, he’s not all that all that bad, is he?"
Porter Rockwell was one of the colorful characters we cannot any longer, I suspect, disentangle fact from myth.
But whatever you may read remember this statment from Joseph Smith: "Brother Porter is an innocent boy,
and my soul loves him."
Then there were the endless legal entanglements.
Brigham Young said that Joseph had forty-[six]
lawsuits.
The standard LDS statement is that he was
acquitted from all these.
It is true in most cases that he was, but
in some he was convicted.
There was a charge, for example, in the state
of New York that he was guilty of casting
out an evil spirit.
The trial was held and he was found guilty.
The judge then observed that there was, to
his knowledge, no ordinance against that,
and he would have to be set free!
Often the basis of the complaints charged
against Joseph, especially in the early days,
was about the same as the ancient Christians
faced, as recorded in the book of Acts: “You
have set the neighborhood in an uproar.”
So he had.
But how could he help it?
Light always stirs up darkness.
That is an eternal law.
Among those legal trials, we find now from careful study, was the last one, a posthumous trial.
For those involved in what Oaks and Hill call, "The Carthage Conspiracy."
It seems to me symbolic that Willard Richards,
speaking to calm the Saints after the word
was out that Joseph and Hyrum had fallen,
said, in effect, Do not make any rash moves,
do not seek vengeance, leave all of this to
the law, and when that fails, leave it to God."
Notice, not “if that fails” but “when
that fails, leave it to God.”
It failed.
None of those involved at Carthage was ever
brought to earthly justice.
So be it.
Eternal justice will take care of it.
The trials extend from the out to the in. I have always felt there was something ironic in the name of the jail.
Liberty.
Of all the places had none, it was there.
Part of the reason he was there, was that the Salt Sermon had been delivered on the prior July 4th in which
Sidney Rigdon had said, "Our enemies were like the salt that had lost his savor,
and were henceforth
“good for nothing, but to be cast out and
to be trodden under foot of men.” Those were fighting words, and our enemies caught them up quickly.
Joseph was blamed and jailed.
During those cold winter months in Liberty Jail—December through March—Joseph didn't have a blanket.
He wrote to Emma and pleaded for one.
She had to reply that in his absence William
McLellin, formerly one of the original Twelve
Apostles and now a vicious antagonist, had
stolen all the blankets from his house.
Several times the jailers administered poison
to the prisoners, and as a mean joke, on one
occasion they tried to feed them with human flesh. The amputated limb of a negro.
There were no sanitary facilities except the
slop bucket, and there was very little light.
Joseph was not alone; his brother Hyrum and
four other brethren were with him.
In some respects that was an added affliction,
as he saw their sufferings too.
The reports piled up of cruelties inflicted
on the Saints—the whippings, the beatings,
the rapes, the plundering of homes and farms,
and finally the enforced exodus to Illinois
in dead of winter, leaving bloody marks in
their footprints on the snow,
and the charred remains of their crops.
These weighed heavily on the souls and the
hearts of these men.
Joseph’s personal trials were one thing;
those of the Saints he loved were another.
He prayed for an answer from the Lord to the
two questions: “How long, O Lord, wilt thou
witness these things and not avenge us?”
And the other question, “Why?”
Why must the Saints suffer so?
To the first the Lord answered that in due
time “a generation of vipers” would receive their due.
But to the second there was no full answer,
except the answer that Job received, and the
admonition to trust: “The Son of Man hath
descended below them all.
Art thou greater than he?”
The full explanation of trials is never that
we have sinned.
The full explanation is that we are sometimes
called on to go through affliction.
The Missouri Saints had not fully lived up
to their covenants, and the Lord made that
known to Joseph.
Part of their difficulties, therefore, was
deserved.
But that will not take care of that great
sum of man’s inhumanity to man that remained.
What happened at Haun’s Mill, for example,
was undeserved.
Joseph had to learn forbearance, had to learn forgiveness. Sometimes aroused in the memory
of what he had seen, he did not record all that he saw,
He would say, in effect, “If ever I am in
such a situation, I will help you.
I will not say I can do nothing for you.
I can do something for you and I will.”
That’s an echo and a reversal of President
Martin Van Buren’s response to him in Washington.
But he prophesied also at times that there
would be repentance and that some who had
most hated us would become our most beloved.
And so it was.
Patience he had to learn.
Pain he had to endure.
We can talk, then, of the spiritual burdens
he bore: how he was called over and over again
to impose sacrifices on himself and on others
when he would rather have not.
Here is an example.
Place: Kirtland.
Commandment: Build a temple.
The question: How?
Stands here Brigham, stands here Joseph.
