Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision/1843 (Levi Richards account)

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Levi Richards' 1843 account of the First Vision

Summary: Levi Richards’s diary about Joseph Smith preaching in the summer of 1843 and repeating the Lord’s first message to him that no church was His (see Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of Joseph Smith, 2nd Edition, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996), 215.

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Levi Richards’s diary

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“Attended Meeting at the Temple weather vary fine moderately warm. Heard J. Smith preach from Math ‘Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem &c, how oft would I have gathered you, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings & Ye would not, behold your house is left unto you desolate &c. Pres. J. Smith bore testimony to the same saying that when he was a youth he began to think about these things but could not find out which of all the sects were right he went into the grove & enquired of the Lord which of all the sects were right he received for answer that none of them were right, that they were all wrong, & that the Everlasting Covenant was broken = = he said he understood the fulness of the Gospel from beginning to end--& could Teach it & also the order of the priesthood in all its ramifications = = Earth & hell had opposed him & tried to destroy him, but they had not done it = = & they never would”