Spiritual Advice to Brother Joe Smith - 1844
Warsaw Message - February 7, 1844
A WORD OF PARTING TO BROTHER JOE.
We are not willing, brother Joe, to leave the station we have ocupied
for a year past, and in which it has been our duty to hold up your
deformities occasionally to the public gaze, without giving you, in
the kindest feeling, a few words of parting advice. It shall be gratis
-- and therefore the more valuable: At any rate, our fee shall not
exceed what you charge to marry a brother and sister for Eternity; and
we think the service will be of quite as much value.
Be an honest man, Joe! Steeped up to the very eyes in sin, as you have
been from your cradle up -- deep, disgusting, foul, lothesome, soul-
destroying sin -- it is yet in your power, as we verily believe, by a
long process of purgation and purification, to make [a] tolerably
decent man of yourself. This will be disputed by many. But we are more
charitable than some of our neighbors, and verily believe it. At least
in the language of the Irishman -- "If you can't be dacent be as
dacent as you can." But it will be no mean labor: it will require
years of penitence, in sackcloth and ashes -- but then you can
accomplish it. You are strong and robust and have sufficient mental
and physical energy tp carry you through, if you shall undertake it in
the proper spirit. Try it then.
Now Joe, that you have been a lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond, all the
days of your life, your own conscience (if you have any left) will
tell you. That you have been the ruin of hundreds of your fellow
beings, men, women, and children; -- that you have been the means of
sending many of your fellows into Eternity unprepared -- that you have
robbed the widow and the orphan of their sixpence, and the honest
laborer of his daily earnings -- the rich man of his hoarded gainl --
that you have violate the sanctuary of private life -- despoiled
female virtue and innocence, and destroyed conjugal felicity; -- that
you harbored the thief and robber -- directed the hand of the assassin
and murder, and aided their escape from justice; -- that you have,
under the garb of a Saint, done the work of a Demon -- in other words,
"stolen the livery of Heaven to serve the Devil ;" that you have done
all this, and a hundred times more, you need none other than that same
inward monitor to tell you.
Knowing, as you must, Joe, the relation in which your black-hearted
crimes and Heaven-daring blasphemies place you before God, we charge
you that it is now high time that you should begin to repent in order
to avert His impending vengeance. You are now near 40 years of age,
and it will require all the remaining years of a life of four score
and ten, to place you in the same moral position you occupied at the
outset of your desparate career. You know, too, the position you
occupy before your fellow men. You know that you are despised, and
hated and loathed, by nineteen twentieths of all who have ever heard
of your name and deeds; and all the "Appeals" that you and your
understrappers can make to the sympathies of your fellow citizens,
between this and the day in which you shall "shake off this mortal
coil," will not change your position before them.
And more -- you cannot expect it to continue much longer in your
courses of infamy and crime. Depend upon it, the day of retribution
cannot be far distant, for at least some of your misdeeds. If the
vengeance of the law shall overtake you, and stretch you up as quick
as lightning to the gallows, and thus end your career, rest assured
that individual vengeance will! Do you think that, of all the men,
women and children you have so foullu wronged, that no one will be so
bold as to avenge their own wrongs? be a prophet nor the son of a
prophet -- yet we tell you that your career of infamy cannot continue
but a little longer! Your days are numbered! The handwriting is upon
the wall!
Come, now, brother Joe. Let us entreat you to begin the work of
reparation. Begin it now, for you have much to do; the job is a hard
one! Divide out again among the widows and the orphans whom you have
beggared, [in] your knavery, the thousands you filched from their hard
earnings; pay back those sums of money you have borrowed of your
followers, and for which they have for years been whistling; dispoil
the oxen and baptismal font of their trappings, and buy shoes and
stockings for the ragged urchins of your streets; and tear down your
Temple and of its materials build a hospital for the innocent victims
of your ambition and licentiousness. These done, and you will have
made some atonement for your past life. Until then, Joe, we shall
remain as, ever, all but "your friend and most obedient servant."
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