Brigham Young · 1857 October General Conference · 1857-10-07
Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 5, pp. 327-333 (delivered October 7, 1857, Wednesday afternoon). This is Young's second discourse at the October 1857 conference; his first ('Advantages of Trials and Experience,' JD 5:293-296, October 6) is filed separately. Conference held while Johnston's Army was marching toward Utah Territory. Pitman shorthand report by G. D. Watt and J. V. Long; the speaker did not review this text before publication.
Full text of the discourse as published in the Journal of Discourses; BYU ContentDM item-level page for JD 5:327-333. Used for collation during Final Review (jod-05-055). A prior BYU item-detail rendering bug (client-side redirect to the generic collections page, reproduced 2026-06-30) has since cleared; this URL now loads directly.
Legacy source_url used before this citation was corrected to point at the BYU ContentDM item page (source_url authority fix, decade-1850s-agent-cleanup); kept as a secondary witness. Used as the recovery source during heavyweight review after a content-integrity bug (see heavyweight_review_notes).
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 5, page 327. Not used for word-level collation this pass; kept as a page-location witness.
Proofread against the source text.
Heavyweight pass found this file's body text was a duplicate of a different talk. Corrected.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass found a serious content-integrity bug: this file's body was an exact, word-for-word duplicate of the sibling file 1857-10-young-advantages-of-trials.md (same opening 'Quite a goodly number have assembled to our Conference...' and same closing 'The brethren call me so; and if it be so, I am glad.'), not the 'Testimony of the Spirit' discourse its own title/frontmatter claimed. Confirmed (private clue) that the real discourse opens 'I rise to bear my testimony with the rest of the brethren who have spoken.' and closes '...all right. Amen.' — including Young's defiant remarks on Johnston's Army ('we are here, and we intend to stay here') and his reflections on Joseph Smith. Replaced the body with the verified correct text, fetched from the raw HTML of the weebly witness (bypassing AI-summarization tools) to get it complete and unsummarized. Confirmed JD 5:327-333 page range. Talk boundaries clean.
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