1. My servant, Orson Hyde, was called by his ordination to proclaim the everlasting gospel, by the Spirit of the living God, from people to people, and from land to land, in the congregations of the wicked, in their synagogues, reasoning with and expounding all scriptures unto them.

2. And, behold, and lo, this is an ensample unto all those who were ordained unto this priesthood, whose mission is appointed unto them to go forth—

3. And this is the ensample unto them, that they shall speak as they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost.

4. And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.

5. Behold, this is the promise of the Lord unto you, O ye my servants.

6. Wherefore, be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you, and will stand by you; and ye shall bear record of me, even Jesus Christ, that I am the Son of the living God, that I was, that I am, and that I am to come.

7. This is the word of the Lord unto you, my servant Orson Hyde, and also unto my servant Luke Johnson, and unto my servant Lyman Johnson, and unto my servant William E. McLellin, and unto all the faithful elders of my church—

8. Go ye into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature, acting in the authority which I have given you, baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

9. And he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned.

10. And he that believeth shall be blest with signs following, even as it is written.

11. And unto you it shall be given to know the signs of the times, and the signs of the coming of the Son of Man;

12. And of as many as the Father shall bear record, to you shall be given power to seal them up unto eternal life. Amen.

13. And now, concerning the items in addition to the covenants and commandments, they are these—

14. There remain hereafter, in the due time of the Lord, other bishops to be set apart unto the church, to minister even according to the first;

15. Wherefore they shall be high priests who are worthy, and they shall be appointed by the First Presidency of the Melchizedek Priesthood, except they be literal descendants of Aaron.

16. And if they be literal descendants of Aaron they have a legal right to the bishopric, if they are the firstborn among the sons of Aaron;

17. For the firstborn holds the right of the presidency over this priesthood, and the keys or authority of the same.

18. No man has a legal right to this office, to hold the keys of this priesthood, except he be a literal descendant and the firstborn of Aaron.

19. But, as a high priest of the Melchizedek Priesthood has authority to officiate in all the lesser offices he may officiate in the office of bishop when no literal descendant of Aaron can be found, provided he is called and set apart and ordained unto this power, under the hands of the First Presidency of the Melchizedek Priesthood.

20. And a literal descendant of Aaron, also, must be designated by this Presidency, and found worthy, and anointed, and ordained under the hands of this Presidency, otherwise they are not legally authorized to officiate in their priesthood.

21. But, by virtue of the decree concerning their right of the priesthood descending from father to son, they may claim their anointing if at any time they can prove their lineage, or do ascertain it by revelation from the Lord under the hands of the above named Presidency.

22. And again, no bishop or high priest who shall be set apart for this ministry shall be tried or condemned for any crime, save it be before the First Presidency of the church;

23. And inasmuch as he is found guilty before this Presidency, by testimony that cannot be impeached, he shall be condemned;

24. And if he repent he shall be forgiven, according to the covenants and commandments of the church.

25. And again, inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance, faith in Christ the Son of the living God, and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands, when eight years old, the sin be upon the heads of the parents.

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About this reader

What is Scripture?

Scripture is a browser-based reader for sixteen sacred texts spanning multiple religious and literary traditions. It provides chapter-by-chapter navigation, full-text search across all works, word concordance with frequency analysis, verse-linked notes, text-to-speech, and deep linking to any chapter or verse.

Traditions Represented

The collection spans Abrahamic, East Asian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Finnish, and Norse traditions. It includes King James biblical text and Apocrypha, Pickthall's Quran, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, Legge's Four Books, Tao Te Ching, and Book of Poetry, Chamberlain's Kojiki, West's Bundahishn, Kern's Lotus Sutra, Haug and West's Arda Viraf, Crawford's Kalevala, and Bellows' Poetic Edda.

The committed manifests and chapter files currently describe 121 books, 2,724 chapters, and 63,141 verse records. In poetry and prose works, a verse record can represent a line or paragraph rather than a canonically numbered scriptural verse.

Licensing

The application source is AGPL-3.0. Generated text downloads and their structured arrangement are CC BY-SA 4.0; the underlying historic source texts are treated as public-domain inputs. The corpus metadata therefore describes the distributed arrangement with its CC BY-SA license rather than the Public Domain Mark.

Concordance and Related Passages

The concordance is an exact-word occurrence index with linked records grouped by work. Related Passages is separate: a TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) cosine-similarity index compares chapter vocabulary after stop-word removal and stores up to five cross-book matches above its threshold. It is a lexical discovery aid, not a claim of historical or theological equivalence.

Deep Linking

Every chapter and verse has a permanent URL. Chapter links follow the pattern /scripture/{work}/{book}-{chapter} (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1 for Genesis 1). Verse links append the verse number (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1:26 for Genesis 1:26). These URLs can be shared, bookmarked, or cited directly.

Accessibility

Scripture supports keyboard navigation throughout: Tab moves between controls, Enter activates verse actions, and arrow keys navigate chapters. The reading pane has a skip-to-content link. All overlays (search, concordance) are focus-trapped ARIA dialogs. Dynamic content regions use aria-live for screen reader announcements. Light and dark themes are available through the theme toggle. Verse numbers are visible to assistive technology. No flashing content or motion hazards.

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