In the library

Orson Pratt

Apostle at twenty-three, self-taught mathematician, and the man sent out to tell the world that Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage. He also spent two decades publicly disagreeing with Brigham Young about the nature of God, and was never removed from the Quorum for it.

Orson Pratt left 127 sermons in the Journal of Discourses, more than anyone except Brigham Young, John Taylor, Heber C. Kimball and George Q. Cannon. He also left a doctrinal newspaper the church later disavowed, and a record of dissent that makes him the most interesting person in nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint thought. Everything below is in this library.

August 1852: he tells the world

Latter-day Saints had practiced plural marriage in secret for a decade. On August 29, 1852, at a special conference in Salt Lake City, the church made it public — and the job of explaining it went to Orson Pratt. He opened by admitting he had not seen it coming:

It is quite unexpected to me, brethren and sisters, to be called upon to address you this forenoon; and still more so, to address you upon the principle which has been named, namely, a plurality of wives. It is rather new ground for me; that is, I have not been in the habit of publicly speaking upon this subject.

Orson Pratt, Celestial Marriage, Journal of Discourses, Volume 1, August 29, 1852

He then argued that the doctrine was not what its critics assumed:

It is not, as many have supposed, a doctrine embraced by them to gratify the carnal lusts and feelings of man; that is not the object of the doctrine.

Orson Pratt, Celestial Marriage, Journal of Discourses, Volume 1

There is an irony in the assignment worth knowing. Pratt had nearly left the church in 1842 over plural marriage — specifically over Joseph Smith's approach to his wife Sarah — and was briefly excommunicated before being restored. Ten years later he was the man chosen to defend the doctrine to the United States.

The Seer

Sent to Washington to make the church's case, Pratt founded a monthly of his own. The Seer ran through 1853 and 1854 and is indexed here in full. It is the most systematic attempt anyone made in that generation to work out Latter-day Saint doctrine from first principles — the nature of God, the eternity of matter, the pre-existence, plural marriage — and Pratt wrote nearly all of it himself.

It went further than the church was willing to follow. In 1865 the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve issued a statement identifying doctrines in The Seer and in Pratt's other writings as incorrect, and instructing members not to treat them as the teaching of the church. Pratt signed the statement. The magazine was never reprinted with church approval.

The disagreement he would not drop

The specific dispute was over what Brigham Young taught in April 1852: that Adam is God the Father. Pratt did not accept it. He argued against it in council, in writing, and by omission — teaching Adam as Michael, an exalted man presiding over his posterity, and declining to teach him as God.

Some of these angels have received their exaltation, and still are called angels. For instance Michael has received his exaltation.

Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses, Volume 15, Discourse 39

Brigham Young rebuked him for it more than once, publicly. In 1875 Young reordered the seniority of the Quorum of the Twelve in a way that moved Pratt behind John Taylor — a decision that determined who became president of the church when Young died two years later, and one that historians still read as tied to these disputes.

And yet Pratt was not excommunicated, not released, and not silenced. He kept preaching, kept publishing, and outlived Brigham Young by four years. The full record of what he taught about Adam sits alongside what Young taught, in The Adam-God doctrine.

What he left

Pratt died in Salt Lake City in October 1881. He had been an apostle for fifty years, served ten missions, published the first Latter-day Saint pamphlets in several countries, calculated the pioneer company's route west, and divided the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants into the numbered verses every reader still uses. That versification is his, and it is the piece of his work that every Latter-day Saint touches without knowing whose it is.

His sermons are indexed here discourse by discourse, and The Seer is indexed issue by issue. You can read the man who was sent to defend the church's hardest doctrine, and the same man refusing his prophet on another, in the same afternoon.