Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

Smith is doing something more pointed than preaching faith: he is waging a jurisdictional fight over who gets to speak for the afterlife. The line yokes "salvation" to "revelation" so tightly that secondhand religion becomes not just insufficient but suspect. You can almost hear the contempt for respectable Christianity that runs on inherited creeds and polished sermons. If heaven and hell are being "testified" to by men who have "never seen either", then their certainty is performance, not knowledge. Smith’s move is to redefine authority as experiential and immediate, and then to imply he possesses exactly that kind of access.

The subtext is a two-part demolition and replacement. First, he delegitimizes the clergy class of his day, accusing it of spiritual hearsay. Second, he quietly elevates a new category of witness: the prophet who has received "this" - revelation - as evidence. The pronoun is doing heavy lifting. "This" is not an argument; it’s a credential. It turns salvation from something dispensed by institutions into something gated by divine disclosure, with Smith positioned as the gate’s authorized operator.

Context matters: early 19th-century America was a crowded religious marketplace where revivalists competed with established churches, and claims of visions weren’t just theological - they were political. By insisting no one "knows these things" without revelation, Smith isn’t merely describing belief. He is staking out a monopoly on spiritual certainty and inviting listeners to trade borrowed doctrine for a living, riskier kind of religion that depends on continuing contact with God.