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Show Page 274 by reading what God has revealed...I have derived great advantage and... edification from reading and studying that which God has revealed to others." 16 Here we feel an almost indefinable lack of confidence - clearly, he suspects his own inspirations and fears he has relied too much on "pretty plain" reasoning to the detriment of his own and others' progression. He now finds his former speculations distasteful, "perfectly disagreeable to my feelings," but nevertheless considers his reading and study to be the saving factor in his life. Although Orson looked with some dismay at his own past, he was delighted in 1874 to receive an appointment to serve as Historian for the Church. He had always seen a providential thread in every trial, every exile, every mission he himself had performed, and he felt so much more that the rise of the Mormon Church simply culminated the evolution of human events toward the Apocalypse. The recorder of these sacred events would write more than mere history - he would literally be compiling a new Bible for a new Chosen People, and Orson threw all his energy into the new assignment. He now had control of a large office, a two-story building facing the President's Beehive House, crammed with old library volumes, mountains of manuscripts and letterbooks, and from this he was determined to create an orderly account of God's people. He assigned himself the duty of recording every day's events, cutting up newspapers for relevant items, and putting the whole together in a "journal history" of the diurnal drama of Mormonism. In two years, he compiled and copied over ten thousand pages. While he wrote the history, he was also part of it - a fact that came home forcefully when he was invited to join the first "Old Folks' Excursion" in honor of Brigham Young's seventy-fifth birthday- With reverence for |
