Joseph Smith Jr. was a very religious and God-fearing man. He founded the Latter-day Saint movement, better known as the Mormon Church. It has been persecuted by some and embraced by others as well. He was one of the most controversial men in history today because of his beliefs and teachings. They were different for his time and still very strange for our time. Joseph Smith Jr. was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont. His father Joseph Smith Sr. and mother Lucy Mack Smith were poor, uneducated farmers. Soon after his birth, the Smith family moved to western New York, where they continued farming near the town of Palmyra. Joseph had five brothers and three sisters. There he spent the next four years of his life as a young boy, before moving to Manchester. (Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith History Ch.1) Smith had little involvement in religious organizations during his youth. He read and studied the Bible and held his own religious views. It was influenced by the common folk religion of the area. Most people during this period were of the Methodist faith. The region where Smith grew up was also an area of ​​intense revivalism during the Second Great Awakening. (Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia: 2008 Early Life of Joseph Smith Jr.) Smith worked primarily in the fields with his father and brothers and had no time for formal education. In 1820, at the age of fourteen, Joseph Smith Jr. was faced with the decision to join a church. As a man with no formal education or religious organization, he went to a grove of trees to pray and ask God which church was the right one to join. Smith said that God and Jesus appeared to him as “two personages, whose splendor and glory defy description.” (Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith History chapter 1 verse 17) They told him that none of the churches were right and that he should not join any of them. Immediately after the “First Vision,” Joseph Smith Jr. was in the company of a Methodist preacher who was very active in revivalism. As the two conversed about religion, Smith mentioned his accounts with the Father and the Son. The preacher treated him lightly, but with contempt, saying that he was the devil. The preacher concluded that the visions did not happen in the present time, and such things stopped with the apostles and would never happen again thereafter.