Long before Joseph Smith offered his first prayer, thousands and millions of people must have yearned, as Sarah did, for the assurance that God is not the severe, distant, impersonal deity of Jonathan Edwards but the kind, loving, and very personal God that Joseph found in the Sacred Grove. That Joseph experienced this God, that the Book of Mormon testifies of and exemplifies His tender mercies, and that all and sundry are invited and given the means to experience God’s presence in the world and in their own lives made belief in a living, personal God a potent and irresistible principle.

That God has a body of flesh and bones is not the revolutionary teaching. God’s physical form is not the point. That God has a heart that beats in sympathy with ours is the truth that catalyzes millions—that He feels real sorrow, rejoices with real gladness, and weeps real tears. This, as Enoch learned, is an awful, terrible, yet infinitely comforting truth.

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.