Seer Stones and The Contemporary LDS Church
After finishing the Book of Mormon translation, Smith gave his brown seer stone to Oliver Cowdery, but he occasionally used his white stone to gain revelations, including his translation of what later became known as the "Book of Abraham." There is no evidence that Smith used the stone to dictate any more of the Doctrine and Covenants revelations after November 1830; and during his work on his Bible translation, Smith told Orson Pratt he had stopped using the stone because he had become acquainted with "the Spirit of Prophecy and Revelation" and no longer needed it. Nevertheless, in 1855, Brigham Young told the apostles that Smith had had five seer stones; and Young made it clear that Smith "did not regard his seer stones simply as relics of his youth" but had found others while church president.
According to Joseph Fielding Smith, tenth president, the LDS church continues to own one of Joseph Smith's seer stones. Michael Quinn claims that the church holds three. Nevertheless, since the nineteenth century, no President of the Church has openly used such a stone in his role as "prophet, seer, and revelator."
Read more about this topic: Seer Stone (Latter Day Saints)
Famous quotes containing the words seer, stones, contemporary and/or church:
“Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas: sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“... contemporary black women felt they were asked to choose between a black movement that primarily served the interests of black male patriarchs and a women’s movement which primarily served the interests of racist white women.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summertime because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)