Mormon History
Spiritual Advice for Joe Smith - 1844
Warsaw Message – February 7, 1844
A WORD OF PARTING TO BROTHER JOE.
We are not willing, brother
Joe, to leave the station we have ocupied for a year past, and in which it has
been our duty to hold up your deformities occasionally to the public gaze,
without giving you, in the kindest feeling, a few words of parting advice. It
shall be gratis -- and therefore the more valuable: At any rate, our fee
shall not exceed what you charge to marry a brother and sister for Eternity; and
we think the service will be of quite as much value.
Be an honest man, Joe! Steeped up to the very eyes in sin, as you have
been from your cradle up -- deep, disgusting, foul, lothesome, soul-destroying
sin -- it is yet in your power, as we verily believe, by a long process of
purgation and purification, to make [a] tolerably decent man of yourself. This
will be disputed by many. But we are more charitable than some of our neighbors,
and verily believe it. At least in the language of the Irishman -- "If you can't
be dacent be as dacent as you can." But it will be no mean labor:
it will require years of penitence, in sackcloth and ashes -- but then you
can accomplish it. You are strong and robust and have sufficient mental and
physical energy tp carry you through, if you shall undertake it in the proper
spirit. Try it then.
Now Joe, that you have been a lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond, all the days of
your life, your own conscience (if you have any left) will tell you. That you
have been the ruin of hundreds of your fellow beings, men, women, and children;
-- that you have been the means of sending many of your fellows into Eternity
unprepared -- that you have robbed the widow and the orphan of their sixpence,
and the honest laborer of his daily earnings -- the rich man of his hoarded
gainl -- that you have violate the sanctuary of private life -- despoiled female
virtue and innocence, and destroyed conjugal felicity; -- that you harbored the
thief and robber -- directed the hand of the assassin and murder, and aided
their escape from justice; -- that you have, under the garb of a Saint,
done the work of a Demon -- in other words, "stolen the livery of Heaven
to serve the Devil ;" that you have done all this, and a hundred times more, you
need none other than that same inward monitor to tell you.
Knowing, as you must, Joe, the relation in which your black-hearted crimes and
Heaven-daring blasphemies place you before God, we charge you that it is now
high time that you should begin to repent in order to avert His impending
vengeance. You are now near 40 years of age, and it will require all the
remaining years of a life of four score and ten, to place you in the same moral
position you occupied at the outset of your desparate career. You know, too, the
position you occupy before your fellow men. You know that you are despised, and
hated and loathed, by nineteen twentieths of all who have ever heard of your
name and deeds; and all the "Appeals" that you and your understrappers can make
to the sympathies of your fellow citizens, between this and the day in which you
shall "shake off this mortal coil," will not change your position before them.
And more -- you cannot expect it to continue much longer in your courses
of infamy and crime. Depend upon it, the day of retribution cannot be far
distant, for at least some of your misdeeds. If the vengeance of the law shall
overtake you, and stretch you up as quick as lightning to the gallows, and thus
end your career, rest assured that individual vengeance will! Do you think that,
of all the men, women and children you have so foullu wronged, that no one will
be so bold as to avenge their own wrongs? be a prophet nor the son of a prophet
-- yet we tell you that your career of infamy cannot continue but a little
longer! Your days are numbered! The handwriting is upon the wall!
Come, now, brother Joe. Let us entreat you to begin the work of reparation.
Begin it now, for you have much to do; the job is a hard one! Divide out
again among the widows and the orphans whom you have beggared, [in] your
knavery, the thousands you filched from their hard earnings; pay back those sums
of money you have borrowed of your followers, and for which they have for
years been whistling; dispoil the oxen and baptismal font of their
trappings, and buy shoes and stockings for the ragged urchins of your streets;
and tear down your Temple and of its materials build a hospital for the innocent
victims of your ambition and licentiousness. These done, and you will have made
some atonement for your past life. Until then, Joe, we shall remain as, ever, all but "your friend and most obedient servant."