You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely, by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.
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"I wish to do something to distinguish myself, and so I am going to get up a religion."
"I will preach on the one grand key-note of the whole volume of scripture, which is the resurrection of the dead."
"I will prophesy that the Saints will continue to suffer much affliction, and will be driven to and fro, from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, until they are purified."
"Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on the top at last."
"If I had not actually got into this work and been called of God, I would back out. But I cannot back out: I have no doubt of the truth."
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Humans are not permanently separated from God by an unbridgeable gap — they are capable of becoming divine themselves. Through incremental spiritual growth, advancing step by step in knowledge, righteousness, and power, a person can eventually reach the highest state of existence: resurrection, glory, and godhood. The journey is progressive and achievable, not fixed at birth.
Smith's entire prophetic career centered on restoring what he saw as lost Christian truths, including radical human potential. This quote from his 1844 King Follett discourse — delivered weeks before his death — encapsulates his doctrine of eternal progression: God was once as man is; man may become as God is. It defined LDS theology's most distinctive and controversial departure from mainstream Christianity.
Delivered in spring 1844 amid the Second Great Awakening, when dozens of new American religious movements competed for converts. Frontier theology was fluid and experimental. Smith's deification doctrine shocked Protestant orthodoxy, which taught an absolute Creator-creature divide. His murder two months later made this sermon his theological testament, cementing eternal progression as Mormonism's cornerstone belief.
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