Liberty Jail

The facts matter here. Joseph Smith and five others spent from December 1838 to April 1839 in Liberty Jail. The lower room had a ceiling about six feet high; the men could not stand upright. The food was poor and, according to several accounts, occasionally poisoned. Outside, the Missouri extermination order had driven roughly ten thousand Latter-day Saints from their homes in winter. He was thirty-three years old and could do nothing about any of it.

Two things about the answer. It does not correct the question — nowhere is Joseph told he should not have asked. And it does not promise rescue. It reframes duration ("a small moment") and attaches a condition ("if thou endure it well"), which is a much harder answer than deliverance and a much more useful one.

This is the Psalms' pattern, and Job's. Scripture does not treat honest complaint to God as faithlessness; roughly a third of the Psalter is lament. D&C 121 belongs in that tradition, and its presence in the canon is permission.

Verse 8 is the entire consolation, and it consoles by comparison rather than by explanation. Nothing is explained. What is offered is company — the assurance that the descent has already been made, and further down.

Verse 37 names four disqualifying uses of authority: covering sins, gratifying pride, gratifying vain ambition, and exercising control, dominion or compulsion in any degree of unrighteousness. The last phrase is the sharpest — any degree. There is no threshold below which it is acceptable.

And the consequence is stated without appeal: "Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man." The ordination remains; the power does not. That distinction — between holding an office and having the heavens open to you — is the whole doctrine of the passage, and it makes priesthood in this tradition permanently conditional on conduct.

Verse 39 is one of the most remarkable sentences ever written by the leader of a religious movement about the leaders of a religious movement. "Almost all men," "as soon as they get a little authority," "as they suppose" — the aside in the middle is devastating. And it is written by a man who had every reason to feel wronged by other people's authority.

Verse 41's construction is worth noticing. It does not say power should preferably be maintained by persuasion. It says no power "can or ought to be" maintained any other way — a claim about what is possible as well as about what is right. Compulsion does not merely offend God; on this account, it does not work.

And verse 43 does not forbid correction. It permits sharpness, on two conditions: promptness, and being moved upon by the Holy Ghost — and then requires a visible increase of love afterward, with a stated reason, "lest he esteem thee to be his enemy." The passage is a complete method, not a prohibition.

The final phrase resolves the section. Dominion is not abolished — it is promised, everlasting, and it arrives "without compulsory means." What the passage rejects is not authority but a particular means of holding it. The influence that lasts is the influence nobody was made to give.

Section 123 then turns outward, instructing the Saints to gather and record "the wrongs and the sufferings" they had endured — not for revenge but as a duty "we owe to God, to angels... and to all the rising generation" (123:7, 11). Even from that cell, the instruction is to keep a record.