Textual record

The President Feeling a Little Weak in Body Asked the Considerate Attention of the Congregation God Interested in the Welfare of All the Human Family The Organization of the Church, and the Responsibility Resting Upon the Priesthood God Has Given to Everyone a Portion of His Spirit The Promptings of that Spirit The Wickedness of the Inhabitants of the Earth in the Days of Noah Why the Flood Came The Ante-Diluvians Would not Repent The Gospel Again Preached As a Warning Persecution Our Relationship to this Nation in a Political Point of View A Commonwealth Has Been Built Up in These Mountains by the Mormons Under the Blessing of God Unfairly Treated as a People By the Parent Government The Latter-day Saints Have Rights Which They Will Seek Legally to Maintain Conclusion

John Taylor · 1883 October General Conference · 1883-10-07

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 24, pp. 287-296. Reported by John Irvine in Pitman shorthand; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD.

Witnesses

Journal of Discourses 24:287-296

Pitman shorthand by John Irvine; 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-_1884_24, page 287transcription source

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 24, page 287. 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 24:287-296 citation against indexes/jod-page-index.json (unchanged, already correct — note JD publication had fallen well behind by this era, scattering this single conference's discourses across Volumes 24, 25, and 26). Added session ("Sunday Afternoon Session") and talk_order (1) confirmed against the Weebly page's own day-by-day agenda for the Fifty-Third Semi-Annual Conference. Checked for volume-crossing continuation markers — none found. Body length and closing "Amen" line confirmed against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript; 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.