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Show Page 88 seemed, was a god - co-eval with his Heavenly Father, whose advancement on the evolutionary scale typified the promises and potential of those who regulated their lives by eternal law. The uncreated intelligence of man was a thoroughly material phenomenon - personality was eternal and infinitely capable of development. Thus did Smith's prophetic notions slice through the mysticism and the incantatory concept of personality "sublimation," which characterized salvation for the orthodox. The glory of God lay in his intelligence, asserted Joseph Smith - and in the unlimited measure of his "increase" (offspring)- The concept of the exaltation of the individual, so foreign to traditional Christianity, was to strike great chords of inspired logic from Orson Pratt in years to come. But his first exposure to the corollary doctrine of "celestial marriage" was not at all felicitous. Orson, despite the respect and even reverence he held for the man he considered a "living oracle" of God, had never actually been an intimate of the Prophet Joseph Smith. He knew him well; but missionary trips and the troubles in Kirtland had not allowed the proximity necessary to close friendship. Joseph was six years older than Orson, considerably more magnetic in his personality, but isolated from all but a handful of associates - his brother Hyrum, for example, and his faithful friend Eliza R. Snow - by the demands of leadership and the loneliness of his presidency. "No man knows me," he was fond of saying. By the same token Orson was not demonstrable with other people - he had always been too absent-minded, a man committed to ideas rather than personalities. But this time Joseph Smith's grand vision was, at least momentarily, inaccessible to him; his normal absorption in the Prophet's teachings failed him at the emotionally confusing issue of "celestial marriage." Strictly, this doctrine outlined the "sealing" prerogative of the |