Years ago I prepared a paper 
titled “Joseph Smith Among the Prophets.”
It attempted to present ten characterizations
of prophets that are typical in Judeo-Christian
literature. For instance, a prophet is a foreteller;
he has prophetic access to the future. Also,
prophets have been called “forth-tellers,”
meaning that they speak forth boldly in judgment
and in recommendation as to their own time.
A prophet too is a man who has authority,
who speaks with more than human sanction.
He is a recoverer or discoverer of truth.
He is an advocate of social righteousness.
He is a charismatic, one whose personality
manifests something that attracts in a spiritual
sense. He is one who endures suffering, and
does so radiantly. He is an embodiment of
love. He is a seer, meaning that he has the
capacity to clearly understand and reveal
truth. Finally, among the great prophets of
the past, many have been martyrs. In that
presentation I showed that, under each of
those heads, Joseph Smith qualifies as a prophet.
If we can use any one of them to characterize
a prophet, what can we say of a man who manifests
them all? More intimately than in the Judeo-Christian
captions mentioned, we come to a subjective approach
to Joseph’s glorious
first vision.In 1969 BYU Studies published
a collection of the four known written accounts
of the First Vision. One was first recorded
in 1832; another in 1835, after a visit Joseph
had with a Jewish visitor named [Matthias];
there is the 1838 statement, which has been
published to the world in the Pearl of Great
Price; and finally, the well-known Wentworth
letter written in 1842 to the Chicago Democrat,
in which the Prophet briefly recapitulated
his first vision. What was intended by the
BYU Studies publication was not only to give,
as was done, the actual holographs—the handwritten
accounts from his different scribes—as he
dictated them, but also to provide articles
on the context by some of the best LDS scholars.
In the earliest account, Joseph speaks of
his days in Vermont. There and later in
New York Joseph would look up at night and marvel
at the symmetry and the beauty and the order
of the heavens. Something in him said, “Behind
that there must be a majestic creator of the
heavens.” The contrast between his boyhood
awareness and the confusion he saw on this
planet was not just difficult; it seared his
soul. The divisions he laments in Palmyra
were not just among and between others, neighbors
and friends; they were in his own family.
He had at least one relative in every church
in Palmyra, so that his family was utterly
spread. Order in heaven, disorder on earth.
How could God be responsible for both? The
record makes it clear that before the sacred
experience in the Grove it had never occurred
to Joseph that all the influential churches
were in error. The question he put to Jesus
Christ when he recovered himself was not,
“Is there a true church in the world?”
The question was, “Which church is true?”
He assumed that at least one had to be true.
The answer therefore was all the more striking
and startling: “Join none of them.” By
reading in the Bible Joseph had been “struck”—in
fact he says, “Never did any passage of
scripture come with more power to the heart
of man than this did at this time to mine.”
The Reverend George Lane may have been the
man who first recommended in Joseph Smith’s
hearing, “Let him ask of God.” That specific
passage in James 1:5 was mentioned in some
of the minister’s sermons. A Methodist,
he was associated with revivals in western
New York. Joseph later talks of a Methodist
preacher he was with soon after the vision,
a person who was, he says, “active in the
before mentioned religious excitement.”
Imagine (and this to me is poignant) Joseph
at age fourteen—full as he was of the glory,
the remarkable experience, and the excitement
of it—­recounting his experience to this
man. And the man’s response was, “Oh no,
that could not be of God. Those things don’t
happen anymore.” So one lacking wisdom ought
to go and pray about it. By all means let
him ask of God. But to this man the answer
seemed . . . well, too much. Heaven had
come too close. We can almost visualize the
boy—pure-minded, spontaneous, even a little
unrestrained, as teenagers are—being struck
by the wonder of this marvelous answer to
prayer. “Wow! It worked! You told me to
do it. I did it.” And the response was,
“Shucks, boy, it’s all of the devil.”
The boy’s smile slowly disappeared. And
he learned early that to testify of divine
manifestations was to stir up darkness and
to call down wrath. That wrath finally evolved
into bullets.
I haven't done justice to the family and 
 their support for him
We have a document from a woman who herself was a Presbyterian, who speaks of Joseph's early life
when she as a girl, much younger apparently, came and watched him with
others of the boys working at her father's farm.
The enemies of Joseph Smith
have made out over and over that he was shiftless,
lazy, indolent, that he never did a day’s
work in his life. The truth: exactly the contrary. [Hugh] Nibley had pointed out in passing,
that the stories radically contradict each other. On the one hand, we hear of this shiftless person,
who's always telling stories aimlessly and never doing a hard days work, and in the next breath the anti-Mormons
point out that every night at midnight he was out with his crew digging for silver or buried treasure,
and never finding it. Which is hardly indolent, it's over active.
