During this 1884-86 period there were numerous appeals by prominent Mormons and friendly non-Mormons for President Taylor to issue a statement or new revelation that would set aside the practice of plural marriage.88 Burdened by his own exile and the sufferings of other Church members, John Taylor "asked the Lord if it would not be right under the circumstances to discontinue plural marriages," in response to which President Taylor received "the word of the Lord to him in which the Lord said that plural marriage was one of His eternal laws and that He had established it, that man had not done so and that He would sustain and uphold his saints in carrying it out."89 Presently available documents of 1885-86 are silent about this revelation, but much later documentation and commentary identified this revelation as having been received by John Taylor on 27 September 1886.90

89 Statement of John W. Taylor to the apostles in Heber J. Grant, Journal, 30 Sept. 1890, also in First Presidency Office Journal, 2 Oct. 1889, copy in CR 1/48, LDS Church Archives; in Abraham H. Cannon, Diary, 1 April 1892; in Minutes of the Quorum of Twelve, 22 Feb. and 1 March 1911, LDS Church Archives. John W. Taylor consistently stated that he found the 1886 revelation among his father's papers after John Taylor's death in 1887. On an envelope containing an unpublished revelation to his father of 19 November 1877 about the settlement of the Brigham Young estate, John W. Taylor made the following handwritten note:

Directions about

Settling Church Property

Revelation of Prest John Taylor

in Envelope —

and all the rest of these papers are Documents that

should go to Prest. Woodruff

J.W. Taylor

read. Oct 22nd 1887.

Although John W. Taylor presented these documents, apparently including the 1886 revelation, to Wilford Woodruff in 1887, this 1877 revelation and envelope ended up in the Joseph F. Smith Papers in the Church Historian's Office, where I examined them in 1971. Taylor may have received back the original 1886 revelation document when he left the Quorum of the Twelve, because his brother Frank Y. Taylor gave it to the First Presidency on 18 July 1933.