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I was born in the
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and five, on the
twenty-third day of December, in the town of Sharon, Windsor county,
State of Vermont . . . My father, Joseph Smith, Sen., left the State of
Vermont, and moved to Palmyra, Ontario (now Wayne) county, in the State
of New York, when I was
in my tenth year, or thereabouts. In about four years after my
father’s arrival in Palmyra, he moved with his family into Manchester in
the same county of Ontario—
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After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was
seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an
astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
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But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the
power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was
ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an
imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen
world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
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