How will we build a temple?
They review the names of every Latter-day
Saint they can think of who has ability in
construction, and there isn’t anyone who
can do it.
Then Joseph Young says: “Well, I know a
man up in Canada; he’s excellent in construction
His name is Artemus Millett; but of course
he’s not a member of the Church.”
At that point Joseph turns to Brigham: “Brother
Brigham, I give you a mission.
You are to go to Canada.
You are to convert Artemus Millett.
You are to bring him back to Kirtland with
his family and tell him to bring at least
a thousand dollars in cash.”
It is a testament of the mettle of Brigham
that he said, “All right, Brother Joseph, I'll go."
Go he did.
He did convert Artemus Millett and his family.
They did come to Kirtland with the thousand
dollars.
Brother Millett oversaw the construction of
that temple and later the Manti Temple.
That is one of the up-against-the-wall impossibilities—perhaps hundreds of them in the Prophet’s life—that
both wrenched his soul and stretched it.
Even when he saw, secondhand and at a distance,
what the Saints had to bear, he broke into
tears and privately went into prayer.
In such a case, at the Nickerson home in Toronto
he became aware of a young girl named Lydia Bailey.
By the tender age of eighteen, she had had
[one husband and two children.]
Her husband had abandoned her and both children
had died.
Why?
Joseph went to the Lord.
Then he met with Lydia.
An outpouring of the Spirit ensued, and Joseph
made promises to her that out of her affliction
there would come into her life such strength
as she could not now comprehend.
She had a role to play in the redemption of
her family that she could not fully understand.
The promises came to fulfillment.
How he suffered in the witness of how his
family suffered!
“My father,” cried out his six-year-old
son, “My father, why can’t you stay with us?
What are the men going to do with you?”
And then the boy was thrust from him by the
sword.
The Prophet cried unto the Lord, “Bless
my family.”
The one journal we have that he wrote in his
own handwriting over a daily period of time
was on a missionary trip north into Canada.
It reflects two preoccupations.
Over and over the journal turns into a prayer:
“Oh, Lord, bless our testimony that it may seal itself
upon the hearts of our hearers," and the other, "Oh, Lord, bless my family."
The one day of peace in the whole documented history where he comments is where he says, simply,
"Took solid comfort with my family." We do have a glimpse of his sleigh-riding on an occasion with
Alexander. There is record of one Christmas morning when choir led by a woman convert from England
who was blind, her name was Rushton, came, sang, and awakened him, and he came to the window and said,
"I thought as you sang that I was hearing the heavenly choir."
Joseph was stretched to do things that he
was not by his own reckoning fully equipped
to do in the temporal sense.
One promise says, “In temporal labors thou
shalt not have strength, for this is not thy calling."
Yet he was required to introduce advanced
ideals—not just dreams, but actual structures:
in economics, the law of consecration; in
politics, the Council of Fifty; in social
thought, plans for communities and for their
very city design with the temple at the center—thus
he was, among other things, a city planner.
Educationally, he established the School of
the Prophets and the University of Nauvoo,
and the school instructions that are outlined
in sections 88 and 109 of the Doctrine and
Covenants involve processes for the expansion
of the knowledge and skill and power of his
faithful band.
How could a man be stretched to that?
It is one thing to be spiritual adviser and
to bring forth inspiration.
But it is quite another thing to take a melting-pot
group of converts from all over the world
and introduce instantly plans for their temporal
welfare—and he always taught that you could
not totally separate the temporal and the
spiritual.
To do that he had help.
The Lord raised up men all around him.
He needed all that and more.
“The burdens which roll upon me,” he said
once, “are very great.”
In the community setting he referred to “the
contraction of feeling.”
(He thought this was one of the absolute marks
that apostasy had occurred.)
“It is an evidence of the contraction of one's feelings, that they are really praying for each others damnation.
He talked to the Relief Society, the faithful
women to whom he paid high tribute.
"Your very emotional makeup tends to make you rigid and judgmental."
And he warned them against gossip, warned
them against the unruly tongue.
He said, “God does not look on sin with
allowance, but when men have sinned, there
must be allowance made for them.
. . . The nearer we get to our heavenly Father,
the more are we disposed to look with compassion
on perishing souls; we feel that we want to
take them upon our shoulders, and cast their
sins behind our backs.”
Many came to him bearing burdens of sin and
plead for him to intervene for them, to help them.
That was as if he had bore the burdens of the whole world.
There were also those who came and pleaded
for other kinds of help.
How would it be, for example, to be sound
asleep, the doorbell rings, and there stand
before you two black women.
They have traveled over [eight] hundred miles,
mainly across the countryside, not daring
to use the highways lest they be apprehended.
