Textual record

Design of God in Relation to the Earth and Its Inhabitants Power of Satan The Two Zions What is Required of the Saints A Priesthood in the Heavens, As Well As on the Earth Duties of the Priesthood Would-Be Advisers Celestial Marriage Distinction Between Polygamy and Prostitution Government Officers Discriminating in Favor of the Latter Unchastity Not to Be Tolerated in the Church Charity Advised Class of People Who Accuse the Saints of Crime Criminal Statistics Horrifying Statements of Crime in the Eastern States Warning to the Saints

John Taylor · 1884 October General Conference · 1884-10-06

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 25, pp. 303-317. Reported by John Irvine in Pitman shorthand; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Text transcribed from the printed JD. Note: unlike most other conferences, the Wayback Machine has no snapshot at all of this Weebly page (checked 2026-07-01, all timestamps); source_archived_url points to the live page, which is currently reachable and shows a full bibliography and agenda matching this citation.

Witnesses

Journal of Discourses 25:303-317

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-_1885_25, page 303transcription source

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 25, page 303. 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 IA scan witness for JD 25:303-317; confirmed complete text (opens referencing 'last evening's' address per JD convention, no clean discourse-ending formula but the text is not truncated — Taylor's own closing words wrap up the topic). Added session from the file's own occasion field (Monday/Tuesday, October 6-7) and confirmed against the Weebly bibliography.

Collated word-by-word against the original scan.

Heavyweight pass: confirmed citation JD 25:303-317 against indexes/jod-page-index.json (byu_pointer 8841, IA page/n312) and against the Weebly page's own bibliography (which lists this as 'Taylor, John. Vol. 25, October 6, 1884: 303-317') — exact match. Collated full text against the Internet Archive scan witness; no truncation, body length consistent with a long ~15-page discourse spanning two days' remarks (the text itself references continuing 'last evening's' address). Did not assign talk_order since this spans two days' sessions rather than a single dated slot.

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.