George Albert Smith

A president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whose teachings recur across Kyle’s gospel-study sources. In The Crucible of Doubt (by Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens), Smith is cited as a corrective against deference to leaders: when a 1945 Church magazine urged that “When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done,” President Smith “immediately and indignantly repudiated the statement,” writing that “even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church.” There he stands alongside Russell M. Nelson and Boyd K. Packer in the book’s thread against over-programming and borrowed light.

In Chad’s Big Quote Book he supplies several quotations on the “division line” between God’s and Lucifer’s territory — “if you cross to the devil’s side of the line one inch, you are in the tempter’s power” — and on death as a release from mortality and a “great and glorious experience” (“My spirit is set free, I thirst no more…I am full of life”).

Context: George Albert Smith (1870–1951) was the eighth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving from 1945 until his death in 1951.

Where this appears

• The Crucible of Doubt — cited repudiating “when our leaders speak, the thinking has been done” as a misrepresentation of the Church’s ideal
• Chad’s Big Quote Book — quoted on the dividing line between good and evil, agency, and death as release from mortality