By their metaphors ye shall know them: Stearns supposedly sees a ‘Pillar’ with heavy emphasis on a fiery light from two flighty spirits who despite a lack of features are identified; and like a rozzers’ line-up of lantern-jawed heavies — the ‘will’ of the one matches the ‘will’ of the other.
Physician and preacher Elias Smith helped cobble a clutch of churches that eventually merged with other like-minded local churches to form the Christian Connexion. Elias Smith also founded The Herald of Gospel Liberty, perhaps America’s first religious newspaper, dedicated to promoting ‘religious liberty’ and news of religious revivals. And the no-less ambitious Elias Smith almost psychedelically trips into the woods with sheep on his mind:
I went into the woods ... a light appeared from heaven ... My mind seemed to rise in that light to the throne of God and the Lamb ... The Lamb once slain appeared to my understanding, and while viewing him, I felt such love to him as I never felt to any thing earthly. My mind was calm and at peace with God through the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world ... It is not possible for me to tell how long I remained in that situation. Elias Smith, The Life, Conversion, Preaching, Travel & Sufferings of Elias Smith pp 58-59, 1816
If in 1816 you go down to the woods that day you’re sure of a big surprise. If you do down to the woods that day, you’d better go sheeped in disguise. For every God that ever there was, will gather there for certain because, 1816 is the year the Golden Boys have their hick-clique.
Another 1816 baahrmy woolly-minded lamb of the Lard hungry for the good grass of the Gospel was the splendidly named Solomon Chamberlain. Solomon visited Palmyra where he met with the Smith clan in 1829 and would eventually become a Mormon:
About this time the Lord showed me in a vision, that there were no people on the earth that were right, and that faith was gone from the earth, excepting a few and that all churches were corrupt. I further saw in vision, that he would soon raise up a church, that would be after the Apostolic Order, that there would be in it the same powers, and gifts that were in the days of Christ, and that I should live to see the day, and that there would a book come forth, like unto the Bible and the people would [be] guided by it, as well as the Bible. This was in the year of 1816. Autobiography of Solomon Chamberlain 1788-1850
In 1821 Charles G Finney, inspired by a passage of scripture, found himself overcome by the urge to retire to the woods alone — a strange habit among New-England men — where he ‘attempted to pray’ but was ‘dumb’ with ‘an overwhelming sense of my own wickedness’ ‘verging fast to despair’, and weak-kneed sinks to prayer:
I then penetrated into the woods ... I crept into this place and knelt down for prayer ... But when I attempted to pray I found that my heart would not pray ... But lo! when I came to try, I was dumb; that is, I had nothing to say to God; or at least I could say but a few words ... Finally I found myself verging fast to despair ... I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees ... Just at that point this passage of Scripture seemed to drop into my mind with a flood of light: ‘Then shall ye go and pray unto me, and I will harken unto you. Then shall ye seek me and find me.’ Charles G Finney, Memoirs of Revival of Religion
Asa Wild complained in the after-heat of his 1823 vision, ‘I was much persecuted and called deluded’. Sound familiar? Oh Joe, say it ain’t so.
It seemed as if my mind ... was struck motionless, as well as into nothing, before the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah ... He also told me, that every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt ... Much more the Lord revealed, but forbids my relating it in this way. Asa Wild, The Wayne Sentinel 22nd October 1823
The Mormon historian Richard Bushman has identified at least thirty-three reported visions between 1783 and 1815. For the reader to believe every one of them, this places the Godfather loitering around New England for fifty years with intent to secure a suitable blue-eyed boy.
Joseph Smith commits the final version of his First Vision to 1820 but we find no published account until the 1840s, and the revelation that the Godfather Himself likes to frighten little boys in the woods would have sprung a supreme surprise on early Latter Day Saints:
The fact that none of the available contemporary writings about Joseph Smith in the 1830s, none of the publications of the Church in that decade, and no contemporary journal or correspondence yet discovered mentions the story of the first vision is convincing evidence that at best it received only limited circulation in those early days. James B Allen, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
With a slick sales pitch the corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints (Mormons) seeks to promote its shop-front version of Joseph’s Final Vision rather than reveal a loose stock of patchwork visions.
Salt Lake City — A Mormon student surfs the Internet for a school assignment and discovers that Mormon founder Joseph Smith had multiple wives, even marrying a 14-year-old.
A returned Mormon missionary, preparing a Sunday school lesson, comes across a website alleging that the Book of Mormon was plagiarized from a novel.
Surprised by what they find so easily online, more and more Mormons are encountering crises of faith. Some even leave the fold and, feeling betrayed, join the ranks of Mormon opponents. The Washington Post 1st February 2012, article Peggy Fletcher Stack: Mormons Confront Epidemic on Online Misinformation
The incendiary discovery by Morg victims that the varnished final version has an under-layer of primary rot comes as a shock.
The first extant evidence for a version of the Final Vision is a handwritten entry in a letterbook for 1832: Lard Jesus in ‘a pillar of fire above the brightness of the sun at noon day’ hears Joseph’s ‘cry in the wilderness’. Joseph’s sins are forgiven him in that footpath throw-away style of the New Testament; but gone are the golden days of Jesus gathering sheep, chicks or other farmyard animals:
... none doeth good no not one they have turned asside [sic] from the gospel and keep not [my] commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them
Jumping Jack-Flash Jesus lets rip eighteen hundred years of explosive frustration. On a cold November day of 1835 Joseph spins a fireside version of the First Vision to a house visitor Robert Matthias, a religious conman masquerading as alias Joshua the Jewish minister. And later that day Joseph lays the hotly hatched version of the Vision to a scribe: two unknown personages in a Pillar of light, Joseph’s sins are immediately forgiven, but no mention of religious revivals or corrupt Christian sects ... ‘And I saw many angels in this vision’.
From 1835 to the first published account of the First Vision of 1842 the two unknown personages mutate monstrously into the Godfather and the Boy Wonder Lard Jesus with their own lighting system and plans for a new fascist structure, and how best to extract a fast buck of 10% protection money on penalty of a fear of Hell.
The gullibility of early Mormons about the genesis of their new-world religion illuminates what was understood by the First Vision. The second polygamous prophet Brigham Young — him of the handcart scandal — testified as late as February 1855: