Orson Pratt

Discourses by Orson Pratt, Volume 1

Orson Pratt (1811-1881) was an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; at 24, he was the third youngest member of the original Quorum of the Twelve. Pratt was a genuine polymath, with major writings on theology, astronomy, and mathematics. He supervised the work of transcribing the Book of Mormon to the Deseret Alphabet and is responsible for our current chapter-verse divisions in the Book of Mormon. He wrote numerous pamphlets that were long used in missionary work. He and his brother Parley were, after Joseph Smith himself, the most important theologians in the early LDS Church. We reprint here twenty of his sermons as recorded in the Journal of Discourses. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).