Mormonism 02 — Gordon Fraser

They went through, they didn't want to expose themselves to any of the wrath of the priests or anything, so they just didn't say anything about it, just disappeared into the woodwork. They just don't want to be identified.

But that is true, because we know these people, and they've told us and confirmed the fact that this is exactly what they went through. So that book is available back there.

...just referred to is called, What's Going On In Here, an Exposing of the Secret Mormon Temple Ritual, by Bob Witt, W-I-T-T-E, and Gordon H. Frazier. This book is available through Gordon Frazier Publishing.

...5076 Eugene, Oregon, 97. The cost of this book is $2. Other books by Gordon Frazier, available at the same address, all for $2 .25 apiece, are Is Mormonism Christian?, subtitled, Mormon Doctrine Compared with Biblical Christianity.

Another, Joseph and the Golden Plate, subtitled, A Close Look at the Book of Mormon. A third, Sects, S-E-C-T-S, of the Latter-day Saints.

Mormonism's Doctrine of God and the Holy Spirit

Now, so much for the doctrine of God the Father. Incidentally, their first item of faith, their first doctrinal statement, is this, We believe in God the Eternal Father, and in his Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.

Which sounds like a Trinitarian statement. But when they say that, knowing what they believe, I always say, All right, what do you mean by God? What do you mean by Father? What do you mean by Jesus Christ?

What do you mean by the Holy Spirit? Because they don't believe orthodox doctrine in any of these points. Now, I want to give you their concept of the Holy Spirit. These are from a book of the name of Gospel Doctrine, by a man by the name of Joseph F. Smith, who would be a nephew of Joseph Smith the Prophet, the son of Hyrum Smith, who was executed at the same time as Joseph Smith was.

He makes this statement, The Holy Ghost, as a personage of Spirit, can no more be omnipresent in person than can the Father or the Son. They do not believe in the omnipresence of the omniscience or the omnipotence of God.

But by his intelligence, his knowledge, his power and influence over and through the laws of nature, he is and can be omnipresent throughout all the works of God, which is pure pantheism. Then he makes this statement, It is not the Holy Ghost who in person lighteth every man who is born into the world, but it is the light of Christ, the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the source of intelligence, which permeates all nature, which lighteth every man and fills the immensity of space.

You may call it the Spirit of God, you may call it the influence of God's intelligence, you may call it the substance of his power. No matter what it is called, it is the Spirit of intelligence that permeates the universe and gives the Spirit of man understanding.

Just as Job said, There is a Spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Now, that's their concept of the Holy Spirit. Some have gone further than that. In Brigham Young's, or in Joseph Smith's Section 132 in the Doctrine and Covenants, a man cannot become a god unless he is married.

He has to have the body, he has to be born into the flesh, be married, and have a wife or wives and children, and have them sealed to him in the temple before he can become a god. Well, they say the Holy Spirit can't be a god because he never got a body, by this line of reasoning of theirs.

Mormonism's Doctrine of Godhood and Spiritual Beings

Here's a statement that clears up a lot of things when you think it through. Their concept of sentient beings of any kind, this is by a contemporary of Joseph Smith, one of his early theologians, Parley Crouch.

This is from his little book, Key to the Science of Theology. God's angels and men are all of one species, one race, one great family, widely diffused among the planetary systems as colonies, kingdoms, and nations.

The great distinguishing difference between one portion of this race and another consists in the varied grades of intelligence and purity, and also in the variety of spheres occupied by each in the series of progressive beings.

Now, get these definitions. An immortal man, possessing a perfect organization of spirit, flesh, and bones, and perfected in all his attributes and all the fullness of celestial glory, is called a god.

An immortal man, in process of perfection, or quickened with a lesser degree of glory, is called an angel. An immortal spirit of man, not united with a fleshly tabernacle, that is, one of these spirit beings that is born through the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, is called a spirit.

