George Q. Cannon says that Heavenly Mother is not to be worshipped like Heavenly Father; Joseph Smith did not reveal any "female element" in Godhead.

Date
May 15, 1895
Type
Periodical
Source
George Q. Cannon
LDS
Hearsay
Direct
Reference

George Q. Cannon, "Topics of the Times: The Worship of Female Deities,” Juvenile Instructor 30 no. 10 (15 May 1895): 316–17

Scribe/Publisher
Juvenile Instructor
People
Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, George Q. Cannon, Joseph Smith, Jr.
Audience
Reading Public
Transcription

About a year ago, a companion hymn to this invocation of Sister Snow's entitled, "Our Mother in Heaven," was published in the JUVENILE INSTRUCTOR. In this hymn [O My Father], there is too much of this inclination to deify "our mother in heaven" . . . This language approaches to worship. Our mother is called a "goddess bride." But this is not all; she is appealed to with the Father to forgive her son. The worship of the true God has been revealed to us. Our Father in heaven should be the object of our worship. He will not have any divided worship. We are commanded to worship Him and Him Only. In the revelation of God the Eternal Father to the Prophet Joseph Smith there was no revelation of the feminine element as part of the Godhead, and no idea was conveyed that any such element "was equal in power and glory with the masculine." Therefore, we are warranted in pronouncing all tendencies to glorify the feminine element and to exalt it as part of the Godhead as wrong and untrue, not only because of the revelation of the Lord in our day but because it has no warrant in scripture, and any attempt to put such a construction on the word of God is false and erroneous.

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