When Joseph Smith learned of the expulsion of his followers from Missouri he immediately organized a company and gathered together clothing and provisions to go to their relief; and, if possible, restore them to the lands from which they had been driven. This company in Mormon history is known as Zion's camp. During that journey from Ohio to Western Missouri many dangers were braved, many hardships encountered, much toil and sickness experienced. As the only assurance of assistance which could be obtained from the governor of Missouri was of a nature to invite more bloodshed,4 the company called Zion's Camp disbanded.
The exiled Saints subsequently settled some fifty or sixty miles north of Jackson County, and organized Caldwell County, where they were joined by large numbers of their co-religionists from the East. Joseph Smith also settled with them. The religious intolerance of their neighbors, however, gave them no peace, and in the fall and winter of 1838 the whole state of Missouri arose against the church and expelled some twelve thousand peaceful and law-abiding United States citizens from their homes solely on account of their religious views. Joseph Smith, under circumstances of great cruelty, was torn from his family and friends, and with a number of his prominent brethren was thrust into prison where they remained for six months awaiting trial, while their families and the church in the midst of great suffering—hunger, cold and nakedness—the greater part of their property destroyed—were driven from the State. Recognizing their inability to prove aught against the prophet and his fellow-prisoners, after six months' incarceration, while moving them from one part of the State to another, their guards, evidently through an understanding with the judges—connived at their escape. After enduring many hardships the prophet rejoined his family and the church in Illinois, where the Saints were then settling.
During his residence in Illinois the prophet's life was one continual course of toil, excitement, sickness, and danger. Old foes and false friends were well-nigh constantly seeking to entrap him. New schemes were constantly hatching to destroy him. During his career some fifty times he was dragged before the tribunals of his country and as many times were the judges compelled to dismiss him. While living in Illinois an effort was made to kidnap him and take him to Missouri among his old enemies. In the midst of these persecutions he was constantly preaching, translating, or completing the organization of the church—setting in order the various quorums of the Priesthood and instructing them in their duties. He endured poverty and hardship throughout the greater part of his career and scarcely knew what it was to enjoy peace—save that God-given peace that comes from within; and which, however great the tempest from without may be, gives serenity and joy unspeakable to the servants and prophets of God.
At last, after a life of continual warfare with error; after enduring untold toil and persecution, illegal prosecutions and mob violence, hardships and suffering—wicked men conspired against him, and while in the charge of the officers of the State of Illinois, with the honor of the great state pledged through the governor for his protection, he was murdered in cold blood for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, in the thirty-ninth year of his age.
Counting from the time that he received his first vision, when a lad of fourteen years, he stood a witness for God a little less than a quarter of a century; but in that short time he suffered more and accomplished more than has fallen to the lot of any other man to suffer and accomplish since the Son of God expired on the summit of Golgotha.
Not only did Joseph Smith thus endure a life of toil, poverty, persecution, danger and suffering in support of the miraculous accounts in which his public ministry had its origin; but many of his followers (some of them also witnesses of the miraculous events which brought into existence the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) spent their lives in the same way. The first Elders of the church shared Joseph Smith's toils, mobbings, imprisonment, poverty, danger and exile; and some, while engaged in the ministry, even in later years have suffered death by violence5 for testifying to the truth of the miraculous story in which the church had its origin. The servants of God have traveled in nearly all the nations of Europe; through the states of North America; and among the peoples of the Pacific Islands. They have usually gone without purse or scrip, and always without remuneration. They have sacrificed their business and professional interests, together with the associations of home and family that they might preach the gospel newly restored to the earth, through the ministration of angels to Joseph Smith. In telling the miraculous story in which the new dispensation had its birth, they have "found leopards and lions in the path," and "have made abundant acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that with privy paw devoured apace and nothing said;" but the have kept right on in the work God called them to perform; and have endured toils and privations which even those of the ancient apostles do not surpass. Amid the ridicule of the learned, the indifference of the rich and the great, and the violence of the rabble they have faithfully borne witness to the truth of the miraculous restoration of the gospel in these last days, until the whole world is acquainted with the story; and in their ministry they have given as much evidence of the divinity of the message they proclaim to the world as ever the apostles and elders of the ancient Christian church did by their lives of self-denial, of toil, exertion, danger and suffering.
These labors they continued after the death of their prophet leader; and I may say of them what Mr. Paley says of the first Christian ministers—only slightly paraphrasing his words: These men could not be deceivers. By only not bearing testimony they might have avoided all these sufferings and have lived quietly. Would men in such circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts which they had no knowledge of; go about lying, to teach virtue; and though not only convinced of Joseph Smith's being an impostor but having seen the success of his imposture in his martyrdom, yet persist in carrying it on; and so persist, as to bring upon their own heads, for nothing, and with a full knowledge of the consequences, enmity and hatred, danger and death?
The conditions demanded in Mr. Paley's argument all exist in the experience of the ministry of the new dispensation of the gospel, and if the same weight be given the argument in the case of this dispensation as is accorded to it when employed to prove the truth of the Christian story as told by the ancient apostles and elders, the divinity of the mission of Joseph Smith is proven beyond all controversy.
Mr. Paley, continuing his argument under the head I have been discussing, says that his belief in the miraculous story told by men who had on account of it endured lives of toil and exertion, of danger and suffering, would be very much increased "If the subject of the mission were of importance to the conduct and happiness of human life; if it testified of anything which it behoved mankind to know from such authority; if the nature of what was delivered, required the sort of proof which it alleged; if the occasion was adequate to the interposition, the end worthy of the means. In the last case my faith would be much confirmed, if the effects of the transaction remained; more especially, if a change had been wrought, at the time in the opinion and conduct of such members, as to lay the foundation of an institution, and of a system of doctrines, which had since overspread the greatest part of the civilized world."6 In the new dispensation of the gospel all these additional circumstances which Mr. Paley finds in the old dispensation of Christianity, exist; so that there is nothing wanting to justify the complete appropriation of this time-honored Christian argument to the divinity of Joseph Smith's mission. Let me point this out:
First: The subject of the mission must be of importance to the conduct and happiness of human life. This is true of the message with which Joseph Smith came to the world, since it cries