LDS Quotes About the Restoration
“At a time when the origins of Christianity were under assault by the forces of Enlightenment rationality, Joseph Smith [unequivocally and singlehandedly] returned modern Christianity to its origins in revelation.”
“If at this moment each one of you were asked to state in one sentence the most distinguishing feature of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what would be your answer? My answer would be divine authority by direct revelation.”
| Conference Report, April 1937
“I cannot believe in any of the creeds of the different denominations, because they all have some things in them I cannot subscribe to, though all of them have some truth. I want to come up into the presence of God, and learn all things; but the creeds set up stakes, and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’; which I cannot subscribe to.”
| History of the Church, 4:536
“As one of a thousand elements of my own testimony of the divinity of the Book of Mormon, I submit this as yet one more evidence of its truthfulness. In this their greatest—and last—hour of need, I ask you: would these men blaspheme before God by continuing to fix their lives, their honor, and their own search for eternal salvation on a book (and by implication a church and a ministry) they had fictitiously created out of whole cloth?
“Never mind that their wives are about to be widows and their children fatherless. Never mind that their little band of followers will yet be “houseless, friendless and homeless” and that their children will leave footprints of blood across frozen rivers and an untamed prairie floor.9 Never mind that legions will die and other legions live declaring in the four quarters of this earth that they know the Book of Mormon and the Church which espouses it to be true. Disregard all of that, and tell me whether in this hour of death these two men would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as imposters and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.”
| "Safety for the Soul," Conference October 2009
“We owe an immense debt to the protesters and the reformers who preserved the scriptures and translated them. They knew something had been lost. They kept the flame alive as best they could. Many of them were martyrs.”
| Boyd K. Packer, in Conference Report, April 2000,
| Things As They Really Are, 46;
“The history of the Relief Society is filled with accounts of such remarkable selfless service. In the terrible days of persecution and deprivation as the faithful moved from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and then across the deserts going west, the sisters in their poverty and sorrows cared for others. You would weep as I did if I now read to you some of the accounts in your history. You would be touched by their generosity but even more by your recognition of the faith which lifted and sustained them…They came from a great diversity of circumstances. All faced the universal trials and heartaches of life. Their determination born of faith to serve the Lord and others seemed to take them not around the storms of life but directly into them. Some were young and some old. They were from many lands and peoples, as you are today. But they were of one heart, one mind, and with one intention.”
| The Enduring Legacy of Relief Society
“Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible told us everything God meant us to believe.”
“Section 10 of the Doctrine and Covenants contains a rather remarkable reassurance. The date is April 1829, a year before the Church was restored. In this revelation, the Lord refers consistently to his Church as something that already exists. The Restoration, he says, will not ‘destroy that which my people have already received.’ ‘Therefore,’ he continues, ‘whosoever belongeth to my church [in 1829] need not fear, for such shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.’ Those who belong to his church, he tells us, will receive more light. In his words, ‘a part of my gospel’ will be theirs. But this will not, he repeats reassuringly, ‘destroy my church, but I say this to build up my church.'”