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User:GregSmith
"Somebody could walk into this room
And say your life is on fire.
It's all over the evening news,
All about the fire in your life on the evening news."
- - Paul Simon, "Crazy Love, Vol. II," Graceland album (1986).
Ill TESTING John C. Bennett in Nauvoo
…as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous, therefore I say unto you, hold your peace until I shall see fit to make all things known unto the world concerning the matter. - Doctrine and Covenants 10:37 Bennett's Motives
Bennett's first meeting with Joseph Smith predated Nauvoo. While all were living in Ohio, Bennett travelled with William McLellin to see Joseph in January 1832.[1] Joseph seems to have made little impact on Bennett personally, though the visit would be remembered later.[2] Interestingly, Bennett instead became friends with Eber D. Howe, who was to print Mormonism Unvailed, one of the first anti-Mormon works.[3] Howe also printed the diplomas peddled by Bennett, and the doctor borrowed heavily from Howe's work when he penned his attack on Joseph and the Saints.[4] This early familiarity with both the Saints and their enemies, coupled with Bennett's unscrupulous nature and burning need for pre-eminence and power, gives credence to his later claim that he did not arrive as a sincere convert.
Notes
- ↑ See William McLellin journal entry for 11 January 1832, reproduced in William E. McLellin, The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831-1836, ed. Jan Shipps and John W. Welch (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, Brigham Young University, 1994), 69.
- ↑ Andrew F. Smith, The Saintly Scoundrel: The Life and Times of Dr. John Cook Bennett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 12.
- ↑ Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 411.
- ↑ Smith, Saintly Scoundrel, 31–32.