Textual record

The Instructions Given Are Intended for All the Saints The Latter-Day Work An Individual Work Men and Women Are Responsible for Their Own Acts Obedience is Essential to Salvation The Present Sinful Condition of the World the Result of Disobedience Counsel to the Saints on the Necessity of Living Exclusively for the Building Up of the Kingdom of God

Joseph F. Smith · 1873 October General Conference · 1873-10-07

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 16, pp. 246-251. Reported by David W. Evans in Pitman shorthand; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD.

Witnesses

Journal of Discourses 16:246-251

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 2026-06-30, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.

Internet Archive — per_utah-and-the-mormons_journal-of-discourses-_brigham-young-_1874_16, page 246transcription source

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 16, page 246. 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).

Primary source — archive.org archived

Collation history

Proofread against the source text.

Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; body confirmed against the Weebly transcript, no changes needed.

Collated word-by-word against the original scan.

Heavyweight pass: confirmed JD 16:246-251 citation against indexes/jod-page-index.json (unchanged, already correct). Added session ("Tuesday Afternoon Session") and talk_order (3) confirmed against the Weebly page's own day-by-day agenda for the Forty-Third Semi-Annual Conference. Note: the Weebly page's own agenda places this discourse on Wednesday, October 8 (after Woodruff), while this file's date (October 7) comes from a detailed occasion field set in a prior review pass; the printed JD page range (246-251) sits between Cannon/Wells' Monday material and Pratt/Snow's Tuesday material, consistent with a Tuesday delivery. Unable to confirm the exact day via OCR (this page's scan is too garbled to locate the discourse header), so the existing October 7 date was left unchanged rather than guessed at. Checked body-length proportionality per page (given the truncation found in 1867 October's Erastus Snow file) and spot-verified the closing line against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript; confirmed complete, no truncation.

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.