This book contains a full collection of Joseph Smith's Nauvoo discourses in the mature and climatic years of his life - many have never been published.
They are reproduced in this book in exact fidelity to their original written sources in diaries and journals, including spelling and grammatical deviations.
All are cross-referenced to earlier sayings and discourses of Joseph Smith.
Also, these discourses are indexed to all the biblical and other scriptural verses discussed or alluded to and
provided is the contextual settings for each discourse in proper chronological sequence.
Footnotes to the discourses in terms of their historical and doctrinal kinships.
All of these discourses, recorded by some 60 different persons are interlaced with other fundamental teachings of this rich and formative period of Church History.
Truman G Madsen says in the foreword:
" For teachers in all levels of Church administration and practice, for parents who are concerned to 'go to the source' when counseling and guiding and testifying in the home, for students who seek a handbook of Mormon sources that will withstand careful scholarly scrutiny, for Latter-day Saints who wish to treasure up the fundamental teachings of the Restoration at a very fountainhead, and for all in or beyond the Church who have begun to recognize that in his high and inspired moments Joseph Smith passed on to this generation 'gems for the sanctified,' this book in not only useful, it is indispensable.