They have escaped from some who have threatened
their lives.
They are both converts to the Church.
What can they do?
Where can they go?
Joseph calls Emma down.
“Emma, these sisters say they have no place to stay, is that true Emma?
"No Joseph, they can stay here."
Jane, one of the two, stayed with them for
the rest of the Prophet’s life.
She records what it was like to be involved
in the prayers of that family and that she
was treated not as a slave and not as a servant
but as one of the family.
Temporal help was cried out for, not just spiritual.
The Prophet’s role as a judge and as mayor
of Nauvoo and the head of the Nauvoo Legion
required him to discipline the legionnaires
and render judgment as the mayor.
Anthony, a black, comes and what's happened? Well, against the Nauvoo Charter he's been found drunk.
On the Sabbath to make it worse.
What can the Prophet do? He pronounces sentence, fines him, and tells him to go and take one of
the Prophets own horses to get the money to pay the fine.
The pressure of love, of caring about the
Saints and wanting them to receive and follow
the will of the Lord, was another major part
of Joseph’s load.
Sometimes—even as early as the mid-1830s—he
would have welcomed deliverance into the next
world, leaving the kingdom in the hands of
others.
Before leaving on the Zion’s Camp march,
he charged Brigham Young, he said
"I command you to do it in the name of the Lord, Jesus," to bring back his body should he be killed,
to be buried by his children in Kirtland.
He later said, "I had thought when I left that God had required of me all that He would require, but I yet live,
and there is more for me to do.
Many threats on the Prophet’s life were
empty; some were not; to all he exhibited
a fearlessness that may have been related
to his readiness to shed the burdens of mortality.
Someone asked him, “How do you dare think
you are safe in the midst of your enemies?”
Once he answered, “Because the children
are praying for me.”
Another time he said, "Because I have the promise of God for it, and God cannot lie.
There is on record, a time when I man came, caught him alone, and shoved a gun right into his sternum and said,
"Joe Smith I've got you now and I'm gonna kill 'ya,"
The Prophet unbuttoned his shirt and said, "Go ahead, shoot. What are you waiting for?"
The man instantly dropped the gun, put up his hands and said, "Don't shoot!"
Assuming, that there must be, somewhere in the room, somebody with a gun drawn on him.
But the Prophet was all alone.
Confidence beyond the ordinary, wouldn't you say?
In Far West, Missouri, the mob lined up about
[3,500] men, preparing to attack and destroy
every Mormon there.
There were between two and three hundred,
including two or three Jack-Mormons (in those
days that term meant a Mormon sympathizer).
Aware of those three, a man came with a flag
of truce and said, “We’re going to wipe
you out, but we understand that a few of you
aren’t Mormon: they can come with us.”
Those non-Mormons decided they would stay.
Then said the Prophet to the man with the white flag, I'll give you again the odds, 150 Mormons,
many of them young, inexperienced, and unarmed, [3,500] in the mob. The Prophet said to the man,
"Go back and tell your general to withdraw his troops or
I will send them to hell.”
John Taylor, who was present that day, said years later, “I thought that was a pretty bold stand to take."
That may be the understatement of the nineteenth
century.
The man went back with his flag, and the militia
withdrew.
That same courage, faith, and endurance.
Somewhere, Edward Hunter, who became a Presiding Bishop, records that he and the Prophet would hide
in the little attic in his house, which still
stands in Nauvoo.
I say “little” because they couldn’t
even stand up there.
They went up through a trapdoor, but by then
they were over the rafters and under the roof,
so they had to double down and sit.
They were often many hours in that exact setting.
There the Prophet wrote section 128 of the
Doctrine and Covenants, a rhapsody—
The one that begins "Let the mountains shout for joy," in an attic, in a shack.
In that same attic he said to Edward Hunter
one day, “I know your genealogy, you are
akin to me, and I know what brought you into
the Church; it was to do good to your fellow
men, and you can do much good.”
The sheer separation from his loved ones;
the inability to speak, which he met by writing;
the cooped-up feeling which because of his
spontaneity and makeup he despised—all those
things compounded to make life difficult.
And yet he could write inspired, rejoicing
literature.
“Brethren, shall we not go on in so great
a cause?
Go forward not backward.
Courage, brethren; and on, on to the victory.”
He was not discouraged.
When he asked for peace of soul in moments
of great anguish, like us he did not always
receive the Lord’s full explanation.
The demand that the Lord explain to us in
detail why it is necessary for this or that—that
demand takes us a step beyond genuine faith.
If we are close enough to the Lord and if
we have the assurance that we are filling
our missions as appointed, it should not come
as any great shock or surprise that we sometimes
walk in affliction.
