As found in the Utah Magazine on August 7th, 1869
What we particularly desire to demonstrate in this article is, that it is part of the policy and programme of the Heavens to raise up leaders of religions amongst [humanity], and inspire them with truths more-or-less freed from error, in exact proportion to the condition of the age or the race to whom they are sent. Which truths are necessarily anything but “the way, the truth, and the light” to later and more advanced times.
We view all the great founders of national faiths as inspired and raised up for their work, and though far from being equally illuminated with divine truth, yet equally sent by divine providence for the good of the class to which they belonged. Among these, we may enumerate Zoroaster the Persian reformer, [Confucius] the great Chinese, and the great founders or chief promoters of [Hinduism], [Islam], and even Roman Catholicism itself.
God, we say, has raised up these men for the sake of humanity: raised them up and supported them and their creed, by a propitious providence, which is clearly to be seen in the history of their lives, – Not that God has desired to impart to [humanity] the false and ignorant conceptions of sacred matters with which these faiths have abounded; but [God] has had to take [humanity] where [God] found them, and give them the highest kind of truths that they could, in their ignorant condition, appreciate and believe in. In this light, we believe that God has not merely permitted old religions to exist, but that they have been intentionally designed and imparted for the world’s best good. As these religions have contained more-or-less falsehood intermixed with a portion of truth, the question will arise, how can God designedly have favored the promulgation of that which is not all truth? We reply on the same principle that we can sometimes permit the teaching of that which is untrue ourselves, and not only be justified but praise-worthy. We tell our children that they were “dug up out of the parsley bed” or something equally untrue; in doing this all admit we act, wisely and righteously, because common sense demands the withholding from children the facts of procreation. So we hold that God has had to act, for to [God Humanity is] but earth’s little children. To reveal to them in a semi-civilized condition, truths which it requires the highest spiritual culture to understand, would, indeed be a perversion of all wisdom, and throwing pearls before swine; hence religious leaders each just a little ahead of their time, have been inspired with truth sufficient, to suit their age. Commencing with some, whose religious ideas were very materialized and degraded. But as ages have rolled along and civilization has progressed, men have successively been raised up, whose souls have been fired with higher and still higher truths, each throwing away something of the falsehood of the past, and each coming nearer to the naked, unadulterated truth.
[Humanity] on the road to their present state of civilization have passed through every condition, from the most bloody-minded, filthy, and degraded, to that where they can sense some of the highest and divinest truths. In all these stages, they have been equally, as to their origin, God’s children. Deity has been equally bound to protect and lead them along at one time as another. There has been no period when God could say, “they are too low for my love and help.” Hence, they have had to be taken just where they were, and as they were, and made the best of; consequently an order of revelations have had to be given to them at each period, spiritually speaking, just a little ahead of where they then stood. This has necessitated the interblending of truth and error.
The highest wisdom teaches that the best way to educate any race or people is through their own traditions. Taking [people] of their own class, whose conceptions are a little ahead of their times, and inspiring them to promulgate their ideas associated with such traditions as are natural for the people to believe. Thus educating them through themselves and leading them on a step further.
Take for instance the principles taught by Jesus Christ. He came just as soon as the world could understand a little of the power and beauty of his doctrines. He would have been fearfully out of place in Moses’s times. In rude and barbarian periods, the human heart is always revengeful. It cannot possibly conceive of the loftiness and superiority of such principles as forgiveness and mercy; or the divine power of love. Indeed, they are hardly realized today. In such times, the utmost [people] can sense, is justice, because there is something stern and unrelenting about justice. … [God revealed God’s self] as a god of wrath and justice [to the untutored Israel in the wilderness] – a God taking bloody vengeance upon [God’s] foes. Such a god the [could] understand and appreciate, because [this God was] akin to their own low nature. In this way, a hold [could] be obtained upon their minds, while a few divine and nobler principles are intermixed. And thus a lower for of religion – like that of the Law given by Moses, becomes “a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.”
How much the low natures of [humanity] have been studied and propitiated in the impartation of divine revelation, is seen in Moses’s bloody rule of “an eye” torn our of the head “for an eye,” “a tooth” dragged out of the mouth “for a tooth.” And a life for a life. What is more revolting to a refined spirit than such doctrines? And yet these principles – absolutely brutal compared to those of Christ – were the highest and holiest that people could appreciate; and being the highest they could obey understandingly, the divinest wisdom was manifested in framing them no better than they were.
On this principle, we hold that revelations have always been given. No matter how great the prophet, [they are] never a vehicle for greater light than [their] age can receive. Hence the shortsightedness of eternally appealing “to the law and to the testimony” as we are now being urged by our friend who have come to set us right; but who, certainly, will yet understand the sublime expansiveness of their great father’s doctrines better. What is “the law and the testimony” of any past period, but a compound of some additional light that was given to suit the new times, with just as much of the old leaven wisely left in as the people’s condition demand?
It was appealing to the law and to the testimony that made the world for two thousand years believe, in spite of their senses, that the sun went round the earth, and that God made the light first and the sun afterwards – just because the Bible said so. And this same appealing “to the law and to the testimony” makes [people] believe, today, that death was never introduced till Adam [and Eve] fell; when the very rocks that were created for Adam [and Eve] to walk upon, were composed of the bodies of millions of little creatures, swept by the hand of death itself into their position. When the bowels of the earth over which [they] and all [their] descendants have roamed, is packed every layer with the dead bodies of the innumerable species that preceded [them]; filled, we say with token of death, death! DEATH! from the earth’s surface to its core.
