Gerald N. Lund - Praise to the Man

Text illustrations by Robert T. Barrett

1995 Gerald N. Lund and Kenneth Ingalls Moe

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P. O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an officialpublication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The viewsexpressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarilyrepresent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company.

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First printing in hardbound 1995
First printing in paperbound 2001
First printing in trade paperbound 2006

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Libraryof Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-81231

ISBN-10 0-88494-999-0 (hardbound)
ISBN-10 1-57345-875-9 (paperbound)
ISBN-10 1-59038-665-5 (tradepaperbound)
ISBN-13 978-1-59038-665-1 (tradepaperbound)

Printed in the United States of America

Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City,UT

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Forbehold, this is my work and my gloryto bring to pass the immortality andeternal life of man.

Moses 1:39

To Jewell G. Lund

(19101995)

Hewas a man who considered himself uneducated but who loved truth and sought forit all of his days. He was a man who never lost his love for learning. He was aman who never faltered in the quest to improve his understanding of the world,the people who inhabit it, and, most important, the God who rules us all.

Itwas from him that I first learned about the greatness of Gods work and glory.It was at his feet that I first gained a testimony of the greatness of theProphet Joseph Smith. And it was from him that I learned that truth is of suchinestimable value that it is worth a lifetime of searching.

Preface

Ona beautiful morning in the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith walked into a grove oftrees near his home to seek an answer to the question that troubled him. Evenas he knelt to pray, the powers of darkness gathered around him and tried todestroy him and stop the work of restoration that was about to unfold. Thosepowers were turned aside and Joseph was delivered by a blazing pillar of light.

Thatinitial experience would prove to be a type and a shadow of much of the life ofJoseph Smith. Opposition rose on every side. Neighbors mocked him, ministersrailed at their congregations against him, newspaper editors vilified him,families disowned those who dared to believe in his teachings. He was cursedand condemned, spit upon and slapped, tarred and feathered, jailed and shot at.Ambushes were laid, conspiracies hatched, plots initiated. He was hounded bymobs, betrayed by friends, sentenced to be executed by firing squad.

Timeand again, the powers of darkness tried to bring him and the work down. Timeand again, higher powers intervened. Thy days are known, the Lord once toldhim, and thy years shall not be numbered less. And so it proved to be. He wasprotected, shielded, warned, and safeguarded. Sometimes this protective powerwas subtle and unseen, sometimes clearly miraculous.

Duringthe time period covered in Praiseto the Man, volume 6 in the series The Work and the Glory, the season of joy described in volume 5 came to anend. At first, the forces that would eventually bring down a firestorm on theheads of the Saints were hidden, silent, treacherous. But that would end soonenough, and before it was over even the governor of the state would become partof the movement to destroy the Prophet. And this time the mobs would not beturned aside. This time the cries for blood would not be stilled. This time therifles and the pistols would not misfire or miss the mark. Josephs work wasdone. The keys had been placed on the shoulders of others, and his Father said,Come home. Under the muzzles of more than a hundred blazing rifles fired bymen with blackened faces, the life of the man whom God had chosen to usher inthe last dispensation came to an abrupt and violent end.

Inthe world and among the followers of darkness a great shout of triumph went up.How little did they understand that they had slain the man but not the work.Even the Saints, who waited in stunned, silent grief, did not fully comprehendthat what Joseph had set in place and moved forward so boldly could not beended with powder and ball. They had not yet remembered that as early as 1828,long before Joseph fully knew that his path would take him to Carthage Jail,the Lord said to him: The works, and the designs, and the purposes of Godcannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught.... Remember, rememberthat it is not the work of God that is frustrated, but the work of men.

Volume6 may prove to be a troublesome book for some readers. In the late months of1841 and on into 1842, Joseph Smith began to teach a select circle of leadersthe doctrine of plural marriage. Even today, some one hundred fifty yearslater, that issue continues to be controversial and disturbing in the minds ofsome people. Plural marriage proved to be so highly divisive in the Churchduring the Prophets time that even some in the highest councils found itimpossible to accept. One member of the Twelve was excommunicated, and a formermember of the First Presidency ended up in a conspiracy to kill Joseph andHyrum. That was how volatile this issue became. Plural marriage was a majorfactor in creating the emotions that led to the Martyrdom.

Writingof this time in history proved to be an interesting challenge for this author.Because of its highly explosive emotional ramifications, plural marriagegenerated a hurricane of reaction in the nineteenth century. Much of thatreaction has been preserved to our time. There are journal entries, letters,affidavits, recollections, reminiscences, and formal historical accounts.Sorting through those sourcestrying to decide what was truth, what wasrumor and innuendo, what was hearsay and embellishment, and what was downrightslander and fabricationproved to be an almost overwhelming task. Onecannot even get the most careful of historians to agree on exactly how manywomen were sealed to Joseph Smith and which of those he actually lived with ashusband and wife. But I can assure the reader that those sources were carefullyread again and again as this book was written.

Thereare surely some readers who will think I spent far too much time on thissubject and will be uncomfortable with what is given and how it is treated.There will surely be others who believe I have deliberately sidestepped far toomuch and that a fuller treatment was called for. The fundamentalissuefor those back then and for us todaycomes down to one basic question:Did God reveal this law to Joseph and require him and others to live it, or wasit purely the product of Josephs own mind? In Praise to the Man Ihave tried to let Joseph and those who believed in him speak for themselves. Ihave also tried to accurately depict the reactions of those who heard about therestoration of the practice of plural marriageboth those who accepted itand those who bitterly and totally rejected it. Ultimately each reader mustanswer that fundamental question for himself or herself. Was this of God, orwas it of man?