An immortal man, clothed with mortal tabernacles, is called a man. It then may be, then consistently enough be said, that there are, in a subordinate sense, a plurality of gods, or rather of the sons of God, although there is one supreme head who is over all, and through all, and in all his sons, by the spirit of his power.

Jesus Christ and his Father are two persons, in the same sense as John and Peter are two persons. Each of them has an organized individual tabernacle, embodied in material form and composed of material substance, in the likeness of man, and possessing every organ, limb, and physical part that man possesses.

There is no more mystery connected with their oneness than there is in the oneness of Enoch and Elijah, of Paul and Silas. Their oneness consists of a oneness of spirit, intelligence, attributes, and knowledge of power.

If Enoch, Elijah, Abraham, Peter, Paul, and millions of others are to attain the immortal life, and their fleshly tabernacles be quickened by the fulness of celestial life and light, intelligence and power, then it can be said of them, they are one, as my Father and I are one.

It can be said of each of them, in him dwells all the fulness, powers, and attributes of the Eternal God. Or, in other words, he possesses endless life together with an intelligence, knowledge, light, and power.

Which, of course, is utterly false. They have no concept of the difference between spirits and gods. Demons, for that matter. Demons were spirits who were rejected. They didn't get bodies. This is all part of the system, and they just believe this.

They don't think in terms of the distinction between an angel and a man. For instance, when Joseph Smith was receiving his revelations, the first revelation that he received, supposedly the accepted form of it, when he was a boy of 14, he went to the sacred grove on his father's farm to pray and to find out which of the churches he should join.

He said that at that time there was a revival meeting going in town, and the Baptists and the Methodists and the Presbyterians were having a united meeting. And he found this historically true. But he wasn't satisfied that he should join any of them, and so he went to pray, and as he prayed, the figures appeared above him in the air, father and the son as two separate beings of flesh and bones.

And the older of the two said to Joseph Smith, confirming the other one, this is my beloved son, hear him. Which, of course, is identifying them as the biblical father and son. Now, there's only one problem with that vision.

Joseph Smith's First Vision and the Angel Moroni

There are these four stories of the vision, one of them in Joseph Smith's own handwriting, in which he only saw one figure in the air above him. The final one gives us this particular one. This is the one the church accepts today.

The only problem is this. The revival meetings didn't happen until four years after the date that Joseph Smith says he saw the vision. And he was a boy of 14. He was nothing but a vagrant around the country.

We have some of the record. He was under house arrest. The judge took him into his own home for vagrancy and kept him there for a while while he was 14 years of age, at the time he was supposed to have gotten this vision.

Three years later, the angel Moroni appeared to him in his bedroom. Suggestion of light, and then the whole room became illuminated brighter than the noonday sun. And this figure appeared and announced himself that he was Moroni, one of the old prophets.

And we identify him in the Book of Mormon as being the last writer in the Book of Mormon, the one who got the golden plates together and translated the Book of Mormon. Well, Moroni came as an angel, but he was actually a man in history, in the history of the Book of Mormon.

He was a man, not an angel. Now he appears as an angel and gives this message to the prophet. Incidentally, the prophet had 18 different visions of beings coming to him, angels and so forth. One of the most interesting was when they were translating the Book of Mormon, he and Oliver Cowdery, his scribe, were writing, and they came across a person who spoke of baptism.

So they went down to the Susquehanna River to pray about it. While they were there, the angel John the Baptist appeared to them and spoke to them out of the bushes and told them to baptize each other, and then he ordained them to the Aaronic priesthood.

Now, they have a statue of John the Baptist with his hand on the top of the heads of these two kneeling figures, Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith, there underneath, and he is ordaining them, fulfillment of this statement of Joseph Smith.

I was looking at it one day when I was there, and one of the attendants came up and said, are you interested in this? And I said, yeah, I have a question. He said, when did John the Baptist get his head baptized?

