Oliver Cowdery's Secret Prayer and Confirmation of the Book of Mormon
Published October 4, 2026 at 5:41 AM
Contributed by
Millennial Star Research
After hearing about the plates from Joseph Smith’s family, Oliver Cowdery prayed privately at night to know whether the account was true. The Lord manifested to him that it was. Cowdery kept the experience secret and told no one; later, after Joseph Smith received a revelation concerning the matter, Cowdery recognized that it confirmed his private experience and became convinced that the work was true.
In Their Own Words
“After we had received this revelation, he stated to me, that after he had gone to my father's to board, and after the family communicated to him concerning my having got the plates, that one night after he had retired to bed he called upon the Lord to know if these things were true, and the Lord manifested to him that they were true, but that he had kept the manifestation entirely secret, and mentioned it to no being; so that after this revelation having been given, he knew that the work was true, because that no being living knew of the thing alluded to in the revelation, but God and himself. I bear testimony that this is true.”
— Joseph Smith, History of the Church
Sources & References
The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 2 no. 8 (May 1891). L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University digital collections. https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/YWJ/id/9780 (account extracted verbatim from the collection's page-level OCR; research confidence: high) Fuller account: The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 2 no. 8 (May 1891) https://contentdm.lib.by… The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Manchester, later Liverpool, England, May 1840–1970), December 1842 (Vol. 3, No. 8). https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_the-latter-day-saints-millennial-star_1842-12_3_8 (account extracted verbatim from the issue's Internet Archive OCR text; research confidence: high) Full first-person account: History of the Church, Vol. 1, Chapter 4 https…
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