The truth is that,
according to this account, her father hired
Joseph because he was such a good worker.
Another reason was that Joseph was able to
get the other boys to work. The suspicion
is that he did that by the deft use of his
fists. It is my belief that one of the feelings
he had of unworthiness, one of the things
for which he asked forgiveness (and his account
shows that he did pray for forgiveness prior
to the visitations of Moroni), was this physical
propensity. He was so strong, so muscular,
so physically able, that that was one way
he had of solving problems. This troubled
him. He did not feel it was consonant with
the divine commission he had received.
[Mrs. Palmer’s] account says that on an occasion, the minister came to her home, and said that the boy
Joseph, well known in the community, had claimed to have a vision. This minister had pled with the man who
had hired Joseph to refuse to hire him, and to treat him rough. Because, he said, he was setting
the neighborhood in an uproar.
The father replied, "No, he earns his money. He's a good worker, and I don't care about whatever
he claims religiously," as a matter of fact the phrase he uses to describe the vision is interesting,
he said that it was “the sweet dream of a pure-minded boy."
Later, the daughter reports, Joseph
claimed to have had another vision; and this
time it led to the production of a book. The
churchman came again, and at this point the
girl’s father turned against Joseph. But,
she adds significantly, by then it was too
late. Joseph Smith had a following. The first
members of that following were his family,
who supported and loved him with great constancy.
In fact there is no greater example of total
familial endurance in history than that of
the Smith family. It is true that they had
their ups and downs and that William Smith
was almost as insecure and unsteady as Hyrum
Smith was loyal and unyielding. But from an
overall perspective, one of the strengths
of the history of the Church is that the
first family held true to each other. Even
in the early days of Joseph’s revelations,
the father would counsel him not to be disobedient
to the heavenly vision. Notice that from the four accounts that each describes the struggle [Joseph]
had with the adversary. At each crucial turning
point in the Restoration, Beelzebub, the
enemy of righteousness, the prince of darkness,
has made his power felt. The First Vision
was a natural point of attack. The devil has
not, unlike the rest of us, lost his memory
of premortal life. He has not been placed
in a physical body and had the veil drawn.
He therefore knew Joseph Smith. Later in his
life Joseph would say, “Every man [and that
would include himself] who has a calling to
minister to the inhabitants of the world was
ordained to that very purpose in the Grand
Council of heaven before this world was.”
It is no surprise, then, that the adversary
would wish to thwart the earnest supplications
of the boy Joseph in the Sacred Grove. It
was not the first time someone had prayed
for the Lord to answer the hard question,
“Where is the truth?” The response that
came to Joseph was an answer, I believe, to
millions of prayers offered down through the
centuries on both sides of the veil. How strong
was the dark influence on that occasion? In
the Pearl of Great Price account Joseph makes
clear that it was no imaginary thing. For
a time it seemed as if he would be destroyed.
In an earlier account he adds that for a time
he could not speak, as if his tongue cleaved
to the roof of his mouth. He exerted faith
and was released from the evil power. Throughout
his life the Prophet had important things
to say about the power of the evil one, but
he never said the evil one was as powerful
as the living God. He knew both. Like Moses
of old, he was not confused when once he had
experienced both and felt their influence.
Speaking of the kind of power that we call
possession, he taught the Saints that “the
devil has no power over us only as we permit
him.” He said elsewhere that all men have
power to resist the devil. All, in short,
is voluntary. But whether we are righteous
or not, we do not escape the attacks. And
they can come from the outside, as in Joseph’s
case in the Grove, or, if we yield, they can
become interior and we ourselves can become
the very puppets of the evil one. A healthy
respect, if I may put it so, for the power
of darkness arose from Joseph Smith’s early
vision, as did a glorious respect for the
power that overcomes darkness. Joseph described
the descending light. In 
dictating the account, he sought the proper
word. He first used the word fire. That is
crossed out in favor of spirit or light. The
word he finally settled on and used most often
was glory. It refers to the emanating and
radiating spirit and power of God. But the
word fire is important to notice. Orson Pratt,
in his book Interesting Account of Several
Remarkable Visions—published in 1840, two
years before the Wentworth letter, and circulated
widely in the missions in Great Britain and
Europe—says that the young prophet expected
to see “the leaves and boughs of the trees
consumed.” In other words, he thought he
was seeing descending fire, the kind that
burns and consumes. Was that detail something
Orson Pratt had learned from conversation
with the Prophet? Or was it an inference from
the statement Joseph makes that the “brightness
and glory defy all description”? The Prophet
indicates in the 1835 account that he was
filled with that light, but also surrounded
by it, that it filled the Grove. Then he adds,
“Yet nothing consumed,” perhaps indicating
that he expected it to be.