Well, the man, of course, thought I was very irreligious, and he, with a hunch, walked away. He didn't want to talk to me anymore. But in the first place, I was going to ask him, why didn't John the Baptist baptize him when he was right there, instead of baptizing each other?

Then it would have been quite an experience. Of course, the only thing is, Oliver Cowdery, who defected from the church soon after, in fact, he came into a real squabble with Joseph Smith over money matters, and he was given a walking sentence, told to get out of there and be gone before morning, and he went.

He made, in his defense for leaving the Church of the Latter-day Saints, he said he was very interested at the time, or later on, when he met Brother Rigdon, to notice how much John the Baptist sounded like Sidney Rigdon.

And, indeed, it was Sidney Rigdon standing in the bushes. And he appeared on several occasions like this as an angel. Of course, Joseph Smith had a way of mesmerizing folks and making them think they were seeing visions anyway.

Mormonism's Teaching on John the Baptist and Priesthood

So much for that. Angels are partly in their exaltation to godhood. Going back to John the Baptist, he wouldn't have any authority to baptize or ordain anyone. He wasn't even a priest. While he was of a priestly family, he couldn't have been a priest, because in the wilderness he ate locusts and wild honey and wore a garment of skin about his arms.

Well, a priest could never use anything next to his flesh but linen. And he couldn't eat hummus. So John the Baptist was disobeying two of the rules of the priesthood. So he wasn't a priest. And, of course, we know he didn't officiate as a priest.

That wasn't his ministry. But they made him one of their great priests. Now, I want to read this concerning the Heavenly Mother. Implicit in the Christian verity that all men are the spirit children of an Eternal Father, it is the usually unspoken truth that they are also the offspring of an Eternal Mother.

The doctrine that there is a Mother in Heaven was affirmed in plainness by the First Presidency of the Church. Mortal persons who overcome all things and gain an ultimate exaltation will live eternally in the family unit and have spirit children, thus becoming Eternal Fathers and Eternal Mothers.

So when they speak of the Eternal Mother or the Eternal Father, you can see how it is qualified in their personal beliefs. Now, there's something ahead just a little bit. I'm going to give you this in case some of you may not be here later.

Salvation, Marriage, and Women in Mormon Theology

There is no provision in Mormonism for the salvation of women as individuals. They never thought of that. Of course, until this day, what was a woman? She was a chaplain. Heber Kimball, the grandfather of the present president of the Church, had 42 wives, and he referred to them as his powers.

That's about how much they thought about the women. Now, the only way a woman can be saved is to be married to a Mormon in good standing and be sealed to him in the temple, one of the 25 temples throughout the world.

It's the only way a woman can be saved. When she is exalted to heavenly motherhood in the celestial region with her Eternal Father, her father who is an exalted man, their one occupation is to beget spirit children throughout eternity, that they may become mortals in human birth.

So, the dear lady who wrote this book, Mormonism Mama and Me, she was a Mormon born in a polygamous family. The great-granddaughter of John D. Lee, who had 19 wives and 64 children. She's a descendant of one of the 64.

She lives in Arizona. I know her well. A very dear person who is so sound in her doctrine that you won't find a flaw in her book. But she writes from the inside, viewing a woman's loss in Mormonism. And she knows from the inside, because all of her people are Mormons.

She lives, incidentally, in a polygamous community in southern Arizona with her southern Baptist husband. A dear woman that has written charmingly. This book is charmingly written. But she brings out here that the only prospect a woman has in Mormonism, if she is exalted to heavenly motherhood, is to be pregnant throughout eternity.

That's the only loss that she has. Now, if you want a book that will beguile your minutes and you'll learn a lot about Mormonism, Mrs. Geer's book is back there. It's a splendid book. I told you about this one.

And this one is all doctrines. In my books, I have a plan for them. This is a comparison between Mormon doctrines and Christian doctrines, all the way through. There's a few added portions. I have here about the persecutions.

