On April 7, 1844, at the funeral of Elder King Follett — killed in an accident a few weeks earlier — Joseph Smith preached for over two hours at the closing session of the April general conference held in a grove near the Nauvoo temple. The sermon, known thereafter as the King Follett Discourse, is among the most theologically expansive teachings he ever gave. It was preached less than three months before his martyrdom at Carthage in late June.
The Prophet did not write the discourse out in advance; what survives are the simultaneous notes of four scribes — Willard Richards, Wilford Woodruff, William Clayton, and Thomas Bullock — preserved in the Joseph Smith Papers. The standard published text in History of the Church volume 6 is an amalgamation of these notes by the Church’s later historians; Stan Larson’s 1978 critical reconstruction (BYU Studies) is the most rigorous scholarly text.
The discourse develops several teachings central to Latter-day Saint theology. It articulates the eternal nature of intelligence — that the basic stuff of a human spirit is co-eternal with God, neither created nor capable of being destroyed (the doctrinal point also given in Sections 93↗). It treats the nature and origin of God — that God Himself was once as we are now, and that humanity’s destiny is to grow into the divine nature, sharing in God’s own life. It articulates the relationship between Christ’s atonement and human exaltation. The discourse’s most often-quoted summary — “as man is, God once was; as God is, man may become” (the couplet was given in this form by Lorenzo Snow rather than by Joseph Smith himself, but the substance is the discourse’s central claim) — captures the breadth of the teaching.
The King Follett Discourse is not canonized scripture. It has nevertheless shaped Latter-day Saint understanding of premortal existence, the eternal nature of human identity, and the doctrine of exaltation in ways no other single source has matched.