Journal of Discourses

The Journal of Discourses

Twenty-six volumes of sermons, preached between 1854 and 1886 and taken down in shorthand as they were spoken. What is in them, who preached them, and what authority they carry.

What the Journal of Discourses is

The Journal of Discourses is a 26-volume collection of sermons preached by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, published in Liverpool, England, between 1854 and 1886. It is the single largest body of Latter-day Saint preaching from the nineteenth century, and for most of the Brigham Young era it is the closest thing that exists to a transcript of what was actually said from the pulpit.

It was a commercial venture, not an official publication. The volumes were issued by the Latter-day Saints' Book Depot, the church's British publishing arm, and sold by subscription — the reporters who took the sermons down in shorthand were paid out of the proceeds. Church leaders knew about it, encouraged members to subscribe, and supplied the sermons. But the church did not commission it, did not underwrite it, and has never canonised it. That distinction is the root of nearly every argument about the Journal since.

When the subscriptions stopped covering the costs, the series stopped. The final volume appeared in 1886, four years before the Manifesto that ended the church's public practice of plural marriage.

How the sermons got onto the page

There were no recording devices. Every discourse in these volumes reached print because someone sat in the congregation and wrote it down in Pitman shorthand, then expanded those notes into longhand afterwards.

The principal figure is George D. Watt, an English convert who had learned Pitman shorthand before emigrating and who proposed the project as a way to make a living from a skill almost nobody else in the territory had. Later volumes drew on other reporters, David W. Evans and George F. Gibbs among them. Some speakers reviewed the transcript before it was printed. Many did not, and the sermons went to Liverpool, were typeset there, and appeared in print months after they were spoken.

This matters for how the Journal should be read. A discourse in these volumes is a reporter's reconstruction of an extemporaneous sermon, not a text the speaker wrote, and not always a text the speaker checked. Brigham Young himself complained on occasion about how he had been reported. The words are close to what was said — but "close to" is doing real work in that sentence, and anyone quoting the Journal against a speaker should know it.

What is actually in it

People arrive at the Journal expecting doctrine and find something much stranger: a working record of a frontier community being governed from the pulpit. Sermons on the nature of God sit beside sermons on irrigation, crop rotation, debt, schooling, and how much to pay for freight. In our corpus, 152 of the 1,426 sermons are tagged with agriculture. That is not a filing error. Brigham Young genuinely did preach about farming.

These are the subjects that come up most often across the whole run:

The titles are their own obstacle. A single discourse routinely wanders across four or five unrelated subjects, and the printed title simply lists them. The eighth discourse in volume one is titled:

Self-Government—Mysteries—Recreation and Amusements, Not in Themselves Sinful—Tithing—Adam, Our Father and Our God

Journal of Discourses, volume 1, discourse 8 — Brigham Young, 9 April 1852

That last clause is one of the most argued-over sentences in Latter-day Saint history, and it is filed behind dancing and tithing. This is exactly why the Journal is hard to use: the thing you are looking for is rarely in a sermon named after it.

The 26 volumes

The series was never strictly annual. Volumes appeared as material and money allowed, and there are years with no volume at all — 1863, 1864, 1866, 1868, 1870, 1876 and 1879 are all gaps.

The shape of that table is worth a moment. Volume 8, from 1861, is the largest in the series at 91 sermons; the first nine volumes average 65. The last nine average 45. The Journal thinned as it aged — fewer sermons per volume, longer gaps between volumes — until it stopped.

Who preached

Fifty-three men appear as speakers across the whole series, and the distribution is steep. Brigham Young alone accounts for more than a quarter of every sermon in it.

Below that line the tail runs long and thin: thirty-four more men, twenty of whom preached exactly once. Willard Richards, B. H. Roberts, George Reynolds, Isaac Morley and Edward Hunter each appear a single time. Those single sermons are, for some of these men, the only extended record of their preaching that exists anywhere.

Is the Journal of Discourses doctrine?

Not settled, and not simple. The question arrives from two opposite directions — from readers hoping the Journal is binding, and from readers hoping it can be dismissed — and the honest reply to both turns out to be the same one, which is why it is worth more than a single word.

The case against treating it as binding is straightforward. The Journal is not among the standard works. It was never presented to the church for a sustaining vote, never canonised, and is not published by the church today. It was a private subscription series produced for profit, and its contents were selected by whoever happened to be reporting. Nothing in that process confers doctrinal authority, and the church has not claimed it does.

But it is equally a mistake to wave the Journal away as a fringe document. These were the presidents of the church and the apostles, preaching in general conference and in the Tabernacle, to the whole body of the Saints, in the century when much of what Latter-day Saints now believe was being worked out in public. Members were urged to subscribe. The sermons were the teaching of the church as it was actually delivered. "Not canonised" is not the same as "not what they taught."

What makes the Journal genuinely difficult is that it preserves teaching the church no longer holds. Brigham Young's identification of Adam with God the Father; blood atonement; the rationales offered for the restriction on Black members holding the priesthood; extended defences of plural marriage as a requirement of exaltation. Later leaders have contradicted, qualified, or disavowed each of these. The honest description is that the Journal is a faithful record of what was preached, which is not the same as a record of what is believed now — and that the distance between those two things is itself the most interesting thing about the book.

How to read it

Three habits make the difference between using the Journal well and misusing it:

• Read the whole discourse, not the quotation. The Journal is the most quote-mined text in Latter-day Saint studies, and sermons that wander across five subjects are unusually easy to mine. A line means something different when you can see what the speaker was answering.
• Note who is speaking, and when. A sermon by Brigham Young in 1857, during the Utah War and the Reformation, is not the same kind of document as a sermon by Joseph F. Smith in 1883. The Journal spans thirty-two years and two generations of leadership.
• Remember the reporter. Every word arrived through shorthand, and some speakers never saw a proof.

What we hold

All 26 volumes are indexed here in full — 1,426 sermons, each attributed to its speaker and located to its volume and discourse number. Nothing is summarised or paraphrased. When an answer quotes a sermon, it cites the volume and discourse it came from, so the quotation can be checked against the original.