In September of the same year Father Joseph Smith, Patriarch to The Church, and father of the Prophet Joseph, was "gathered to his final home," in the sixty-ninth year of his age. He was baptized on the sixth day of April, 1830, and was one of the six who organized The Church on that date. Indeed he was the one who first received the testimony of his son after the angel Moroni visited him on that memorable night of September 21, 1823; and it was he who first exhorted his prophet son to be faithful and diligent to the message he had received. He endured many persecutions on account of the claims made by his son Joseph to being a prophet of God; for Joseph's declarations that he had received heavenly visions and revelations together with a divine commission to preach the Gospel of Christ, not only brought upon himself the wrath of the ungodly, but involved his whole family in the persecutions which followed him throughout his life. Of these things, however, his father never complained, but endured all things patiently, and with true heroism, and ever supported his son in carrying out the counsels of Heaven. He was born on the twelfth of July, 1771, in Topsfield, Massachusetts; and was the second of the seven sons of Asahel and Mary Smith; his forefathers being among those who early came from England to Massachusetts. He was a large man, ordinarily weighing two hundred pounds, was six feet two inches tall, and well proportioned, strong and active; and he stood unbowed beneath the accumulated sorrows and hardships he had experienced during his nearly three score and ten years of sojourn in this life. The exposures, however, that he suffered in the exodus from Missouri brought on him consumption, of which he died. His was an unassuming nature--noted mostly, perhaps, for its sincerity and unwavering integrity. He was a child of nature, and one of nature's noblest; his life had been spent in parts remote from the busy marts, where "wealth accumulates and men decay," and he had passed through his probation on earth without being corrupted by the evil influences of luxury or enervating civilization. He was a type of men, so well described by one of our poets, in the following lines: Simple their lives--yet theirs the race When liberty sent forth her cry, Who crowded conflicts deadliest place, To fight--to bleed--to die; Who stood on Bunker's heights of red, By hope through years were led-- And witnessed Yorktown's sun Shine on a nation's banner spread, A nation's freedom won! Such was the character of the first Patriarch of The Church in this dispensation.