tithing? 5. Why was the Church in debt? 6. Who opened the Japanese mission?




CHAPTER XXXIX.

PRESIDENCY OF JOSEPH F. SMITH.


The First Presidency of the Church was reorganized for the sixth time
October 17, 1901. Joseph F. Smith was chosen president, and he selected for
his counselors, John R. Winder and Anthon H. Lund. At a special conference
held in Salt Lake City November 10, 1901, this presidency was sustained by
the vote of the Church.

From his boyhood President Smith has been an active, earnest member of the
Church over which he now presides. His father was Hyrum Smith the
Patriarch, brother to the Prophet Joseph. You will remember how these two
brothers were so closely together in the beginning of the Church, and how
they were both killed in Carthage jail.

Joseph was thus left fatherless when he was a boy six years old. As a boy
he had not the privilege of going every day to school or of playing
peacefully in the door-yard of his home. Mobs drove them out of Missouri,
and then out of Nauvoo. They had little peace. Two years after his father
had been killed, Joseph's mother, with her family, had to leave her home,
along with the Saints, and undertake the long westward journey. Although
Joseph was only eight years old at the time, he successfully drove a team
of oxen for three hundred miles over the rolling prairies of Iowa. This was