While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused
by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle
of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack wisdom,
let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and
it shall be given him.
Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to
the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with
great force into every feeling of my heart.
I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any
person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless
I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know; for the teachers
of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so
differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal
to the Bible.
… I retired to the woods
to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in
the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty. After I had retired to the place
where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding
myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to
God.
…I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the
brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
…When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose
brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of
them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is
My Beloved Son. Hear Him!
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