“For hundreds of years the world was wrapped in a veil of spiritual darkness, until there was not one fundamental truth belonging to the place of salvation… Joseph Smith declared that in the year 1820 the Lord revealed to him that all the ‘Christian’ churches were in error, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men.”
Joseph Fielding Smith, The Improvement Era (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, April 1920), 496-497.