"And modern philosophy, as set forth in American universities, holds this incarnation not as a fanciful and merely beautiful ideal, but as a working and understandable principle in the soul of humanity. The professors, therefore, who are digging what they believe to be graves for dead dogmas, stand as exponents of the teaching that man is the embodiment and conscious expression of the force that guides all life and holds all matter in its course. Man has begun the cycle of that triumphal daring prophesied by ancient seers, and which appealed so potently to the imagination of Poe. Not merely in religious rhetoric but in reality the schoolmen say, is man the avatar of God." That is to say, man is the incarnation of God, the incarnation of a divine spirit; his spirit is one with the Infinite Spirit, even the spirit and essence of God. Let no one hereafter say, when viewing the teachings of Joseph Smith in reference to the divinity of man's spirit, that his doctrines are merely the utterance of an ignorant, unlettered man, since the doctrines he taught three-quarters of a century ago, now receive this splendid, though unconscious vindication, through the utterances of the most learned men of our country and age. II. The Existence of a Plurality of Divine Intelligences--Gods. The trend of teaching by professors in universities of America is supporting the ideas expressed by Joseph Smith in relation to Deity; not by direct affirmation, of course, but by natural implication, they sustain his doctrines in relation to Deity. Let me call your attention to what the prophet taught on the subject of Deity, by quoting one paragraph from a discourse delivered by him in 1844. I think this one paragraph presents in one view the essential things the prophet had to say about God: "What sort of a being was God in the beginning? Open your ears and hear, all ye ends of the earth. * * * God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret. If the veil was rent today, and the great God who upholds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and things by his power, was to make himself visible--I say if we were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form, like yourself in all the present image and very form as a man: for Adam was created in the very fashion, image, and likeness of God, and received instructions from and walked and talked and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another."