Miller, Reuben.  James J. Strang, weighed in the balance of truth, and found wanting.  His claims as first president of the Melchisedek priesthood refuted.  By Reuben Miller, elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Burlington, W. T. September, 1846.
[i-ii][1]-26 pp. 19 cm.

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Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, September 4, 1811, Reuben Miller converted to Mormonism in January 1843, and in October 1844 was called to be the bishop in Norway, La Salle County, Illinois.  In the spring of 1845 he moved his family to Nauvoo, and that October Brigham Young asked him to lead a company west.  Miller actually made the overland trek to Utah in 1849.  Settling in Mill Creek, he served there as the bishop and as county commissioner for more than thirty years, until his death in 1882.

Miller’s association with James J. Strang was brief and tumultuous.  He first met him on January 6, 1846, at St. Charles, while he was traveling about northeastern Illinois organizing his company to go west.  The next day, for four hours, he listened to Strang present his position, and he questioned him in detail about his claim that an angel appeared to him on the day of Joseph Smith’s assassination and charged him as Joseph’s successor.  Miller then returned to Nauvoo, and after consulting for a week with the Twelve about their authority to lead the Church, he began to publicly lecture on Strang’s behalf.  In February, at Keokuk, he published the first Strangite pamphlet, A Defence of the Claims of James J. Strang to the Authority Now Usurped by the Twelve.  Two months later, at the Strangite conference in Voree, Wisconsin, he was appointed the president of the Voree stake.  But about two weeks after the conference Miller learned that Strang had written an account of his angelic visitation which appeared to differ from the one he had related in January, and at this point he began to doubt the validity of Strang’s claims.  In June he withdrew from the Strangite church, and in September he drafted James J. Strang Weighed in the Balance of Truth.  The following month he was rebaptized into the Church at Nauvoo.

The first five pages of James J. Strang weighed in the Balance of Truth give Miller’s account of his acceptance and subsequent rejection of Strang’s teachings, followed by a long refutation of Strang’s claim to be Joseph Smith’s successor.  It asserts that Strang had secretly begun to organize “the kingdom” with 144 officers including himself as “Imperial Primate, Absolute Sovereign” and John C. Bennett as “Primier, Prime Minister, General–in–chief, and Successor to J.J. Strang.”

James J. Strang Weighed in the Balance of Truth was undoubtedly printed late in September or early in October.  The Chicago Democrat, for example, received a copy by October 9, and the Voree Herald took notice of it in its October issue.  The pamphlet mentions John C. Bennett a number of times, so it is not surprising that Bennett commented upon it in a letter to the editor in Zion’s Reveille of November 1846.  Zion’s Reveille ran a long response in its issues of January 14 and February 4, 1847, and replied to it again and to Miller’s second tract on March 25.  The Gospel Herald discussed it yet again on October 14—a measure of the pamphlet’s impact on the Strangite congregations.  On January 12, 1847, for instance, Lester Brooks wrote to James M. Adams, “when I got to New york I found the Branch in most stupid condition they have a pamphlet written by Ruben Miller against Brother St[r]ang they are inclined to think there is something quite wrong.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church.  Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]).  Item 311, p. 349–51.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.