Pulpit
Textual record

Kingdom of God and the Governments of Men

Daniel H. Wells · 1861 April General Conference · 1861-04-06

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 8, pp. 371-376, delivered April 6, 1861. BYU ContentDM precise page link recorded; text below is taken from the Historical General Conferences transcript of JD 8:371-376. Pitman shorthand report by John V. Long; speaker did not review this text before publication. Full text reproduced; not abridged.

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 used to source the text below; matches the JD 8:371-376 citation.

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 8, page 371. 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).

Collation history

Proofread against the source text.

Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; confirmed body text is complete and matches the witness verbatim.

Collated word-by-word against the original scan.

Heavyweight pass: JD 8:371-376 citation confirmed; speaker/date/occasion/title-basis/session/talk_order verified against the raw historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com HTML (fetched directly, not AI-summarized) — full JD text matches word-for-word. Resolved a duplicate-file bug: this file and the sibling '1861-04-wells-kingdom-of-god-and-the-governments.md' were the same discourse saved twice; this file is the richer/more complete record (session, talk_order, source_archived_url, fuller witness notes) and is retained as the single canonical file. The redundant duplicate was deleted via git rm and conference-record-minutes updated to reference this file only. No other content-integrity issues found.

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.