MEMOIRS OF JOSEPH SMITH III

Dedication

  To my mother, Emma Hale, whom my father, Joseph Smith, married on January 18, 1827, and who was his only wife, I dedicate these memories.

  To her care I was committed after the death of my father, together with my brothers, Frederick Granger Williams, Alexander Hale, and David Hyrum, and my adopted sister, Julia Murdock, who shared her motherly solicitude and untiring energy.
  I acknowledge with gratitude to my heavenly Father that to the precept and example of my father's humble wife I owe the love for right and the hatred for wrong which have characterized my life.  She early impressed upon my mind the conviction that under Divine Providence only truth and right would live and that error and wrong must perish.
  Upon those teachings I have tried to build the foundation and rear the structure of my life's services to God, ever 
bearing in mind the nobility of that character to which she pointed, by precept and example, as the best and the highest that through effort could be attained by man.

                                                                         JOSEPH SMITH
May 22, 1911


Introduction

  Not having any definite recollection of the place where I may have lived in a pre-existent world nor any definite conception of my surroundings at the time of residence there or of those with whom I may have been there associated, it is not likely that I shall attempt to write in these "Memoirs" anything that does not appertain to this world.


         The advocates of the doctrine of pre-existence of man frequently suggest that those transitory glimpses of things apparently seen at some far-off time in the past but which could not have happened in the experiences of the flesh upon earth are almost conclusive evidences that individuals have lived prior to the advent into this life.  Such flashes of unrelated memory have come to me as to others, but they have not yet proved of sufficient importance to warrant me in setting down here any of the misty things so classed as recollections of another far-off world.

            Notwithstanding what may have been said about spirits having a great desire for embodiment in the flesh and seeking opportunities to accept such tabernacles upon the earth, I have no hesitancy in stating that if I had an existence in a pre-earth period and I were there consulted as to the time when, place where, and company with whom my earth-life should begin, I have not the faintest recollection of such existence or consultation.  I do not care to deny the doctrine, but simply state at the beginning that the memories here set down have reference only to my present sojourn in the flesh.