Abstract: The Restoration of the Gospel began in an atmosphere of ardent and urgent expectations of the Second Coming of Christ. We are, after all, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those expectations were shared far beyond the ranks of those who eventually joined the Church. But the early nineteenth-century men and women who did become Latter-day Saints were commanded that, having been warned, they should warn their neighbors. However, nearly two full centuries since the founding of the Church, and more than two centuries since Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the Lord’s Second Advent has still not arrived. Does that mean that this isn’t a time for warning? That the time to warn our neighbors hasn’t yet come? No, not at all. We remain under the divinely given obligation to spread the word and, yes, to warn. And there are many ways to do so.


The most important of the Latter-day Saint missionary tracts of the nineteenth century, by a considerable distance, was Parley P. Pratt’s A Voice of Warning. By that time a member of the still-new Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Elder Pratt wrote the lengthy text over a two-month period while on a mission to New York, and it was published in 1837. Eventually, it appeared in more than thirty English editions and was translated into several other languages. In it, Elder Pratt detailed differences between the still-developing doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and those of other Christian denominations. He used biblical texts to explain the Restoration, described the recovery of the Book of Mormon, proclaimed the Latter-day Saint belief in modern-day revelation, and outlined some of the events that would precede the Second Coming of Christ.
It’s perhaps a little bit difficult for us, now a quarter of the way [Page viii]through the twenty-first century and drawing ever nearer to the dawn of the Church’s third hundred years, to appreciate the significance of A Voice of Warning. But Latter-day Saints had created only a small body of writing by 1837, so it loomed large for that reason alone. And, even physically, it wasn’t small: Printed editions of it range between 133 and 248 pages in length; the audiobook version of it runs nearly five-and-a-half hours.
The English Book of Mormon was less than a decade old by 1837, the Doctrine and Covenants had only been published in 1835, and the Pearl of Great Price was still decades in the future. However, A Voice of Warning was important for far more than its relative literary bulk within the nonscriptural literature of the fledgling Restoration. In it, Parley Pratt set forth an orderly account of Latter-day Saint beliefs as they stood at the time and created many of the scriptural arguments that members of the Church have used ever since to elucidate, justify, and defend their faith. They’re familiar to us now, but they were once new.
I’m interested here, though, in the title that he chose for his pioneering work: A Voice of Warning. It’s fairly clear that the first Latter-day Saints expected the Second Advent of the Savior to come much sooner than it has—every meteor shower seemed to be a sign that the Lord’s coming was very near at hand—and I think it safe to say that our sense of the imminence of that event has lessened quite a bit. Perhaps, indeed, a bit too much. For “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). The Second Epistle of Peter exhorts its audience
That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. . . .
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing,