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Appendix II

Having had extensive personal contact with the Prophet Joseph Smith, Elder John Taylor wrote a great deal about him. He frequently defended the Prophet in his public discourses. The following summarizes how he felt about the Prophet. He made the statement in Boulougne-Sur-Mer, France, in 1855 on his mission to France. The statement in defense of the Prophet was made during three nights of public debate with three ministers of other churches. The three had made slanderous comments about the Prophet, whereupon Elder Taylor said the following in his defense:

I testify that I was acquainted with Joseph Smith for years. I have traveled with him; I have been with him in private and in public; I have associated with him in councils of all kinds; I have listened hundreds of times to his public teachings, and his advice to his friends and associates of a more private nature. I have been at his house and seen his deportment in his family. I have seen him arraigned before the tribunals of his country, and have seen him honorably acquitted, and delivered from the pernicious breath of slander, and the machinations and falsehoods of wicked and corrupt men. I was with him living, and with him when he died, when he was murdered in Carthage jail by a ruthless mob . . . with their faces painted. I was there and was myself wounded; I at that time received four balls in my body. I have seen him, then, under these various circumstances, and I testify before God, angels, and men, that he was a good, honorable, virtuous man-that his doctrines were good, scriptural, and wholesome-that his precepts were such as became a man of God-that his private and public character was unimpeachable-and that he lived and died as a man of God and a gentleman. This is my testimony.1

Elder Taylor had deep feelings about the gospel of Jesus Christ and its applications in mortal life. Those feelings, which he developed during the process of his conversion, provided the foundation for his courage to defend the Prophet Joseph Smith against mobs and to preach the gospel to the nations of the earth. They were the foundation of all that he believed and did. The following forcefully summarizes his views on the breadth of the gospel's application to mortality. He wrote this on July 28, 1855, as part of an editorial in The Mormon, the New York City newspaper he was publishing and managing at the time:

The everlasting gospel . . . is adapted to the wants of the human family, to the world morally, socially, religiously and politically. It is not a sickly, sentimental, effeminate plaything; not a ghostly, spiritual, sing-song, ethereal dream, but a living, sober, matter-of-fact reality, adapted to body and spirit, to earth and heaven, to time and eternity. It enters into all the ramifications of life. It does not adapt itself to the philosophy, politics, creeds, and opinions of men, but fashions them in its divine mold. It cannot be twisted into the multitudinous latitudinarian principles of a degenerate world; but lifts all that are in the world, who will be subject to its precepts, to its own ennobling, exalted and dignified standard. It searches all truth, and grasps at all intelligence; it is the revealed living and abiding will of God to man; a connection between the heavens and the earth; it is nature, philosophy, heavens and earth, time and eternity united. It is the philosophy of the heavens and the earth, of God, and angels, and saints.2