When revelations are given through an individual appointed to receive them, they are given to the understandings of the people. These revelations, after a lapse of years, become mystified to those who were not personally acquainted with the circumstances at the time they were given.

The revelation that I have been reading may be as mysterious to our children, in a thousand or fifteen hundred years from now, in case the world continues in the same degree of enlightenment that it has for a few ages past, as the revelations contained in the Old and New Testaments are to this generation, and it would be commented upon with the same scrutiny and accuracy; and men would study, year after year, and fret themselves almost to death to find out the mysterious meaning of the revelation given to us their forefathers.

This revelation is as plain and clear to the understandings of those who know the circumstances that called it forth, as it would be for you to understand me should I talk about making a canal to bring the waters of Big Cottonwood to this city for irrigating our gardens and the farming lands. It is plain and easy to be understood, it is familiar to us who were in that country at the time, we know all about it.

But a portion of this congregation have not been personally acquainted with the early experience and travels of this Church, and with the sayings and doings of the Prophet Joseph, and it may be that they do not fully understand what this revelation really does mean.