We have about the Mormon buildings, the reorganized church, and so forth. And some of the matters of the Book of Mormon. But mostly, this is a doctrinal book, and that's what it was intended for. It's right there.

The Various Sects of the Latter-day Saints

Then, there's a little book here that I wrote because people were always asking me the question, who are the reorganized Latter-day Saints? And they're everywhere. You'll find that there's a church of their kind in practically every city in the United States of any size.

This has to do with the sects of the Latter-day Saints. First, the reorganized church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has its headquarters in Independence, Missouri. And then, the polygamous sects of Mormonism, of which there are about 20, and probably a total membership of somewhere around 100 ,000 in the West of polygamous Mormons.

That's what this book is. It's the history of the various sects of Mormonism. The young fellows, when they come to your door, they will present themselves as being members of the only church of Christ on the earth.

The only one that has remained pure. When they do that, I say, which one of the 64 sects do you belong to? Because there have been 64 different sects of Mormonism since the death of Joseph Smith. This is history.

This little book has to do with the Book of Mormon, totally. The absolute philosophy of the presentations of the Golden Plate and the Book of Mormon. That's what this book is. As distinguished from the other, which is all doctrine.

Now, this little paper is one that I just finished recently and got into shape so I could bring it east with me. This is a little exposition of what Paul was talking about when he said, when they knew God, who was he talking to?

Gentiles. What was the Gentile name of God down through history? We find that the Jews worshipped Jehovah. The Semites in general worshipped Elohim. Even the Muslims have their name for God, Allah, which they say is from Elohim.

Same term. The Gentiles didn't use either of these terms. They used the term, the Most High God. Now, in Daniel, when the Jewish men were talking to the Gentiles, they always referred to God as the Most High God, or the God of Heaven, or the Higher One, and so forth.

When the Jews were speaking among themselves, they used the name Jehovah. When they talked to Gentiles, they used the Gentile name, the Most High. So, this traces the name of the Most High God down from the time of the Flood on down to the present.

The interesting thing, we find the name of God in the language of practically any tribe on the earth today. I've isolated at least 35 instances of it among the American Indian tribes in America. Some of them so strikingly pure that you can say these are devout worshipping theists.

The Most High God and the Gospel Among the Gentiles

There's a tribe out at the mouth of the Columbia River. I did some of my work up there for some of my studies. I had an informant, an old man who is now gone. He died at age 94 a few years ago. He became a Christian through a rather unusual experience up there in the Northwest when one of their men, after missionaries had been there and gone because they just hadn't made any progress with the Indians, they couldn't figure out why.

But at that time, a certain Indian had a vision. He went into a coma as a result of an accident, and he got a visitation while he was in the coma that the Most High God had a son named Jesus who had died for the Indians.

If they believed on him, they'd have their hearts cleansed, and then they could come to his place above. Well, I've always wondered where this man, a Squaxin Indian, where he ever heard the name of Jesus.

And in my research, I discovered that certain Catholic priests came to that part of the country while he was a small boy, and they baptized all the babies that they could catch, and all the little boys, and he was one of them.

So he knew the name of Jesus, you see. And when he got his vision, it was revealed to him. The missionaries never told him, but the Lord told him. Now, this old man, dear old man, learned a great deal after his conversion.

He said, you fellows, when you came, meaning the missionaries, he said, you didn't tell us that your Jesus was the son of our Most High God. You didn't tell us that. You told us we worship the devil. We don't.

We worship God. Then he gave me a prayer. I don't know whether I have it in anything that I've written here or not, but I can give it to you pretty well. And this was taught to him by his grandmother.

Back in the early days, in about the 1840s, and the missionaries hadn't reached that part of the country even then, the old grandmother had learned it from her grandmother down on the Columbia River way back in the 1700s.

And the prayer goes like this. O thou great God, may they name his name. We thank you for all the gifts that you send to us from above. We thank you for the rivers where the salmon can swim, for our food.

