It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty that we have a right to expect to see God, and that he will converse with us as one man converses with another.
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"If I am to be damned for going to hell with my friends, I will go to hell with my friends."
"I am not afraid of death. I have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward all men."
"If you are ever called to bear a message to the people, do not go without your purse or your scrip, but go forth in the name of the Lord."
"I have the best of feelings for all men, and I wish them all to be saved."
"Had I anything to do with the negro, I would confine them by strict law to their own species, and put them on a national equalization."
King Follett Discourse, April 7, 1844, History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 305
Date: 1844
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This quote asserts that directly encountering and conversing with God is a fundamental right every believer should confidently expect — not a rare miracle reserved for ancient prophets. Rather than treating God as distant or unknowable, it declares that literal, face-to-face dialogue with the divine is the very starting point of genuine faith. Belief is not abstract doctrine but an active, experiential relationship between a person and a present, communicating God.
Smith founded the entire Latter-day Saint movement on his claimed First Vision of 1820, in which he said God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him as two distinct, embodied beings who spoke to him directly. He taught that God was not an abstract spirit but a glorified, physical being — making literal conversation genuinely possible. This quote encapsulates his prophetic identity: he was a man who claimed to have actually seen and spoken with God.
Smith spoke in the 1830s–1840s during America's Second Great Awakening — a surge of revivalism that nonetheless upheld cessationism: the mainstream Protestant belief that God no longer communicated directly with humans after the biblical era. Most denominations positioned clergy as necessary intermediaries before a distant deity. Smith's claim that any believer could personally encounter God was democratically radical, directly challenging established church authority and prevailing doctrines of divine inaccessibility.
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