The Restoration of the Gospel

The following chapters on the subject of the Restoration are the outcome of an invitation to write, during the winter of 1910-11, a series of lessons for the Young Ladies' Mutual Improvement Association. Chapters two to nineteen, inclusive, were written for the Association and were printed, substantially as they appear in this book, in the Young Woman's Journal. Chapters one, twenty, twenty-one and twenty-three, were prepared especially for this volume. Chapter twenty-two appeared as an independent article in the Improvement Era some years ago.

The brief treatment of the Restoration of the Gospel herewith presented to the public is not intended to be in any wise a history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is at most a story of the Restoration. It presumes at the outset that something has been restored. It relates how this something was restored. Every missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has met these two questions when he has preached abroad the Gospel of the Restoration:—What was restored? How was it restored? These two questions the following chapters attempt to answer in part. They consider the actual restoring of the necessary priesthood and authorities to officiate for God, in God's stead; they consider the organizing of the Church, of the quorums of the priesthood, of the auxiliary associations, and of community and family life. Indeed, these chapters are essentially the story of the restoration of divine authority and correct organization. With these things restored, it became necessary to set the world right in its knowledge of God, and in its conception of the duties of man, and his relationship to the kingdom of God. But these questions concern another phase of the story of the restoration and must be left to a later book.