Orson Pratt · 1867 October General Conference · 1867-10-07
Delivered October 7, 1867, in the newly completed Salt Lake Tabernacle, the first General Conference held there. Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 19, pp. 311-321 (confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json and the Weebly page's own bibliography — this discourse was printed unusually late, in a volume otherwise covering 1877-1878 material). Text below is taken from the Historical General Conferences transcript. Reported by David W. Evans; speaker did not review this text before publication. Full text reproduced; not abridged. Contains the speaker's extended theological argument against Trinitarian creeds and for an embodied, personal God — presented as the speaker's doctrinal exposition, not as project editorial endorsement.
Pitman shorthand by David W. Evans; speaker did not review. 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 2026-07-01, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 19, page 311. 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).
Digital transcript used to source the text below.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; body confirmed word-for-word complete, no changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: previous source_url was a bare BYU collection landing page with no proven JD volume/page citation (fidelity_notes even guessed 'likely JD vol. 12,' which was wrong). Located the precise citation — JD 19:311-321, an unusually late placement in a volume otherwise covering 1877-1878 discourses — confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json and the Weebly page's own bibliography; upgraded source_url/witnesses to the page-anchored IA pointer (page/n318) and BYU id/832. Body collated word-for-word against the IA OCR scan of JD Volume 19 (opening 'Never having had the opportunity of speaking to so large a congregation...' and closing '...truth abides forever and has no end... I desire to abide in it forever and ever. Amen.' both confirmed verbatim) and cross-checked against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript (fetched directly, not summarized); no OCR errors, clean boundaries. Session (Monday Morning Session) and talk_order (1) confirmed against the Weebly page's own day-by-day agenda.
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.