What's happening
This is the Manifesto — the formal declaration by which President Wilford Woodruff, in 1890, ended the Church's practice of plural marriage. It is not a section of revelation in the form of "thus saith the Lord," but an official, canonized declaration: a prophet announcing to the Church and to the world that the practice commanded for a season (see Section 132) was now to cease, and that the Saints should submit to the laws of the land.
The background is one of the most wrenching chapters in Latter-day Saint history. Plural marriage had been instituted among Church members in the early 1840s (Section 132). From the 1860s through the 1880s the United States government passed increasingly severe laws to stamp it out — disincorporating the Church, seizing its property, disenfranchising those who practiced it, and imprisoning hundreds of men. The Supreme Court upheld these laws. The temples themselves, and all the ordinances performed in them for the living and the dead, were under threat of confiscation. In that crucible, after long prayer and what he described as direct revelation and vision, President Woodruff issued the Manifesto. It was presented to the Church in General Conference on October 6, 1890, and accepted by common consent (proposed by President Lorenzo Snow) as authoritative and binding. Appended to the declaration are excerpts from three of President Woodruff's later addresses explaining what the Lord had shown him — including the cherished assurance that the Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.
This is a section that asks for sobriety and faith. The right approach is the project's own from D&C 91: read it by the Spirit, honoring both the difficulty of what the Saints lived through and the prophet's witness that the change came by revelation, without sensationalizing.
The declaration: I declare my intention to submit (the Manifesto)
Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise. — Official Declaration 1
The heart of the Manifesto is a public act of submission to law. President Woodruff, as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, declares that the Church is not solemnizing plural marriages and counsels the Saints to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land. The same principle the Church had declared in 1835 — that the Saints are bound to sustain and uphold the respective governments in which they reside (Section 134) — here meets its hardest test. The submission was not a quiet administrative memo but a solemn declaration, presented to the whole Church and sustained by their raised hands. The keys to make such a change belonged, as President Snow's motion affirmed, to the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances.
The Lord will not permit me to lead you astray (the excerpts)
The canonized excerpts from President Woodruff's later addresses are where the spiritual weight of the declaration rests. The first is one of the most quoted assurances in the Church:
The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place... — Official Declaration 1
President Woodruff testifies that the Manifesto was not a capitulation to political pressure but a commandment of God — that he had had some revelations of late, and very important ones, and that he wrote what the Lord told me to write. He frames the choice the Saints faced as a question the Lord put to him by vision and revelation: to continue the practice and lose the temples, the ordinances for the living and the dead, and the freedom of the leaders — or to cease the practice and leave the Temples in the hands of the Saints, so that they can attend to the ordinances of the Gospel, both for the living and the dead.
The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice... shall the work go on or stop? This is the question I lay before the Latter-day Saints. — Official Declaration 1
The deciding value, in his telling, was the temple and the redemption of the dead. The same work that Sections 124, 128, and 138 reveal as the climax of the Restoration — the sealing of families, the salvation of the dead — was precisely what would have been lost. A large number has already been delivered from the prison house in the spirit world by this people, and shall the work go on or stop? The Manifesto, in President Woodruff's witness, was the Lord's way of preserving the greater work.
How this declaration is built
The structure is a declaration with an explanatory appendix. The Manifesto proper (the body): a denial of the false charges, the solemn declaration of intent to submit to the law, and the counsel to the Saints to do likewise — signed by Wilford Woodruff, and accepted by the Church on October 6, 1890, on President Lorenzo Snow's motion. Then three excerpts from President Woodruff's later addresses (1890, 1891, 1893): the assurance that the Lord will not let the President lead the Church astray; the account of the vision and revelation behind the Manifesto, framed as a choice to preserve the temples and the ordinances for the living and the dead; and the testimony that the Son of God moved to have the Manifesto given for purposes in his own mind. The architecture moves from the public, legal act to the private, revelatory why — showing that what looked from outside like surrender was, from within, obedience to preserve the work of salvation.
How this sits in the documentary record
Where this lands
Official Declaration 1 is a hard, holy chapter, and the way it is written rewards a reader who comes with both honesty and faith. From the outside, the Manifesto can look like a church bending to political force — the United States had brought the full weight of its law against the Saints, and the Saints relented. But the canonized excerpts let President Woodruff testify to what was happening on the inside, and his witness is unambiguous: I wrote what the Lord told me to write. He describes a vision in which the Lord showed him exactly what would be lost if the practice continued — not merely property or liberty, but the temples themselves and all the ordinances performed in them for the living and the dead. Faced with that, the question the Lord put to him was stark: shall the work go on or stop? The Manifesto was, in his telling, the Lord's own way of preserving the greater work of salvation when the lesser commandment could no longer be kept without destroying it.
And tucked into the declaration is one of the most reassuring promises the Church possesses: the Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is a promise about the safeguard on the prophetic office — that the same God who calls a prophet will remove him before He lets him carry the Church into apostasy. For Saints who lived through the anguish of the Manifesto, and for any who study it now, that assurance is the anchor. The change was wrenching; faithful families had sacrificed enormously to live the principle, and now were asked to lay it down. But the keys to give the commandment and the keys to end it rested in the same hands, held by the same Lord. Official Declaration 1 asks us to trust that the God who guides His Church can be trusted even when He reverses a course — that He sees the whole work, the temples and the dead and the generations yet to come, and will protect it. The Lord is at work with us.