Joseph Smith affirmed that Peter, James and John visited him and conferred on him authority to administer the holy ordinances of the Gospel, through which every honest-hearted man and woman were promised the Holy Ghost and a perfect knowledge of the doctrine. Our Elders simply affirm that, having received a divine knowledge of the fact that this Gospel was a heaven-born institution, and through its virtue and divine force every honest-hearted person may obtain this same knowledge. I had been a member of this Church but a short time when I obtained, through a divine manifestation, a clear, explicit and tangible demonstration of the truth of this work. Thousands and tens of thousands of Latter-day Saints, men and women in private life, can testify to the same experience; and though I may know many things in regard to this doctrine which in their limited experience they may not understand, yet, in this _one fact_ they are equal to me in knowledge and equal to the messengers who administer to them this Gospel. I now wish to examine another prominent feature connected with the religion of this Gospel. An important item which was held forth prominently wherever this Gospel was announced, was that its followers should have abundance of persecutions, and would probably, in the progress of their new life, be compelled to make the most trying sacrifices, as wife, children, houses and lands, the spoiling of goods, and perhaps even of life itself. No persons are properly prepared to enter upon this new life until they have formed within themselves a resolution to abide this ordeal. The Savior, the Apostles, Joseph Smith and the latter day Elders, when offering this great system of salvation to the people, told them clearly and emphatically that it required sacrifices of the most serious and trying nature--that it would bring persecutions, change our warmest friends into bitter and relentless enemies, and that instances would occur when people, in their confused notions of right and wrong, would even conceive they were doing God service in taking our lives. These were dull and forbidding prospects to a rational person, in being proselyted to a system whose truths he could not know, but only guess at by what he was told, or of which he had read. Every man and every woman, before receiving a system that required such sacrifices, would require a positive assurance that submission to its requirements would bring indisputable knowledge of its true divinity, so that, after having obtained a divine witness of its genuineness, they could willingly, cheerfully, and with a resolution inspired by the Almighty, move onward over the pathway of persecution and sacrifice, traversed in all ages by the martyred Saints and Prophets.