Parenting & Family Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

The line is doing two things at once: lowering the ceiling of divine authority and raising the floor of who gets to speak with it. Joseph Smith frames Jesus less as distant monarch and more as a responsive interlocutor, someone who will "adapt" to you. That verb matters. It quietly recasts revelation as a two-way, intelligible experience rather than an elite code mediated by credentialed clergy. In a religious marketplace crowded with professionals guarding doctrine, Smith sells access.

The child is not sentimental decoration; its a strategic democratic metaphor. A "little child" is the ultimate outsider to formal theology: no training, no status, no rhetorical polish. By insisting Christ can meet a child on the childs terms, Smith implies the bar for legitimate spiritual knowledge is not education but openness. That subtext directly supports a movement built on lay participation, charismatic experience, and suspicion of monopoly institutions.

The phrasing also contains a subtle instruction about epistemology. "Ask Him; He will know all about it" promises not merely comfort but competence: Jesus is positioned as the expert witness on your life. The reward is certainty without bureaucracy. For early Latter-day Saint audiences, many of them socially marginal or frontier-adjacent, that is powerful: you dont need to climb into a learned mans language to be heard; heaven will climb down into yours.

In context, Smith is staking out a theology of translation. If God can translate himself into a childs "capacity", then new scripture, new prophets, and plainspoken visions stop sounding like category errors and start sounding like the point.