We thank you for the forests where the deer can hide. We thank you for the sunshine. We thank you for all of the good gifts you send to us. Then a second verse. O thou great high God, when you come by this way, take pity on us.

Not because we are worthy, for we are most unworthy. Not because we are good, because our hearts are vast. But because you made us, and we need you, and take us at last to your home above. Now, that is not a pagan prayer.

That's a theistic prayer. And when this revelation came to them, of the Son of the Most High God, there were hundreds of them believed. The qualifications were given. This man was told if he went back to his body, and he could see his body lying on the table down there in the house, and they were getting it sent into Olympia, Washington for a casket to put it in, that you can go back to your body if you go out and tell the story.

And he did, and many others with him, including the old man that I knew very well. This is on the distribution of the Gentile names of God, and it's pertinent to our lesson because Paul identifies God as the one whom they knew.

Therefore, they were responsible. Now, in the introduction here, I've given a chapter on that very thing, Paul's statement, why he made it, and so forth. And then we have a lot of research on the Gentile names of God from the time of the flood on down to the present.

Very interesting story. It's very dull. It's the dullest thing I ever wrote. But if you can sit down and read a couple of paragraphs at a time without going to sleep, then wake up and read a couple more paragraphs, and eventually you'll get the picture.

This is back there for your interest. We have a little time yet left. Give you their picture of Jesus Christ. Oh, let's have the rest of the time for questions, and I'll deal with this, because this is a little lengthy.

Question on Adam, Michael, and Exaltation

I'll give you this tomorrow night. The Incarnation. Do we have some questions? Yes. I was a little confused on it. It seems as though, when he became a man, man can be, but in the process of man becoming God, he becomes an angel, as Moroni did in the film The Baptist King?

Yeah, that's a good question. The question is concerning Michael becoming Adam, and Adam eventually becoming a god. Joseph Smith was a very careless reader. And in his reading, he confused a lot of things, and he read in Daniel about Michael the archangel, and he also read about the Ancient of Days, the chief, and so forth.

He put all of these into the one figure of Michael, and then he deduced that this was Adam. And, see, this crept into the ritual, eventually, that Michael becomes a man who is the god of this world. Now, of course, Adam had to go through all the processes to get back to the point of being our heavenly father and our heavenly god through this roundabout system of becoming a man, getting the truth of the Mormon gospel, eventually dying and ascending and becoming a god in the next life with Eve and probably the other wives that he had before he brought Eve to this world.

Now, it's a very confused thing, but it's because of Joseph Smith's inability to understand the English grammar. So he confused these terms and made Michael the Ancient of Days, which, of course, is wrong.

And then, of course, this makes Adam the Ancient of Days. And there are at least a dozen references to this in the book of the Doctrine and Covenants. In there, I can give you the documentation of it, but this is a very common thing.

And this is where the whole doctrine of God being an exalted man develops. It's all developed out of the same syndrome. Michael, Adam, the Ancient of Days, it's all just confused thinking on their part.

And when they put it down in type, to us it looks very confused. They seem to think this is great stuff. One writer has said that Joseph Smith made the biggest blunder when he formed a new religion in the age of the printing press because they printed everything he said as being Scripture.

Question on Continuous Revelation and Adding to Scripture

Well, tomorrow night we're going into the matter of the philosophy of the restored church. They claim that they restored the church in 1830 that had been apostate for 1 ,700 years, and there was no church on the earth when they started in.

And the father and the son, appearing to Joseph Smith, told him to form this new church. All right, another question. When these men are charged with a rebuke due to Jephthah, the war against Israel, and Revelation, they come up with this policy, the Book of Mormon.

Now, if that's so, if that's what they do, do you give us any idea of why the practice of Mormon worldwide today? The question has to do with the matter of adding to the Word of God, which, of course, includes the Book of Mormon and other writings.

Their concept is what they call a continuous revelation. They make the statement in their doctrinal statement, We believe all that God has spoken, all that he is now revealing, and we believe that he will reveal many things yet concerning his purpose.