It is significant that when the Lord speaks of coming in His glory, an who shall abide the day,
that the very same reality, namely, His glory should be a blessing, a creative enhancing, sanctifying thing.
And for the wicked: anything but. Corruption cannot endure the presence of God.
The same fire that will confirm the worthiness of the faithful, will condemn the wickedness of the rest.
And they, will lose by purging (in some cases by death) the elements of their systems that have been corrupted.
The Prophet was not harmed by the
experience; he was hallowed by it.
Having seen the light, he sees two personages, as if in a pillar, descending. One spoke and said,
“This is my Beloved Son.” In the Wentworth
letter the Prophet adds, speaking of the two,
that they “exactly resembled each other
in features, and likeness.” Notice they
not just resembled—they exactly resembled
each other in features and likeness.
My own guess as to his meaning is that we have here what on Earth is familiar.
We talk of a family resemblance: “Like father, like
son.” The Son looked like his Father.
Mosiah Hancock records a discourse in which Joseph Smith said that only the Holy Ghost in it's special
province of revelation can really enable you to know the Father from the Son, so much are they alike.
The biblical statement to Phillip, who asked, "Show us the Father." is literally true.
The answer the Master gave was, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?
He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”
This is not because they are identical but
because they are, in appearance as well as
in nature, exactly similar. This circumstance
may give further insight into the phrase Alma
used in his familiar set of questions about
our spiritual progress: “Is the image of
God engraven upon your countenances?” It
may also give greater meaning to a favorite
story of President David O. McKay’s about
the great stone face: in the very loving of
a countenance one may eventually take on the
character of what one loves. It gives further
confirmation of the Prophet’s later vision
of the Twelve while in Kirtland—a disparate
group of men from a variety of backgrounds
whom he saw in vision, through their flounderings
and struggles, until he saw them glorified.
He saw them welcomed by father Adam, ushered
to the throne of God, greeted and embraced
by the Master, and then crowned. He says, “I saw
that they all had beautiful heads of hair
and all looked alike.” This should not be
pushed to mean that the Twelve had absolutely
similar features, but rather that in glory,
“in bloom and beauty”—and the Prophet
uses the word beauty to describe the glory
of a resurrected man as well as of a woman—they
were similar. Young Joseph Smith learned in
the Sacred Grove that to see the Father is
to see the Son, and vice versa. A deeper point
is the relationship of these two beings. Joseph
taught in the 1840s—and I think it was an
extension of what he learned in the Grove
that morning—that the statement of the Master
about his doing nothing but what he had seen
the Father do has infinite implications.
How could Jesus have seen the acts of the Father
as a witness? President Joseph Fielding Smith
wrote: "Not as a witness, He saw it in vision. Christ was blessed before He entered mortality to see
in vision what the Father had done before Him, in a prior eon if you will.
And again, the relationship is exact.
If Christ himself was uniquely begotten
and was the firstborn in the spirit, and if
he was the Christ not only of this earth but
also, as the Prophet taught later, of the
galaxy, so before him the Father himself was
a Redeemer, having worked out the salvation
of souls of whom he was a brother, not a father.
This is deep water. The conclusion is drawn
by Joseph Smith in his King Follett discourse.
Whatever else it may mean, and it is mind-boggling,
it at least means this: The Father, by experience,
knows exactly what his Son has been through.
And the Son, by experience, knows exactly
what the Father has been through. Therefore,
when he says, “I and my Father are one,”
he is not expressing a metaphysical identity.
He is speaking of oneness of spirit, harmonic
throbbings of love and insight that can come
only in the patterns of eternal redemption.
Sown in the mind of a ­fourteen-year-old boy,
that seed of insight ­blossomed and
grew. Though we do not know how long the Prophet
Joseph was in the Grove that day receiving
instructions, it probably was longer than
is suggested by the outline we have. We know,
for example, that he wrote, “Many other
things did he say unto me, which I cannot
write at this time.” So far as I know, he
never did commit them to paper. Some critics
have pointed out that the Prophet spoke of
the visit of angels in connection with his
first vision. Some have theorized that he
began by asserting that he saw an angel and
ended by embellishing it with the claim that
he saw the Father and the Son. The truth is
that, having described all that we are familiar
with about the visitation of the Father and
the Son, he says in the closing words of the
1835 account, “I saw many angels in this
vision.” It is an enforced either-or to
say that he either saw the Father and the
Son or saw angels. What he saw was both.
