Eliza Roxcy Snow

I'm going to go to the writings of Eliza Snowe.

And Eliza Snow, this is her thoughts when she is introduced to the concept of plural marriage in Nauvoo.

And she says this, it was in Nauvoo I first understood the practice of plurality was to be introduced into the church.

The subject was very repugnant to my feelings, so directly that it was in opposition to my educated prepossessions that it seemed as though all the prejudices of my ancestors for generations past congregated around me.

Yeah.

Now, that phrasing that she uses, first of all, Eliza Snow knows how to use words, but that phrasing, this idea of her first impression of this doctrine, which is a very difficult doctrine, but her recognition of some of the difficulties that arose in her own heart was this idea of it went against her culture, not so much went against what God wanted her to do.

And that's sort of a question that I've been wrestling with because we talked a little bit ago about in our Boomer episode, this idea of like we need to, you know, not tear down the past and listen to those who came before.

And yet there is plenty in the scriptures about this idea of beware of wicked traditions.

And he lays the foundations for other relationships.

amazing church historians like Wilford Woodruff and Willard Richards and Thomas Bullock and William Clayton and Eliza Snow that are going to build on his legacy.

So I was honored to be the leader of an organization named after John Whitmer because he was a good historian.

And I don't know if Joseph Smith knew the whole story, honestly.

So I'll have someone reading out a portion from Parley P. Pratt's Declaration of Independence from the United States in 1885.

Someone reading Eliza R. Snow's poem commemorating the Fourth of July as a funeral in 1885.

Someone presenting as Ezra Taft Benson and reading his bicentennial address in 1976.

And then Cache Valley's own Darren Perry reading about his own reflections on on Manifest Destiny and its complicated relationship to Mormonism.

I mean, this is, this is hardship.

And there's, there's a quote from, uh, Eliza Snow about the Missouri persecutions, where she says that, "They might well allay doubts that these are indeed the last days." Man, this is sort of apocalyptic level of disaster.

It doesn't shake Brigham's belief in the church.

It doesn't shake his belief in Joseph's, uh, leadership.