Which, of course, covers anything that they would want to add. Now, you face them with this question, What about the Book of Revelation when it says that if any man added to this record or deleted from it, he was accursed with the curses that are written in the book?

They will immediately say, Oh, yes, but that's just talking about the Book of Revelation. It doesn't mean the rest of the writings. Well, if that's so, they're still under condemnation, because when Joseph Smith did his inspired version, which he called the inspired version in which he attempted to rewrite the King James Version, he added copiously to the Book of Revelation as well as the rest of it.

Wherever he found a passage that didn't quite coincide with their doctrines, he changed the text of scripture. So their changing of the scripture is by authority of this doctrinal statement, and we believe all that God is now revealing, and we believe that he will reveal many things yet to God.

Incidentally, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accepts this doctrinal statement. They say, We believe in the continuous revelation. And in order to have something to put in their doctrinal columns, they add all the minutes of the latest meetings of the Church.

Whatever the Prophet said, they put in there as inspired scripture, just as it's inspired in the King James, Peter, and John. They accept the doctrines and covenants up to the time just before he gave the doctrine, Section 132, that called for polygamy.

At that point, they cut off Joseph Smith's revelation. But they have added to that their own minutes since that time. So, the interesting thing, they are the ones that published the inspired version of the Bible which is so corrupt.

The Book of Mormon, the King James Bible, and Historical Anachronisms

And the Salt Lake City Mormons continue with the King James Version. And, of course, the reason they're stuck with the King James Version is that they've quoted from it 3 ,900 times in the Book of Mormon.

In fact, there are 22 chapters from the King James Version of the Bible, verbatim, in the Book of Mormon. The date from when they were inserted into the Book of Mormon was about 480 B .C. Now, that's a good trick, to quote the King James Version in 482 B .C., when it wasn't written until 1611 A .D.

And they had quite a time squirming out of that one. Of course, they say this. This was called to me by the great faith in my edition. He said that is exactly true. He said that the Holy Spirit told Moroni what words to put in there so that when it was published, the people around them would recognize it as being the same language as their Bible, the King James Bible, that they had in their hands.

Which is really some adroit squirreling out of opposition. We're going to deal with that when we deal with the Book of Mormon and the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon. It's just so full of them that it's...

I have no hesitation in saying these men are liars. In fact, when you come down to it, Joseph Smith lied about the First Vision. We know that because the dating of it. He lied about that. He lied about the angel coming to his room.

He lied about the golden plate. He lied about the witnesses that say they saw and handled the golden plate. He lied in the last writings that he wrote, Pearl of Great Price, by telling us that Abraham wrote this in his own hand upon papyrus, and he translated it into the Book of Abraham, which is as phony as anything you ever read.

So it wasn't a thing that Joseph Smith did that he did honestly. He never told the truth. It was the characteristic of him, and this is true of them today. Everything they do, they do by means of deceit.

Biblical Qualifications for Church Elders and Bishops

You'll find this in their presentation, everything they do. Even presenting their young elders in all of their pious garb and so forth. Holy young men, they're elders indeed. That's 19. I asked one up in Cleveland, Tennessee the other day.

He came to my meetings there. I said, Are you married? He said, No. You got any children? No. I said, Well, then you can't be an elder. I said, Why don't you take that badge off? I said, You can't be an elder, because an elder is supposed to be the husband of one wife.

And have a family that is responsible. Well, he said, Not in our religion. Pure religion isn't a god in the first place. Well, I'm just telling you that you have no right to call yourself an elder. But they will deny, of course, the polygamy.

The archaeologist, many years ago, he was bishop of the first ward, as they call it, in Boise. Now they have 25 wards in that town, 60 ,000. They practically own the town. But he told me he had four wives.

He said, One in Coquitlam, Idaho. One in Boise. One in Lewiston, Idaho. And one in Spokane, Washington. Because he traveled. That is his business, every month. He got around to all four establishments.