Who would have been permitted to be with him in
that theophany—what angels were present?
We have Joseph Smith’s teaching that angels are either resurrected personages who have lived upon this earth,
or they are the spirits of the just who have lived upon this earth and will yet be resurrected, or, as in rare cases
in the Old Testament, not-yet-embodied persons
who come in anticipation. “There are no
angels who minister to this earth but those
who do belong or have belonged to it.”
That narrows it down to this earth, but we can't narrow it down more than that.
Joseph was wearied with his experience in the Grove.
The encounter, however long or short, demanded
much from him. He says, “I came to myself.”
I think it inappropriate to say that he had
been in a trance or a mystic state. The clearest
parallels come from the ancient records of
Moses and Abraham and Enoch. Like those prophets
of old, Joseph was filled with a spirit which
enabled him to endure the presence of God.
Is that spirit enervating or is it energizing?
My considered answer is, “Yes.” It is
both. It demands from us a concentration and
a surrender comparable to nothing else possible
in this life. But it also confers great capacities
that transcend our finite mental, spiritual,
and physical powers. In 1832, emerging from
the vision on the three degrees of glory (Doctrine
and Covenants 76) with his companion in the
vision, Sidney Rigdon, the Prophet looked
strong, while Sidney looked like he'd been through a war.
To which the Prophet, with a certain humility
as also perhaps with a little condescension,
said, “Sidney is not as used to it as I
am.” But after the First Vision, he was
feeble. It was difficult for him to go home.
Similarly, in his 1823 encounter with Moroni,
the repetitive encounter, he was left weak,
and his father sent him home. He couldn’t
even climb the fence, which for a strong and vigorous boy, is interesting.
We now turn to some of the theological
extensions of this initial insight of the
First Vision as the Prophet later taught them.
“It is the first principle of the gospel,”
he said, “to know for a certainty the character
of God.” That is more than saying it is
the first principle to know that God exists.
He doesn’t use the word existence at all
in this context. You can’t find one argument
in Joseph Smith for the existence of God.
Why not? One answer: Because one does not
begin to argue about a thing’s existence
until serious doubts have arisen. The arguments
for God are a kind of whistling in the dark.
In the absence of experience with God, men
have invented arguments to justify the experience
of the absence of God. They have built a rational
Tower of Babel, from which they comfort themselves
with, “We haven’t heard from God, but
he must still be there.” But Joseph wasn’t
speculating. He was reporting his firsthand
experience. Prophets always have. On the other
hand, the philosophers have expended some
of the greatest ingenuity of the western world
in inventing what turn out to be specious
and invalid arguments for the existence of
God. No. “It is the first principle of the
gospel to know for a certainty the character
[the personality, the attributes] of God,
and to know that we may converse with him
as one man converses with another.” That
is the testimony of Joseph Smith from beginning
to end. He is talking about all of us, now.
A man, a woman—it is the first principle
for any of us. That is where we begin. And
lest we should say, as occasionally we do,
“But his remarkable life and experience
is utterly beyond my own,” we should note
that Joseph said in [1839]: “God hath not
revealed anything to Joseph [calling himself
by name], or to the Twelve, but what will be made known to all Saints of the last days,
as soon as they are prepared to receive."
“For the day must come when no
man need say to his neighbor, Know ye the
Lord; for all shall know Him (who remain)
from the least to the greatest.” Note that
“all shall know him” is different from
knowing about him. That same year Joseph delivered
a marvelous discourse in which he expounded
on the fourteenth chapter of John, that masterful
sermon of the Master’s in which he says, "Be patient, I will not leave you comfortless. I will come unto you,
I will make my abode with you, and even the Father." Over and over in the sermon the
Prophet in effect readdresses that sermon
to us. It is as if he said, “It is not enough
for you to say, ‘Ah, Brother Joseph is in
charge, and he knows.’ You must know.”
He says it in ten different ways, then in
the final part says,
“Weary the Lord until He blesses you.”
Occasionally I hear people say ”Well I don't want to overdo it."
"I don’t want to ask for things I shouldn’t ask for.”
Of course, as a general principle that represents
a genuine, discerning wisdom—we should not
ask for what we should not seek from him.
But when the Lord has commanded us to ask,
it is appropriate. This is illustrated in
the Savior’s parable of the unjust judge
and the importunate widow, which is preceded
by the reason it was given—to show “that
men ought always to pray, and not to faint.”
