Rigdon's next steps certainly gave substance to his brother's theory that his mind was unbalanced, the family having noticed his peculiarities from the time he was thrown from a horse, when a boy.* He soon returned to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where his first step was to "resuscitate" the Messenger and Advocate, which had died at Kirtland. In a signed article in the first number he showed that he then intended "to contend for the same doctrines, order of government, and discipline maintained by that paper when first published at Kirtland," in other words, to uphold the Mormon church as he had known it, with himself at its head. But his old desire for original leadership got the better of him, and after a conference of the membership he had gathered around him, held in Pittsburg in April, 1845, at which he was voted "First President, Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and Translator," he issued an address to the public in which he declared that his Church of Christ was neither a branch nor connection of the church at Nauvoo, and that it received members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints only after baptism and repentance.** In an article in his organ, on July 15, 1845, he made assertions like these: "The Church of Christ and the Mormons are so widely different in their respective beliefs that they are of necessity opposed to one another, as far as religion is concerned.... There is scarcely one point of similarity.... The Church of Christ has obtained a distinctive character." * Baptist Witness, March I, 1875. **Pittsburg Messenger and Advocate, p, 220. Rigdon told the April conference that he had one unceasing desire, namely, to know whether God would accept their work. At the suggestion of the spirit, he had taken some of the brethren into a room in his house that morning, and had consecrated them. What there occurred he thus described:--