Pulpit
Textual record

The Latter-Day Work—Necessity of An Inspired Leader to Stand at the Head of Israel, Etc., and to Dictate in Spiritual and Temporal Affairs

Wilford Woodruff · 1857 April General Conference · 1857-04-08

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 4, pp. 320-323 (delivered April 8, 1857). Pitman shorthand report; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD.

Witnesses

Full text of the discourse as published in the Journal of Discourses. BYU ContentDM's item-detail page currently fails to render in modern browsers (loads, then a client-side script redirects to the generic lib.byu.edu collections page; reproduced 2026-06-30, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.

Digital transcript referencing JD Vol. 4.

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 4, page 320. Currently the only reliably clickable link for this talk; BYU ContentDM is the institutionally preferred citation but its item pages are currently broken client-side (see the BYU witness note).

Carruth CR 100 912 inventory item cr-100-912-0773. Scholarly re-transcription of George D. Watt's original Pitman shorthand report, catalogued at the Church History Library. MS 4216 George D. Watt shorthand reports, 1857 April images 2-4. Sermon in Journal of Discourses 4:320; not in CR 100 317. Transcribed by LaJean Purcell Carruth 23 June 2022. Recorded as a separate witness per docs/ingestion.md's Carruth policy; the printed Journal of Discourses 4:320 text stays preferred until this transcription is reviewed against it.

Collation history

Proofread against the source text.

Proofread against the IA/weebly witnesses; confirmed clean, no changes needed.

Collated word-by-word against the original scan.

Heavyweight pass: speaker, date, page range (JD 4:320-323), and opening/closing sentences independently confirmed verbatim against [redacted legacy mirror] No text changes needed; talk boundaries clean.

Corrections

This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.