“It seemed as if my mind, though active in its very nature, had lost all its activity, and was struck motionless, as well as into nothing, before the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah… He also told me, that every denomination of professing christians had become extremely corrupt; many of which had never had any true faith at all; but are guided only by depraved reason… he said that all the different denominations of professing christians constituted the New Testament Babylon…

“Much more the Lord revealed; but forbids my relating it in this way.”

Asa Wild – 1 October 1823, Palmyra’s Wayne Sentinel, “PROGNOSTICATION ! ! Remarkable Vision and Revelation” (Palmyra, NY: Wayne Sentinel Newspaper, 22 October 1823), 4.

“Asa Wild was almost a dozen years older than Joseph Smith, and it is probable the two never met. Like Joseph, Wild was born in Vermont–in 1794 at West Fairlee, about twenty miles northeast of Joseph’s birthplace of Sharon. Most of what we know about Asa Wild comes from a pamphlet he published in 1824, entitled A Short Sketch of the Religious Experience and Spiritual Travels of Asa Wild, of Amsterdam, N. Y. For many years, he resisted the faith of his parents, practicing almost every species of vice, until at age twenty-two he experienced a desire for forgiveness of his sins and looked back to Calvinism to satisfy his religious yearnings. He affiliated with the Calvinists and became more and more assimilated to their theorists before discovering that he was surrounded with professors of religion who were only wolves in sheep’s clothing, having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.”

Elden J. Watson, The ‘Prognostication’ of Asa Wild (Provo, UT: BYU Studies 37:3, 1997), 223.