Link and Quote Related to CHFT 1

From Milton V. Backman's article describing the advent of religious freedom in America as part of a prelude to the restoration ("Preparing the Way: The Rise of Religioius Freedom in New England," January, 1989 Ensign): "During this American reformation, many beliefs were brought into harmony with the teachings of the still-future restored Church. These changes in belief would later make it easier for many to receive the fulness of the gospel. For example, the Unitarians, Eastern Christians, and some Universalists replaced the traditional view that God was three persons of one essence with a belief that the Father and Son were two separate and distinct entities."

From Thomas Jefferson's letters ----- To Van der Kemp, 1820 "The genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored: such as it was preached and practised by himself. Very soon after his death it became muffled up in mysteries, and has been ever since kept in concealment from the vulgar eye. To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education." ----- To S. Kercheval, 1810 "But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State: that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves: that rational men, not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ." ----- To John Adams, 1813 "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one . . . But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe."