The Prophet Joseph Smith—that much misunderstood man—gave at one time a striking illustration of this principle. It was when Zion's camp was going down to Missouri, in the year 1834. A member of the camp awoke one morning and found a rattlesnake in bed with him, coiled and asleep near his pillow. Horrorstricken he arose, and his first thought was to get a stick or a stone and kill the snake. The Prophet told him not to do it. Said he: "The snake has not harmed you; it has trusted in you; do not kill it; for how is that great era of peace and goodwill to be ushered in, which the prophets have predicted, when the lion shall eat straw like the ox, when the sucking child shall play with the serpent, and they shall not hurt nor destroy in all the holy mountain of the Lord—how long must we wait for that great era, the Millennium, if men continue to treat cruelly the animals and crush their lives out of them without any provocation?" Joseph Smith taught men to be kind, to be merciful, to be forgiving, and to return good for evil.

I bear in mind another incident in his history, when he and some of his brethren were lying in a dungeon, Liberty jail, Missouri, during the winter of 1838-9, after the Saints, fifteen thousand men, women and children, had been driven from the state of Missouri. These brethren were treated with great cruelty in prison. It is said that the depravity of their jailers descended so low that they even cooked human flesh, taken from the body of a negro who had been killed, and offered it to these prisoners to eat; and the Prophet, warned by the Lord, told his brethren not to partake of it. It was in the midst of these circumstances that one of the brethren was asked to pray; and he prayed that God would damn the men who were treating them thus cruelly. When he got through, the others were laughing at him. He asked, "What is the matter?" They said, "We are laughing at your prayer." "Well," he replied, "if you want any better praying than that, you can do it yourselves." The Prophet then told him, "You yourself will yet see the day when you will pity these very men who are inflicting these injuries upon you. God has shown to me in vision the sufferings of the ungodly, and I had to pray to Him to close the vision when I saw the terrible judgments that would come upon the wicked." The Prophet taught the principle of patient submission to wrong. And it is this that lifts men up above other men. When men injure us they put themselves in our debt, and that debt remains until we cancel it by an act of retaliation.