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Show Page 211 Orson had always a courteous and almost naive deference for Brigham Young. The pre-eminence of the Prophet in matters of doctrine and policy was unquestioned...this was a necessary element of Orson's personal religious logic. But Brigham Young, shrewd and stout as a barrel, clashed in many ways with the spare Orson Pratt. For the apostle, the Gospel of Mormonism was something to be defined, logically apprehended, as the will of a rational, ethereal, and universal intelligence, but for the Prophet Brigham Young it was the living of life - the definitive Gospel sermon could be seen in a man's conduct: "To commence, continue, and finish this Gospel sermon, will require all the time that is allotted to man...No man is able to set before a congregation all the items of the Gospel...for this mortal life is too short... I do not even commence at the beginning of it; I only catch at it, where it comes to me, in the 19th Century..." 5 For Brigham Young, the Gospel was the immediate practical course he and he alone must discern and follow to save a desperate people in the wilderness. Brigham had to "catch at" revelation; he could not afford the luxury of mulling metaphysical riddles on the terms of a rationalizing world. To him, the message of the Gospel meant salvation from his enemies - and his enemies included exalted speculations which might, no matter how innocently intended, mean dilution of the discipline he required of the Saints. He above all must vigilantly guard against the "precepts of men," the curse which Joseph verily testified had deadened the universal Church in its infancy. Brigham had always tended to hold Orson at arm's length. He was uncomfortable with Orson's pre-occupations - he looked askance at his obsession with meters, telescopes, and clocks - though recognizing the practical value of this gimcrackery, he was a hard-headed carpenter to whom these things were tools, not keys to the decoding of the universe. |