It told of the widow who repeatedly came to
the judge to plead her case. Always he refused
to heed. But because she came back so often,
in order to be permanently rid of her the
judge said, “All right! Give her what she
wants and end her clamoring.” My rendering
is a crude paraphrase of the parable. But
what is the point of the story? Why would
the Savior teach a parable like that? The
point is, pray and don’t faint; or, in the
words of Joseph Smith, “Weary [the Lord]
until he blesses you.” There are places
in modern scripture where the Lord commands
someone not to pray further on a particular
matter, where he says, “Trouble me no more.”
But in each case the context shows he had
already given the answer, and he is saying,
“Please take no or yes for an answer.”
So it is. We have the privilege to recapitulate
the experience of the Prophet. That leads
to my final point. So often we are haunted
not only with the question of whether we have
gone far enough in our own religious experience
but also whether we can rely on some things
we have previously trusted. Acids eat away
at us. Sometimes it is the taunting of other
voices; but sometimes it is nothing more profound
than our own sins and weaknesses, and the
betrayals of the best in ourselves. Doubt
naturally follows. The Master made a strange
statement to Thomas. Thomas is categorized
as a doubter because he said what the others
had said earlier: “I will believe when,
and only when, I see.” According to Luke,
the others virtually rubbed their eyes in
disbelief when they did see. It is a beautiful
phrase: “They yet believed not for joy.”
Meaning what? Meaning it was too good to be
true. Within days they had seen their Lord
crucified, and now he stood before them! So
they too had impending doubts, as did Thomas.
The strange words of Jesus are reported by
John: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me,
thou hast believed: blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed.” On
the surface this statement seems to put a
premium on secondhand or distant awareness,
almost as if unsupportable faith is more commendable
than faith resting on the knowledge of sight.
That, I think, is a mistake. What is involved
in the statement is the recognition by the
Lord and by his prophets that the most penetrating
of assurances—the one power, even beyond
sight, that can burn doubt out of us and make
it, as it were, impossible for us to disbelieve—is
the Holy Ghost. Recording the feelings he
had on leaving the Grove and on the subsequent
days, Joseph left on record this sentence:
“The Spirit of the Lord was with me,
I could rejoice with great joy and the
Lord was with me but [I] could find none that
would believe the heavenly vision.” This
is one of the rare insights he gives as to
what went on inside as distinct from outside
him in that experience. Joy, love. And no doubt.
Others, of course, doubted. He did
not. The devil is shrewd with the strategems
and with the Satanic substitute, but one thing
he cannot counterfeit is the witness and power
of the Holy Ghost. When that is upon us there
is ­assurance—and, I repeat, even greater
than that of sight. It is of course possible
to have both, and that is precisely what Joseph
Smith had. He saw, as a later revelation explains,
not through the natural or the carnal mind
but with the spiritual. He saw with his own
eyes, but he also was enveloped in that radiating
power which has been commissioned to bear
witness of the Father and the Son. One can therefore,
Without having open or remarkable visions, we all
can have the same glorious and glorifying
certainty about the reality of the Father
and the Son; and that comes by the Spirit,
by the power of the Holy Ghost. In closing then may I bring all of this to a word of Testimony.
Often we are confronted in the world by those who want to believe in God without believing in God.
They are willing to affirm that there is ­something—and
that’s about the strongest word they are
willing to use—that there is something out
there that accounts for things: a principle,
a harmonic force, or an ultimate cosmic mystery.
How rarely is the testimony welcomed that
the Father is in the likeness of the Christ!
One ­reason—and Latter-day Saints can testify
of this—is that such personal beings can
get involved in your life, changing it, giving
specific commandments and counsels, rebuking,
approving, or disapproving. A God who is utterly
distant stays out of your hair. It is unlikely
that the Prophet fully anticipated the consequences
of his prayer in the Grove, and I'm sure he did not.
On one occasion he said, “If
I had not actually got into this work and
been called of God, I would back out.” But
he added—and this shows his integrity—“I cannot
back out: I have no doubt of the truth.”
(Some men having no doubt of the truth have
nevertheless backed out, but he did not.)
From the Grove experience on throughout his
life he knew and welcomed into his life the
Father and the Son, “even,” as he was
commanded in 1829, “if [he] should be slain.”
He was true unto life and unto death. To use
the word that he re-revealed in our generation,
that seals the power of his first and subsequent
visitations. Anyone who has enough of the
Spirit of God to know that God lives and that
Jesus is the Christ, by that same spirit will
be brought to recognize that one of the prophets
called by the Father and the Son was Joseph Smith.
