Joseph Fielding Smith · 1953 April General Conference · 1953-04-04
Official printed text of the One Hundred Twenty-third Annual (April) General Conference, held April 4, 5, and 6, 1953, as published in the Church Conference Report. The Church History Catalog record for the April 1953 Conference Report could not be independently verified this session (the catalog's record viewer is a client-rendered SPA that returned no content to available fetch tools, and the Chrome browser extension was not connected); rather than guess or reuse the 1951-1952 parent record without proof, the Internet Archive scan (conferencereport1953a), a Church History Library-contributed preservation copy, is retained as the top-level source. Heavyweight review collated the text page-by-page against that scan; removed a running-head bleed ("AS E. McKAY 21") from the body, corrected an OCR misread of "Jun." as "Tun." in the Doctrine and Covenants quotation, and rejoined a paragraph the OCR had split mid-sentence.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against IA scan/OCR witness; removed running-head bleed, fixed OCR misread, rejoined split paragraph.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: page-by-page collation against IA scan conferencereport1953a (leaves 19-21); talk boundaries, session, date, calling, and talk_order confirmed against the printed conference schedule and speaker-introduction text (President McKay's remarks identify this as the first speaker of the First Day Morning Meeting, Saturday April 4, 1953). CHL catalog record for April 1953 could not be verified with available tools this session (client-rendered catalog site, no browser access) — kept IA scan as source per docs/review.md guidance rather than fabricate a record ID; this is an honest tooling limitation, not a source-quality problem.
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.