It is appealing to the “law and to the testimony” that enables one [person] so cleverly, to prove that Utah is accursed of God, because Jeremiah spoke of some people who should be led to “a SALT LAND not inhabited;” and it is appealing to the “law and to the testimony” that enabled another to prove Utah is God’s own place, because Isaiah spoke of those for whom “the DESERT and the solitary places should rejoice and blossom as the rose:” while the bewildered listener comes to the conclusion that the “law and the testimony” is very much like a fiddle upon which a [person] can play any tune that suits [them]. Here, Joseph Smith not dead thirty years, and already [people] commence to argue in the same wearying sickening way about what he said and what he did not say, as they have done for ages over the meaning of Jesus’s words, until the earth has been one dark scene of hate and contention crimsoned with blood. And, so it would be again and again, but for the fact that we are living in an age that will set aside forever these endless sources of contention, by throwing [people] off “The Books” on to the diviner and far surer testimony of their own souls – that intellectual and spiritual light that grows forever in every [person’s] nature, while Sacred Books are stationary.
For one moment let us ask from whence do all sacred Books and revelations of this or any other age obtain their authority over our individual minds? How, in a word, did we come to accept them as true and divine in the first place; but by submitting them to the light of truth in our own bosoms? It was only so far as they agreed with that inward testimony and intelligence that they were worth anything to us. They then, obtained their authority after all FROM OURSELVES, or in the light of deity within us. If so, that light must be greater than all books and revelations, because it is the touchstone by which we try them, and before which all have to come to be judged. We do not believe in prophets because they say they are divine; neither do we believe in them because of the correctness of their predictions, or their miracles. All this sort of thing can, and has been done by natural gifts without any special divine calling. There is but one infallible way by which the world can judge the divinity of a message, and that is by its tendency to raise us to a higher and a diviner life; by its lifting us out of our earthliness and our selfishness on to a more Heavenly plane. How, for instance, do we know that Jesus is divine? Certainly not because the books say he was; but simply because his principles tough our souls and we feel their loveliness and beauty. Thus, immediately we are taken off the books on to the testimony of our own hearts. And so with all past revelations, it is only so far as they present truths in harmony with the highest instincts of our natures that they can be true to us. This is the highest evidence that God can give to [humanity], and by which all apostles, all prophets, and all sacred books stand or fall. Why then be manacled forever by books which get all their authority to us from our very selves? If we began by testing books and revelators by the light of Deity enshrined within our souls, why not leave an opening for unlimited inspiration, and go on testing all by the same light? And if, in the growth of our spirits, new and higher light is developed within us on any subject, why not accept it and leave the books to care for themselves, and go on trusting to the same immortal guide within the soul which we accepted in the first place? It is all the test we shall ever need throughout an ever progressive immortality.
[Humanity is] destined to grow beyond the iron bondage of sacred books. They have served a useful purpose in the past, and were adapted to the world’s childhood. It was well enough before [humanity] had learned that God dwelt in their souls, ready to answer any call for light to steady poor weak humanity, but chaining it down to the law and the testimony, just as we tie little children to a bedpost for fear they should crawl into danger. That saying of scripture, “To the law and to the testimony” was wisely enough applied then. But men have found out since then that, that wondrous thing, the human soul bears testimony to every divine truth, and can always be relied upon.
We stand upon the threshold of a new age, which will emancipate [humanity] from the thralldom of creeds and texts, and teach them to rely upon their own inward perceptions of truth. A blind adherence to past revelations has ever been in the way of human progress. The doctrine which bases [people] upon themselves instead of upon cast-iron saying of sacred books, is the only one which can open an illimitable road for truth, and it must prevail. It will be useless to talk to [people] about the law and the testimony when their souls have soured to higher truths – to inspirations nigher to God than any “law and testimony” ever contained.
In the former part of this article, we endeavored to show that revelations of divine truth has been wisely given, associated with such lower ideas that would give them sufficient hold upon [humanity] in the period for which they were designed. We will say in addition, that there is no exception to this rule. The reflective mind that goes fearlessly before its God and dares to accept all the truth that [God] will our into the soul – no matter what idol of doctrine it may destroy, will see that somethings, given even by God’s own apostles and prophets, and upon which a great deal of importance has been placed, are only so many pure principles overlaid with something of an earthly nature for the human mind to grasp, till it is strong enough to walk by the pure truth alone. What is, therefore, true of the past, can be true again. We have not yet got further than to the merest beginnings of divine revelation. With greater times, therefore, will come greater conceptions of truth. Old ideas, almost worshipped now, have yet to be stripped of their glory, and “thrown to the moles and to the bats.” For truth must go on, revelation and inspirations of heavenly light must increase. They are the natural property of every human spirit. All past books and revelations in the way of the grandest, highest, and widest conceptions of the human soul must be left on one side, and the intelligence of [humanity] uncurbed by anything but pure and unadulterated truth press onward to its destiny.