Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

Smith’s image is so absurdly overbuilt it becomes a kind of frontier scripture: the “lowest pits of Nova Scotia” plus the “Rocky Mountains piled on me” isn’t realism, it’s a dare. He’s not describing hardship; he’s staging it, stacking distance and weight until the only remaining variable is will. The exaggeration works because it’s meant to. It turns perseverance into proof of divine favor: if you can “come out on top” from an impossible crush, then your survival isn’t luck or privilege, it’s providence.

The intent is pastoral but also managerial. Smith is leading a young, embattled movement that faced public ridicule, legal pressure, expulsions, and internal fracture. Encouragement, here, is governance: he’s manufacturing morale in conditions where morale is a resource. “Hang on” and “keep up good courage” sound like simple counsel, but “exercise faith” makes endurance a spiritual duty. Discouragement isn’t just an emotion; it becomes a lapse in belief, a failure to perform the identity the community needs.

There’s subtextual bravado, too: I can take the worst imaginable and still rise. That’s charisma talking, the rhetoric of a founder who has to make adversity narratively useful. By choosing Nova Scotia (remote, cold, edge-of-the-map) and the Rockies (monumental, immovable), he builds a North American mythic geography that mirrors Mormon displacement. The promise isn’t comfort; it’s a storyline: pressure will validate you, and survival will mean you were right.