Textual record

The Lord is Teaching Us Valuable Lessons in Our Present Experience He is Teaching Us to Rely Upon Him and to Exercise the Faculties He Has Given Us Nature of the Government of the United States the Elements of a Variety of Governments Enter Into It Physical and Moral Courage the Judge of the Third District Court not a Christian a Concubine Was a Wife and It Should not Be a Term of Reproach the Character of Abraham Vindicated Sympathy for Our Enemies When the Saints Learn to Be Strictly Impartial, Judgment and Rule Will Be Given Them Not All in the United States Are Arrayed Against Us Weakness of the American Government Power of Secret Societies Zion to Be a Place of Refuge and Safety President Cleveland's Opportunity to Be Just and Great We Must Purify Ourselves that Liberty May Come

Moses Thatcher · 1885 October General Conference · 1885-10-08

Fidelity

◑Contemporaneous report

Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 26, pp. 327-335. 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 26:327-335

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-_1886_26, page 327transcription source

Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 26, page 327. 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 full Deseret News proceedings for this conference and cross-checked against the printed Journal of Discourses text already used as this file's source; found the body to be an accurate, complete, verbatim transcription (not a compiler-written summary like the other talks in this conference) matching the real Oct 8, 1885 Thursday afternoon discourse word for word. No corrections needed.

Collated word-by-word against the original scan.

Heavyweight pass: fetched and read the full Deseret News proceedings for this conference (Oct 14 and Oct 21, 1885 issues, pg. 623, 626-627), via historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com (newspapers.lib.utah.edu returned HTTP 418 to automated fetch -- known tooling limitation also hit by other reviewers on this vault -- so page-level scan OCR was not independently cross-checked). Unlike every other talk in this conference, this file was already sourced directly from the printed Journal of Discourses (vol. 26, pp. 327-335) in an earlier pass and found to be a genuine, accurate, complete verbatim transcription of Thatcher's real Thursday afternoon (Oct 8) discourse -- confirmed against the Deseret News account of the same conference. No fabrication, no mis-dating, no rewriting needed. Cross-referenced the conference's own roll call of general authorities present and the full session-by-session table of contents to confirm Thatcher was genuinely present and this was his real, complete discourse (the separate 1885-10-thatcher-discourse.md file, by contrast, duplicates this same talk under a different id and has been flagged with heavyweight_review_blocker instead).

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.