Melvin J. Ballard · 1927 April General Conference · 1927-04-06
Transcribed from the OCR of the official printed Conference Report published by the Deseret News and hosted at the Internet Archive (conferencereport1927a, underlying file conferencereport981chur_djvu.txt). Running heads, page numbers, and line-break hyphenation removed.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the OCR/scan witness (Internet Archive conferencereport1927a); fixed scattered OCR letter substitutions ('T' for 'I', 'n>' for 'to', 'b*ut' for 'but', 'iback' for 'back', and similar), removed two mid-body running-head bleeds, reflowed paragraphs, removed the trailing soprano-solo notice as session-music bleed, and replaced a placeholder title (a truncated fragment of the opening sentence) with a supplied title drawn from the talk's own first internal subheading and central theme. Corrected date, session, and calling_at_time.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: page-by-page collation against the conferencereport1927a djvu OCR (conferencereport981chur_djvu.txt); confirmed speaker (Melvin J. Ballard) via the printed running head 'ELDER MELVIN J. BALLARD' recurring at each page break in this talk. Confirmed this talk immediately follows Elder Stephen L. Richards's address (1927-04-51), whom it explicitly references by name near its close ('the people, to whom Brother Stephen L. Richards has just referred'), and is followed by a soprano solo (How beautiful upon the mountains, sung by Margaret Stewart Hewlett) and then Elder David A. Smith's address (1927-04-53). Removed the trailing soprano-solo notice from the end of the body as session-music bleed belonging to the boundary before the next talk, not to Ballard's own remarks (matching the boundary-cleanup precedent set on 1927-04-04, where an adjacent solo notice was likewise excluded). Corrected source_url page anchor from a proportional estimate (n157) to the exact leaf n158 using the item's page_numbers.json leaf map (printed page 156 = leaf 158, leaf = printed page + 2, matching the pattern confirmed across this conference's Fourth Day talks; the printed index's Ballard entry confirms 'Ballard, Elder Melvin J . . . 156'). Corrected session from 'Second Day Morning Session' to 'Fourth Day Afternoon Meeting (Concluding Meeting)' and date from 1927-04-01/approximate to 1927-04-06/exact, consistent with 1927-04-50 and 1927-04-51. Corrected calling_at_time from the generic 'General Authority' placeholder to 'Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles', matching Ballard's actual office at this conference (per the convention used elsewhere in the vault, e.g. 1927-10-32). Body text collated word-for-word against the OCR paragraph by paragraph, including all seven internal subheadings. Replaced the placeholder title with a supplied title drawn from the talk's first subheading, 'Meeting the Testing Time,' which also names its central theme.
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.