OCR Text |
Show Page 233 That midnight convocation devastated Orson Pratt, and he wrestled all the next day with this repudiation by the only man on earth whose opinion he revered as untainted truth. Great First Cause he considered his master work, his definitive statement of an authentic Mormon cosmology - it had been in print nine years, read by thousands and clucked over the leading divines of the Old and the New Worlds. Once again the specter of apostasy shadowed him as he contemplated having to renounce the philosophical system which he felt followed inescapably on the premises revealed by Joseph Smith. To tear down this structure would not only shear away his prestige among the Saints - to him a minor consideration - but violate what he saw as heaven's own truth, logically arrived at. Once again, as in 1842, he grappled with irreconcilable creeds: his faith in his own reasoned systems, against his reliance on the incontestable oracle from which he drew his premises. Sometime on that lonely Saturday he decided that the Prophet had original claim on his loyalties, both intellectual and temporal. Voluntarily, but still unsure exactly where he had erred, he confessed before the massive congregation the next morning "a few things wherein I have done wrong." The Saints who clustered the cold pine benches of the tabernacle asked each other muffled questions during his monologue, but they remembered Brigham's occasional ftimings over Orson Pratt in the past. As for Brigham, he had no idea that Orson had thought to make a public renunciation of his own works, and he, with the other apostles, listened raptly: "I have, no doubt, grieved the feelings of my brethren; and inasmuch as I have done this, no doubt I have also brought at many times darkness upon my own mind. I want to make a confession today-..There are a few things which have been a source of sorrow to myself, at different times, for many years...There are some points of doctrine which I have unfortunately thrown out before the people. At the time T expressed those views, I did most sincerely believe that |