Book: Journal of Discourses

Overview
Journal of Discourses is a twenty-six volume collection of sermons and addresses delivered by early leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with the first volume appearing in 1854 and many of the early volumes featuring Brigham Young prominently. The set records a wide array of teachings on doctrine, church organization, social practice, and the practical challenges of building a religious community in the American West.
The volumes are not a thematic treatise but a running chronicle of public preaching, capturing exhortation, counsel, and doctrinal explanation as delivered in conferences, meetings, and public gatherings. The result is a vivid, sometimes unruly archive of nineteenth-century Mormon thought and leadership in formation.

Historical Context
These addresses emerged during a period of migration, settlement, and institutional consolidation for the Latter-day Saints after their exodus to the Salt Lake Valley. The speeches reflect immediate concerns of survival, community cohesion, and the articulation of religious identity amid conflict with surrounding society and federal authorities.
The social landscape included questions about property, polygamy, commerce, governance, and the role of religion in public life. The Journal preserves the discursive responses to those pressures and reveals how leaders sought to shape daily life, law, and belief through public instruction.

Main Themes
A central strand is authority and priesthood: the nature of prophetic leadership, the responsibilities of church officers, and the mechanisms by which divine guidance was claimed and enacted. Brigham Young's addresses frequently return to the idea of continuing revelation and the practical implications of obedience to revealed counsel.
Eschatology and millennial expectation also run throughout the volumes. Sermons often interpret contemporary events as signs of preparation for the Second Coming, urging spiritual readiness while outlining communal projects seen as part of divine preparation, from temples to settlement patterns.
Practical ethics and social order appear repeatedly, with counsel about family life, education, industry, and civic duty. Economic cooperation, self-sufficiency, and a distinct cultural identity are framed as religious imperatives as much as pragmatic responses to frontier challenges.

Brigham Young's Voice and Style
Brigham Young's speaking style is direct, energetic, and often improvisatory. He blends scriptural citation, anecdote, administrative instruction, and blunt practical advice, producing speeches that are at once pastoral, managerial, and prophetic.
The tone varies from comforting and pastoral to stern and disciplinary, reflecting the many roles Young occupied as spiritual leader, territorial governor, and community organizer. His rhetorical force and frequent repetition of key concepts helped imprint institutional priorities on the developing Latter-day Saint community.

Publication and Editorial Notes
The Journal of Discourses was transcribed by various stenographers and published under the direction of church members, with George Q. Cannon later playing a significant editorial role. Transcriptions were sometimes edited for clarity or emphasis, and the volumes do not represent verbatim reports in the modern sense.
Because of the editorial practices of the time, occasional discrepancies, paraphrases, and contextual omissions appear. Scholars treat the Journal as an invaluable primary source that must be read with attention to the circumstances of composition, transmission, and publication.

Influence and Legacy
The Journal of Discourses became a touchstone for nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint belief and practice and continues to be a vital resource for historians, theologians, and members tracing the development of early Utah-era Mormonism. Quotations from the set have been used both to explain and to critique historical doctrines and policies.
Modern readers use the Journal to understand how doctrine, culture, and leadership interacted in a formative era. While not an official doctrinal repository, it remains a powerful, if complex, window into the convictions and choices that shaped an evolving religious community.