John Taylor · 1875 April General Conference · 1875-04-08
Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 17, pp. 369-376, continued on Volume 18, pp. 1-2 (this discourse crosses a JD volume boundary; the printed text itself is continuous). Reported by David W. Evans in Pitman shorthand; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD, cross-checked against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript for the Volume 18 continuation (that page's IA/OCR scan is severely garbled two-column text).
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.
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 17, page 369, covering the bulk of the discourse. 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). The final ~2 pages (Vol. 18, pp. 1-2) were restored from the Weebly transcript, not this scan, because the Volume 18 page-1 OCR is badly garbled two-column text.
Used to restore the missing Volume 18 continuation (the final three paragraphs, ending 'in the name of Jesus. Amen.'), which the badly garbled IA OCR scan of that page could not be safely transcribed from.
Carruth CR 100 912 inventory item cr-100-912-0587. Scholarly re-transcription of David W. Evans's shorthand record, catalogued at the Church History Library. David W. Evans Shorthand Notebooks, BYU Library MSS 6857 box 1 folder 6 part 1 images 45-80. Sermon in Journal of Discourses 17:369, 18:1; not in CR 100 317. Transcribed by LaJean Purcell Carruth July 2017; revised 2 April 2018; corrected from originals at BYU; corrections input 13 December 2022. Recorded as a separate witness per docs/ingestion.md's Carruth policy; the printed Journal of Discourses 17:369 text stays preferred until this transcription is reviewed against it.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; restored missing continuation text.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: found this file ended abruptly with a bracketed editorial note, '[Continued on Page 1, Vol. 18.],' with the continuation itself never transcribed — a genuine ~3-paragraph gap (the Priesthood/kingdom-of-Priests passage, the 'Search me, oh God' prayer, and the closing charge to 'operate with the living Priesthood of all ages...in the name of Jesus. Amen.'). The Volume 18 page-1 IA OCR scan is severely garbled two-column text that cannot be safely disentangled without guessing, so the missing continuation was restored verbatim from the Weebly raw-HTML transcript (fetched directly, not summarized) instead, which reproduces the same text cleanly. Confirmed the restored passage is the discourse's genuine ending (followed immediately in the Weebly source by 'The meeting was adjourned till 2 p.m.' and the benediction) rather than a further truncation. Citation updated to reflect the volume-crossing span (JD 17:369-376, continued 18:1-2).
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.