Orson Pratt on Harmonization

Orson Pratt

mormon authorities harmonization science

The study of science is the study of something eternal. If we study astronomy, we study the works of God. If we study chemistry, geology, optics, or any other branch of science, every new truth we come to the understanding of is eternal; it is a part of the great system of universal truth. It is truth that exists throughout universal nature; and God is the dispenser of all truth⁠—scientific, religious, and political.

Journal of Discourses, vol 7, page 157, Liverpool, England: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1860

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B. H. Roberts

Mental Laziness is the vice of men, especially with reference to divine things. Men seem to think that because inspiration and revelation are factors in connection with the things of God, therefore the pain and stress of mental effort are not required; that by some means these elements act somewhat as Elijah’s ravens and feed us without effort on our part.

Joseph Smith

This morning I read German and visited with a brother and sister from Michigan, who thought that ‘a prophet is always a prophet;” but I told them that a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such.

Orson F. Whitney

Perhaps the Lord needs such men on the outside of His Church to help it along. They are among its auxiliaries, and can do more good for the cause where the Lord has placed them, than anywhere else. And the same is true of the priesthood and its auxiliaries inside the Church.

More from Orson Pratt

Our Father in Heaven was begotten on a previous heavenly world by His Father; He was begotten by a still more ancient Father; and so on from generation to generation, from one heavenly world to another.

The Gods who dwell in heaven . . . were once in a fallen state . . . they were exalted also, from fallen men to celestial Gods.

The great temple of science must be erected upon the solid foundations of everlasting truth; its towering spires must mount upward, reaching higher and still higher, until crowned with the glory and presence of Him, who is Eternal.

Mormonism, to me, is but another name for God’s truth, and to find the fullness of that truth we would have to bring together and aggregate the truth of all religions, adding thereto all others that God would or could reveal. Truth is truth, where’er `tis found, On Christian or on heathen ground. This religion called Mormonism is no new thing. According to our view it is the oldest of all religions.