The Church of All Nations and the Garden of Gethsemane can be seen in the background.
More notes from one of my manuscripts:
This was much the same impression that his contemporaries had of Joseph, even late in his career. “He is a man that you could not help liking as a man,” George W. Taggart wrote from Nauvoo to his three non-Mormon brothers in the fall of 1843, “setting aside the religious prejudice which the world has raised against him. . . . Neither is he puffed up with his greatness as many suppose but on the contrary is familiar with any decent man and is ready to talk upon any subject that anyone wishes.”[1] The perceptive and highly intelligent George Q. Cannon remembered him as “always gentle and good-natured,” “considerate and just.”[2] In 1843, Joseph Smith was head of a large and rapidly growing church, lieutenant general in the Illinois militia, and the dominant figure in what may at the time have been the state’s largest city. Yet he was wholly unpretentious. “When we all had a social chat,” Jonah Ball wrote earlier that year, “I found Joseph familiar in conversation, easy, and unassuming. I found no sycophancy.” And the Prophet evidently did not demand formality in his presence, tolerating behavior by others that, by the standards of the time, could have been taken as disrespectful to him. “There are those,” Ball said, “that came in or went out not even taking their hats or caps off their heads.” Concluding, Ball reported that “he is what the Mormons represent him to be and the stories about him are false.”[3]
Humor is in short supply among fanatics, and is something carefully avoided by most pretenders to sanctity. Yet George Q. Cannon remembered Joseph’s “sense of gentle humor.”[4] Likewise, his modern biographer Robert Remini, a preeminent scholar of Jacksonian America and a non-Mormon, writes that he “came to like the man very much,” not only because he possessed “compelling charisma, charm, persuasiveness,” but partly because Joseph Smith was “joyously funny.” “I like them when they’re funny. Andrew Jackson was not funny.”[5]
There is perhaps even a trace of humor apparent in his mother’s recollection of his return home after his First Vision. Leaning against the fireplace, he answers his mother’s concerned question about what is wrong: “I have learned for myself,” she recalls him saying, “that Presbyterianism is not true.”[6] Rather an understatement of what had just occurred. But, notes Professor King, “We have to remember that his mother had joined the Presbyterian Church shortly before this. How do you assess that as a conversation between a fourteen-year-old and his mother? All mothers know that sort of thing really happens to them with their teenagers.”[7] Nonetheless, Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, remembered him at the age of fourteen as “a remarkably quiet, well disposed child,” although she insists that, prior to that age, there was nothing unusual in his childhood.[8]
[1] Susannah Taggart and George W. Taggart, letter of 6 September and 10 September 1843 to Albert Taggart, Samuel W. Taggart, and Henry C. Taggart. The relevant text is given on pages 171 and 173 of Ronald O. Barney, “’A Man That You Could Not Help Likeing’: Joseph Smith and Nauvoo Portrayed in a Letter by Susannah and George W. Taggart,” BYU Studies 40/2 (2001): 165-179. I have standardized the spelling and punctuation.
[2] Cannon, Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 343.
[3] Jonah Randolph Ball, letter of 15 January 1843 to “Dear Brother [Harvey Howard] and Sister.” Cited in Barney, “’A Man That You Could Not Help Likeing,’” 178 note 41. I have standardized the spelling and punctuation.
[4] Cannon, Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 342.
[5] As quoted by Dennis Lythgoe, “Writer finds ‘his Joseph,’” Salt Lake City Deseret News (13 October 2002), E10.
[6] Joseph Smith – History 1:20.
[7] King, “Joseph Smith as a Writer,” 291.
[8] Lucy’s Book, 329.
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“A Mormon guy told me that Mormon church pastors and elders don’t get salaries. Is it true? If it is, then where do they spend all the money of people’s tithe?”
You can read the very well done answer to this question here:
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From Taylor Halverson and Doug Witney:
“2 Things Distracting Us from Hearing the Voice of God in Our Lives + How to Tune Them Out”
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“Elder Christofferson applauds journalists as ambassadors of freedom”
Posted from Jerusalem, Israel
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