That is the program.
In a measure that is what we came to face
and to endure in righteousness.
So Joseph was simply given assurance, the
whisper of peace, the “Be still, Joseph,
and know that I am God.”
Or again, the serenity that does not assure
you anything by way of, Where am I? or, Where
am I going? but only, “You’re on track,
murmur not—all will work out in the end.”
The Prophet had to endure and not know why
or when.
Along the way he had premonitions.
“May I borrow that book?” he asked at
the home of Edward L. Stevenson, in Pontiac,
Michigan, in the early 1830s.
The book was titled Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
When he returned it to Mother Stevenson in
Missouri, he said, “I have prayed about
those old martyrs.”
These were men and women who had literally
given their blood and their lives for the
testimony of Jesus.
They were people of various faiths and backgrounds,
but allegiance to their conviction meant death,
He read it, and said, "I've prayed about them, and they were good men according to the light they received,
and God has a salvation for them.
Why would he have been preoccupied with that?
Perhaps he anticipated that he would be numbered
among them.
Again and again he had promises that his life
would be prolonged to fill a certain mission.
“Thy days are known,” he was told in Liberty
Jail, “and thy years shall not be numbered less."
What is that? A statement of fatalism?
No, for we learn that in conversations with Brother Brigham, Brother White, and his own mother, he confided
that what exactly he was told was, if, he would harken to the voice of the Spirit, he had about five years.
We now know that revelation was given late in March 1839.
He was shot in Carthage on June 27, 1844,
five years and [three] months after that.
During the last few months of his life, Joseph
seems to have had a sense of urgency which
in our day would be called a sense of living
on borrowed time.
In that period he laid upon the Twelve the
burdens he had carried for so long, in late March 1844,
their journals uniformly say that he rejoiced exceedingly and said "Thank God that I have lived to see this day."
“It mattereth not what becomes of me.”
He did not fear death, he anticipated it,
but he often said that he wanted to give his
life in a way that would matter.
On a Sunday, a beautiful day, Benjamin Johnson
records, they were sitting in the dining room
and in came [two] of his children “as just
from their mother, all so nice, bright and sweet."
Joseph said, “Benjamin, look at these children.
How could I help loving their mother; if necessary,
I would go to hell for such a woman.”
There is the truth about the legend that has
grown up.
Joseph Smith, so far as the evidence leads,
never said (a) “Emma is going to hell,”
or (b) “I’m going to go to dig her out.”
He said, “I would go to hell for such a woman,” meaning, “I feel strongly and deeply toward my wife."
The distinction is clear.
Then he said to Benjamin something about other
children.
They had had a joint experience wherein he
had blessed twenty-six in a row and had sensed
what they would face in the trials of life
and had concentrated his faith to seal upon
them a blessing.
In consequence he was weary when he had finished,
and Jedediah M. Grant noted that he turned pale.
He sank into a chair, he said to Benjamin, "Oh, I get so tired and yearn for my rest."
Benjamin Johnson said, "Oh Joseph, what would we do without you?"
The Prophet replied, "Benjamin, I would be engaged in the work beyond the veil,
with a greater power than I have here."
The presentiments that it would not be long were heav upon him.
The Prophet had two added burdens of which we have rarely spoken,
Mosiah Hancock, the young son of Levi Hancock, the Prophet's bodyguard, one of many,
was in a meeting where the Prophet, you remember, drew a sword, and heard him say,
"I will not submit any longer to cursed mobocracy. I would rather die, I would rather my blood flow."
Inspired, as a mere boy, with the loyalty that Levi Hancock had to the Prophet
for he had that day put his hand down in the midst of the Nauvoo Legion and said,
"Here is a man, whom the Lord has revealed to me, would give his life, for me."
The boy went home, said to his father, "I hope I can be as loyal to the Prophet's son as you are to the Prophet."
Said Levi Hancock to Mosiah, "No my son,  you must not be. The Lord has made known to Joseph
that his son will lead away a portion of the Saints." Of all the burdens a patriarch would have to bear
in his last days, the burden of knowing such a division in his own family and in the kingdom he was living and
dying to establish, must have cut the deepest.
"Emma," He said according to one account of that last morning,
"Can you train my sons to walk in their father's footsteps?"
She replied, “Oh, Joseph, you are coming
back.”
She couldn’t believe he was not: he always
had before.
“Emma”—he repeated the same question.
“Joseph, you are coming back.”
And the third time.
He left with such reticence that reportedly
he went all the way back a third time to say
good-bye to his children.
Yes, the Prophet Joseph Smith was a superb
example of enduring and overcoming trials.
