Erastus Snow, based on Genesis 1:26-27, teaches that Adam was created in the form and image of the Father and Son; teaches that belief in a Mother in Heaven can also be inferred.

Date
1886
Type
Speech / Court Transcript
Source
Erastus Snow
LDS
Hearsay
Scribed Verbatim
Reference

Erastus Snow, "The Creation, Male and Female—Calling of Enoch and Noah—God Selected Abraham and His Seed to Be a Chosen People—He Commanded His People to Multiply But Forbade Adultery and Whoredom in Every Form—Plural Marriage Enjoined Upon Abraham and His Seed to Make Them a Great People—the Principle of Life and Eternal Increase is a Spiritual Power—Modern Christendom Opposed to Large Families—Latter-Day Saints Encourage Them—the Edmunds Law Passed With the Pretence of Repressing Immorality Among the Mormons—that Mask of Hypocrisy Now Thrown Off—the Religious Sentiment of the Latter-Day Saints the Real Object of Persecution—Concluding Exhortations," Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: Daniel H. Wells, 1886), 26:214

Scribe/Publisher
John Irvine
People
Erastus Snow, Adam
Audience
Reading Public, Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
PDF
Transcription

So that when the Father said unto His Son in the beginning, let us make man in our image and after our likeness, it conveys to us the idea that man was organized in the same form and general appearance of both the Father and the Son. This especially in relation to the man himself; for you will remark the wording of the text which we have read—"in the image of God created He him"—referring to Adam—"male and female created He them." You will perceive a difference in the language in regard to the creation of females.

Now, it is not said in so many words in the Scriptures, that we have a Mother in heaven as well as a Father. It is left for us to infer this from what we see and know of all living things in the earth including man. The male and female principle is united and both necessary to the accomplishment of the object of their being, and if this be not the case with our Father in heaven after whose image we are created, then it is an anomaly in nature. But to our minds the idea of a Father suggests that of a Mother: As one of our poets says:

"In the heavens are parents single?

No; the thought makes reason stare!

Truth is reason; truth eternal

Tells me, I've a Mother there."

Hence when it is said that God created our first parents in His likeness—"in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them"—it is intimated in language sufficiently plain to my understanding that the male and female principle was present with the Gods as it is with man. It needs only a common understanding of the organism of man and of all living creatures, and the functions of this organism to show the primary object of the Creator, and that is the multiplication of the species, the fulfillment of the commandment given, to multiply and replenish the earth, given to both man and beast.

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