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Show Page 121 he sees his destitute condition and the debts he has contracted "to the amount of about four hundred dollars," and a voice says to him: "Perhaps if the members and branches of the church throughout the East, knew of the poverty and unhappy circumstances in which their President was placed, they would with one accord contribute to release him from his unpleasant condition." After waking from this dream, he "fully resolved to publish my wakeful cogitations, and earnestly look for the fulfilment thereof...being a believer in dreams." He continued with an earnest solicitation of the members to purchase his Prophetic Almanac, for 1846 and to tell their 38 friends. Despite the tone of this, Orson was in fact destitute. With three wives in Nauvoo, Sarah pregnant for the fifth time, and no "opportunity of entering into any kind of business" on account of his mission calling, he had been forced to live on what he could borrow here and there. His families in Nauvoo suffered in a one-room house by the river - a second little daughter, Sarah Marinda, had died of the seasonal malaria while he was en route to New York. Orson was weighed down night and day by the condition of his wives and two surviving children in Nauvoo - there was nothing facetious in his poignant appeal to the Saints to buy his almanac. With little times for writing except in the columns of the Messenger, Orson's second almanac was made up primarily of excerpts from the works of his brother. Parley's tone of voice is clear throughout this little collection of homiletic tidbits - although there is included an important treatment by Orson entitled "Materiality," arguing the Mormon position that the "immaterial" God worshiped by sectarian Christianity is incomprehensible, unbelievable, and absurd - that there is no distinction between sectarian faith in this "nonentity" and atheism: |