Without Disclosing My True Identity
great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion and was the
cause of great persecution which continued to increase, and though I was
an obscure boy only between fourteen and fifteen years of age and my
circumstances in life such as to make a boy of no consequence in the world;
yet men of high standing would take notice sufficient to excite the public
mind against me, and create a hot persecution, and this was common
among all the sects: all united to persecute me. It has often caused me
serious reflection both then and since, how very strange it was that an
obscure boy of a little over fourteen years of age, and one too who was
doomed to the necessity of obtaining a scanty maintainance [sic] by his
daily labor, should be thought a character of sufficient importance to attract
the attention of the great ones of the most popular sects of the day, so as to
create in them a spirit of the hottest persecution and reviling. But strange or
not, so it was, and was often cause of great sorrow to myself. However it
was nevertheless a fact that I had had a vision.^3What Joseph Jr. Would Learn in the Near Future
In preface to the real details of young Joseph’s near-encounter with an attempted
assassin’s bullet, one must understand the propensity of a young boy to talk about the most
incredible event to occur in the world since Christ himself walked the earth. Disclosing the
truth (though done innocently and with adolescent perception) had its risks; and from this
experience the young Joseph was taught a swift and severe lesson to help him focus on
voicing his mind appropriately, i.e., according to the understanding of the listener. He
needed to learn the importance of not always disclosing what he really knew and how he
came to know it, as well as the purpose for knowing what he did as it related to mortals.
Referring here to information he unwisely told others concerning the First Visitation, the
next chapter will detail it as it actually occurred. Along with this, it will be explained what
Joseph learned and why he was put under a strict mandate not to reveal the real truth to
anyone at the time.
As result of the communication he would have with an advanced being, Joseph
would be taught how absurd the religions of the world were. He would also learn that
advanced human beings were about to intercede in mortal life upon this earth through him,
Joseph, without impeding upon the free will of humankind and without having Joseph
disclose the “mysteries of God in full.” The exception to this would come if the people, by
their own free will, desired to know the mysteries in righteousness—meaning that they
desired to know for the right reasons, which were to live by the precepts disclosed within
these “mysteries.”^4
After his First Visitation, the young Joseph knew things that could confound the
wisest men in the world. He knew real truth—information about the Universe and the state
of humankind that no other fully mortal human on earth knew. However, speaking of
these things was to be controlled under wise mandate; he was permitted only to relate
these things according to the understanding and beliefs of what the people already
accepted as truth. In other words, for example, he could not come right out and tell the
people that Jesus died because of their sins—not for them. Joseph would have to learn how
to expound around the real truth, telling the people what he could without disagreeing or
interfering with their free will, while allowing them to continue with what they already,