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Show Page 232 had something to say about many of them; he felt that Orson had occasionally preached.falsehood, that he advocated worshiping an attribute instead of 53 a God. Taken by surprise, Orson found that heretofore sharp but sporadic criticisms had come seriously to a head - he defended himself and kept the brethren up until midnight resisting their suggestions that he, of all people, should be favoring in his tracts something like the soulless God of the Creeds. Forcefully, Brigham cited actual passages from The Seer and Great First Cause as false doctrine -- specifically he objected to concluding points "16"and "17" in the latter, where Orson dis- 54 cusses the "most glorious substance," defined as "Holy Spirit." In Brigham's mind, this was just the old trinitarian mystery he thought he had left behind with the Protestants, done up in new clothes. He was not impressed with Orson's philosophical arguments about "necessary modes of existence," and went on, now thumbing through The Seer to a passage on the intelligence of the Gods. Orson had proposed in The Seer that once the Saints had acceded to exaltation, the grand school of the universe would close and they would stand on a perfectly equal footing with the Father: "Then there will be no Being or Beings in existence that will know more than what we know...It has been most generally believed that the Saints will progress in knowledge to all eternity; But when they become one with the Father and Son, and receive a fulness of their glory, that will be the end of all progression in knowledge, because there will be nothing more to be learned...." 55 Here the Prophet balked - it was one thing to believe in orderly progression to comparative godhood, but quite another to question the absolute and eternal pre-eminence of the Father. He cared not for Orson's semantics; Brigham Young did not understand the God of Heaven in that fashion, and there was an end. |