I said, How does that square with what Paul said to Timothy, that a bishop must be the husband of one wife? Sure. That's right. Exactly. They don't like it when you tell them that they are of the father of the devil, that I don't hesitate to do it if it's pertinent to the subject I'm discussing.

Engaging Mormon Missionaries and Testing Their Claims

You go to Salt Lake City, and they have an information center that costs them millions of dollars. And they portray so many scenes of Mormonism from the beginning, from the first vision on down to the present or to the future state.

For instance, they have one mural showing the prophets. You have portrayed Adam, of course, and Enoch, a very important person for them, Noah, Abraham, Elijah, Isaiah, Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ, Spencer Kibble.

This is the Lord. Spencer Kibble is the living prophet. None of them ever got prophecies from God. Yes? The question has to do with the portion in 2 John about not allowing cultists to come into your house.

This is a very vital statement, and we're surrounded with some good instructions for dealing with these people. They will want to come into your house, obviously. I say this for anyone who is not acquainted with their methods and who has no purpose in listening to them.

Of course, the problem there is don't listen to what they say. That's what John is saying to his niece in that portion. Don't listen to what they say. Don't invite them in. Well, I say the same thing.

Don't invite them in unless they have showed some inclination to listen to what you've already said. Now, what I tell people to do is this. You see them coming up to the door, you recognize them immediately.

You can't miss them. They don't look like any two other persons in our culture. All right. Open the door before they get up there, and step out and address them. Hello, fellas. I see you're Mormon missionaries.

Don't hesitate to identify them. I know you want to tell me something. But before you do, let me tell you something. And then give them a salvation testimony with all the scriptures that you can let them come to as long as you can think of anything to say to them.

And keep pouring it at them as long as they will listen. They'll want to get away. If they have any argument, then you can pick it up. Go ahead with it. If there's anything that's found that is valuable, go ahead and invite it.

But you don't need to let them in your house. I invite them in sometimes because somehow or other I have questions that I want to find out. Maybe I'm breaking this commandment. But I had two of them not too long ago, and they seemed interested because I had a testimony that they hadn't heard before.

I said, why don't you come in? I'd like to talk to you. They seemed to be willing to listen. I took them into my study, and I sat them in a position so that they could see in my bookshelves the questions about soul wives and like that from Norman writers, their own as well as other people.

And they looked at that and dropped their chins, you know. I kept talking to them like I didn't know what they were looking at. And I said, have you ever heard of the rapture? I just threw it right at them.

Well, what's that? So I read them the scriptures concerning the rapture. I said, this is something that is yet to happen. It hasn't happened yet. But one of these days, I'll be gone. And a lot of other people will be.

Me and the newspapers and everything else will just be a tremendous exodus of Christian people from this earth. And then I said, you've been looking at that shelf of books. The moment you hear that I'm gone, you come in here.

You can have all of those books. So they dropped their chins. They didn't know whether there was to take that bargain or not. Well, now, I had a purpose in that, because I wanted to get through their thick skins to the point where they would realize that there was something to what I had.

Now, that, I suppose, is an excuse for violating that. But don't do it as a matter of fact. The best thing is to just not let them get involved. And don't let them start in with very rich people. And when they come to the point, now, they'll come to this point when they realize there's something to the thing with them.

They will do what they call making their witness, which consists of this. They will put their hands on their chest, and they'll say, I have a testimony of the spirit. I know it's true. I have the burning in my chest that Joseph Smith is the prophet of God, and the book of Mormon is the word of God.

And they just change. They just cut themselves off from this subjective experience. There isn't a thing you can say. I don't let them get through it. I say, wait a minute, Father. Don't purge yourself.

You don't know that this is so. You can't give me any tangible proof of it. Now, this kind of spoils their thunder. I've had to do this right up in Salt Lake City. People that are high up in the organization, they come to the point where they want to cut you off.