First Vision
In the 1830s, after the founding of the new church, Smith said that he had an experience about 1820 that modern Latter Day Saints call the First Vision. No account of this experience was published before 1840, and details of this theophany varied considerably as Smith retold the story. According to an account Smith dictated in 1838, he said that when he was about fourteen, he went into the woods to pray about which church to join. There he fell into the grip of an evil power that nearly overtook him. At the last moment, he was rescued by two shining "personages" (presumably Jesus and God the Father) who hovered above him. One of the beings told Smith not to join any of the existing churches because "they were all wrong" and "all their creeds were an abomination." Although Smith said that recounting his vision story to others "excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase," there is no contemporary evidence of such persecution.
Read more about this topic: Early Life Of Joseph Smith
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