Mormons

Origins and Early History

When Mormons describe the beginning of their faith, they are apt to tell the story of the prophet's “First Vision,” which he had in 1820 when he was 14 years old. In it, he saw two anthropomorphic beings dressed entirely in white, whom he identified as God the Father and God the Son. As they were separate personages, the youngster concluded that the doctrine of the Trinity was a theological fiction. In addition, he learned from them that the true church was not then on the earth. Because the prophet did not describe this vision until 1832 and his full account of it was not published until 1838, it is obvious that for his early followers, the Book of Mormon legitimated Smith's prophetic status. The signal import of the proclamation that a prophet called Joseph Jr. would arise when the prophetic Book of Mormon would speak out of the ground to the children of men came in 1829, when the first revelation addressed to anyone other than the young prophet himself was addressed to his father. The novice seer foretold to Joseph Sr. that “a marvelous work [was] about to come forth.” The “field was white to the harvest,” and those who thrust in their sickles with all their might “may stand blameless before God at the last day,” thereby bringing salvation to their souls.

Virtually identical revelations were addressed to several other religious seekers, including additional members of the Smith family, some neighbors from the Manchester area where the family lived, and a few others who traveled there when they heard about the religious events occurring at the western end of the Erie Canal. The revelation recipients, all members of a tiny group of followers who came together to await the completion of the “marvelous work,” were told that they were all called to embark on service to God. Most of them did so, first by becoming the salespersons who marketed the Book of Mormon from door to door with the result that, as charged to do so in the final chapter of the last book of the work, a surprising number of readers of the text asked God if the content of the work they had just finished was true. If, according to Moroni 10:4, they asked “with a sincere heart and real intent, having faith in Christ, he [would] manifest the truth of it … by the power of the Holy ghost.”

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