Pratt, Parley Parker.
The millennium, and other poems: To which is annexed, a treatise on the regeneration and eternal duration of matter. By P. P. Pratt, minister of the gospel. New York, Printed by W. Molineux, cor. of Ann and Nassau Streets, 1840.
iv, [2]l., 148 p. 19 cm.
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This volume reprints Parley Pratt’s long narrative poem “The Millennium” and eleven shorter poems from his earlier The Millennium, a Poem (Boston 1836). In addition are included eighteen other poems eight of which were written while Parley was a prisoner in Richmond and Columbia jails. But the importance of this book lies in the essay “A Treatise on the Regeneration and Eternal Duration of Matter” included at the end. Parley’s second prison essay, written “to comfort and console myself and friends when death stared me in the face, than as an argumentative or philosophical production for the instruction of others” was the first writing to deal with the truly distinguishing doctrines of Mormonism. Appearing here for the first time in a Mormon publication were such radical ideas as: matter and spirit can neither be created nor annihilated; the world was not created ex nihilo but organized out of existing matter; and God is bound by certain overriding laws. In short, “A Treatise” announced that the “omnis” of traditional Christianity did not apply to Mormonism.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley and Chad J. Flake,
A Mormon Fifty: an exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library in conjunction with the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. (Provo, Utah, Friends of the Brigham Young University Library, 1984). Item 13, p. [13].
Used by permission of the authors.
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY