The Meaning of Christ-The Truth, The Way, The Life : An Analysis of B. H. Roberts' Unpublished Masterwork
BYU Studies
Spring 1975
15
1975
259-92
""My latest and greatest work." "The most important work that I have yet contributed to the Church, the six-volumed Comprehensive History of the Church not omitted." So B.H. Roberts wrote to his friend and leader, President Heber J. Grant, and to a returned missionary in January and February 1931. These generous self-appraisals are the more remarkable since Brigham Henry Roberts had by then authored thirty-two books, manuals, and study courses, and had published more than 300 articles and reviews in periodicals. He was describing "The Truth, The Way, The Life," a 747-page, 55-chapter, three-volume, typewritten manuscript that he had more or less finished in 1928. In his final doctrinal work, Roberts' motives were simply to communicate the distinctions of Mormonism from common ground. "What can we reason but from what we know?" he asks at the outset, and the antecedent of "we" is everyone--every citizen of planet earth. Repeatedly as he approaches his three main categories for the comprehension of Christ as (Vol. I) The Truth, (Vol. II) The Way, and (Vol. III) The Life, he moves from possibility to probability to assurance. All three volumes invoke analogies--the similarity of the present to the past and future; the similarity of what we know to what, by implication, we wish to know; the similarity of the discoverable in ancient religion to the core of truth in modern revelation--all in a compelling appeal to the whole man. "Let us not have the heart breathing defiance to the intellect!" he says. This is an attempt--bold, sometimes unwieldy, and at the end somewhat exhausted--to say, "I know that I can believe--I believe that I can know."" [Publisher's abstract]