Brigham Young · 1853 April General Conference · 1853-04-06
Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 2, pp. 29-33, delivered on the Southeast Corner Stone of the Salt Lake Temple, April 6, 1853. BYU ContentDM precise page link recorded; text below is taken from the Historical General Conferences transcript of JD 2:29-33, cross-checked against the surrounding Deseret News minutes. Pitman shorthand report by George D. Watt; the speaker did not review this text before publication. Full text reproduced; not abridged.
Full text of the oration as published in the Journal of Discourses. BYU ContentDM's item-detail page currently fails to render in modern browsers (loads, then a client-side script redirects to the generic lib.byu.edu collections page; reproduced 2026-06-30, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.
Digital transcript used to source the text below; matches the JD 2:29-33 citation, embedded in the Deseret News minutes of the cornerstone-laying ceremony.
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 2, page 29. Currently the only reliably clickable link for this talk; BYU ContentDM is the institutionally preferred citation but its item pages are currently broken client-side (see the BYU witness note).
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the IA/weebly witnesses; confirmed clean, no changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: speaker, date (April 6, 1853), page range (JD 2:29-33), and opening/closing sentences independently confirmed verbatim against jod.mrm.org and the raw HTML of the historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com transcript. No text changes needed; talk boundaries clean.