The story [of Christianity] is strangely like many myths which have haunted religion from the first, and yet it is not like them. It is not transparent to the reason: we could not have invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism or Netownian physics.

The singular nature of Christianity … is easily evidenced by Christ’s astounding pronouncement: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). Notice that Christ does not say that he knows the truth, or that he carries with him the propositions of truth, or that he exemplifies these propositions. Christ says that he is the truth. Jesus Christ is the Word or ‘Truth made flesh.’ Needless to say, this concrete, embodied truth is a radical departure from Hellenistic and thus Western traditions of a propositional truth.

How extraordinarily stupid it is to defend Christianity, how little knowledge of humanity it betrays, how it connives if only unconsciously with offence by making Christianity out to be some miserable object that in the end must be rescued by a defence. It is therefore certain and true that the person who first thought of defending Christianity is de facto a Judas No. 2; he too betrays with a kiss, except his treason is that of stupidity. To defend something is always to discredit it.

There is no salvation between the two lids of the Bible without a legal administrator.

The course which the popular clergy pursue at this time in relation to the Divine economy looks to me as though they would say, ‘O Lord, we will worship Thee with all our hearts, serve Thee with all our souls, and be very pious and holy; we will even gather Israel, convert the heathen, and bring in the millennium, IF Thou wilt only let us alone that we may do it in our own way, and according to our own will; BUT if Thou speakest from heaven to interfere with our plan, or cause any to see visions or dreams, or prophesy, whereby we are disturbed or interrupted in our worship, we will exert all our strength and skill to deny what Thou sayest, and charge it home upon the devil or some wild, fanatic spirit, as being its author.

That which was looked upon by the ancient saints as among the greatest favors and blessings, viz., revelation from God and communion with Him by dream and by visions, is now looked upon by the religious world as the height of presumption and folly. The ancient saints considered their condition more deplorable when Jehovah would not speak to them; but the most orthodox religionist of this age deem it quite heterodox to even admit the probability that He ever will speak again.

Oh My Soul! Language fails to paint the absurdity and abomination of such heaven-opposing and truth-excluding dogmas!

His life asked and answered the question “Do you believe God speaks to man?” In all else that he accomplished in his brief 38 and a half years, Joseph left us above all else the resolute legacy of divine revelation—not a single, isolated revelation without evidence or consequence, and not “a mild sort of inspiration seeping into the minds of all good people” everywhere, but specific, documented, ongoing directions from God. As a good friend and faithful LDS scholar has succinctly put it, “At a time when the origins of Christianity were under assault by the forces of Enlightenment rationality, Joseph Smith [unequivocally and singlehandedly] returned modern Christianity to its origins in revelation.”

We do “thank thee, O God, for a prophet to guide us in these latter days,” because many of those days will be windblown and tempest-tossed. We give thanks for that morning in the spring of 1820 when the Father and the Son appeared in glory to a 14-year-old boy. We give thanks for that morning when Peter, James, and John came to restore the keys of the holy priesthood and all the offices in it. And in our generation we give thanks for the morning of September 30, 1961, 43 years ago this weekend, when (then) Elder Gordon B. Hinckley was called to the apostleship, the 75th man in this dispensation to be so named. And so it goes down to a day such as this, and so it will go continually until the Savior comes.

In a world of unrest and fear, political turmoil and moral drift, I testify that Jesus is the Christ—that He is the living Bread and living Water—still, yet, and always the great Shield of safety in our lives, the mighty Stone of Israel, the Anchor of this His living Church. I testify of His prophets, seers, and revelators, who constitute the ongoing foundation of that Church and bear witness that such offices and such oracles are at work now, under the guidance of the Savior of us all, in and for our very needful day. Of these truths and of the divinity of this work I bear witness. Of them I am a witness, in the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

The Resurrection is at the core of our beliefs as Christians. Without it, our faith is meaningless.