John Taylor, on Joseph Smith

John Taylor, on Joseph Smith October 9, 2015

 

Sepia toned photo of John Taylor
John Taylor (1808-1887)
Wikimedia CC Public Domain
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“I was acquainted with Joseph Smith for years,” remarked John Taylor, the English Methodist convert who was seriously wounded in Carthage Jail when Joseph was assassinated and who ultimately became the third president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I have traveled with him; I have been with him in private and in public; I have associated with him in councils of all kinds; I have listened hundreds of times to his public teachings, and his advice to his friends and associates of a more private nature. I have been at his house and seen his deportment in his family. I have seen him arraigned before the tribunals of his country, and have seen him honorably acquitted, and delivered from the pernicious breath of slander, and the machinations and falsehoods of wicked and corrupt men. I was with him living, and with him when he died, when he was murdered in Carthage jail by a ruthless mob. . . .

I have seen him, then, under these various circumstances, and I testify before God, angels, and men, that he was a good, honorable, virtuous man . . . that his precepts were such as became a man of God—that his private and public character was unimpeachable—and that he lived and died as a man of God and a gentleman. This is my testimony. If it is disputed, bring me a person authorized to receive an affidavit, and I will make one to this effect. I therefore testify of things which I know and of things which I have seen.[1]

In the immediate aftermath of the murders at Carthage Jail, and while he was still recovering from the severe gunshot wounds that he himself received in that same bloody assault, John Taylor apparently participated in the composition of the Church’s formal announcement of the death of its first prophet. Among other eloquent passages, that statement noted that “the Book of Mormon, and this book of Doctrine and Covenants of the church, cost the best blood of the nineteenth century to bring them forth for the salvation of a ruined world.”[2]

 

[1] G. Homer Durham, ed., The Gospel Kingdom (1943), 355. 

[2] Doctrine and Covenants 135:6.

 

 


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