---
title: The Great Apostasy, Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History
description: 1909 book by James E. Talmage, a Mormon apostle, arguing that the early Christian church fell into apostasy and that the Mormon Church restored it; ten chapters on the claimed apostasy, its causes and its sequel.
authors:
  - Talmage, James Edward
collections:
  - theology
tags:
  - theology
  - church-history
  - 20th-century
  - mormon-writings
  - apostasy
published: "1909"
publisher: The Deseret News
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
edition: Sixth thousand, copyright 1909 (Salt Lake City)
language: en
type: book
reference: 'James E. Talmage, *The Great Apostasy, Considered in the Light of Scriptural and Secular History* (Salt Lake City: The Deseret News, 1909), "Preface."'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/greatapostasycon00atalm
  identifier: greatapostasycon00atalm
  scan: Brigham Young University copy of the 1909 Deseret News printing (sixth thousand), Internet Archive
  transcription: OCR text of the 1909 scan, with line-break hyphens joined, running heads and page numbers removed, library stamps and end papers dropped, and obvious scan errors corrected; printed pagination kept as page markers. Footnotes are kept as bracketed notes. Not proofread against the page images.
curator_note: Printing stated as the sixth thousand; the text carries the 1909 copyright. Treated as a Mormon primary source, included for historical and doctrinal study. Inclusion does not imply endorsement.
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: 1909 US publication (Salt Lake City, The Deseret News; copyright notice of 1909); published before 1931, so public domain in the United States
  source: https://archive.org/details/greatapostasycon00atalm
  publication_year: 1909
  note: Publication year of the edition used is 1909; any modern rights notice in the Internet Archive metadata does not apply to this 1909 text.
---

# Preface

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims the restoration of the Gospel, and the re-establishment of the Church as of old, in this, the Dispensation of the Fulness of Times. Such restoration and re-establishment, with the modern bestowal of the Holy Priesthood, would be unnecessary and indeed impossible had the Church of Christ continued among men with unbroken succession of Priesthood and power, since the ''meridian of time."

The restored Church affirms that a general apostasy developed during and after the apostolic period, and that the primitive Church lost its pov/er, authority, and graces as a divine institution, and degenerated into an earthly organization only. The significance and importance of the great apostasy, as a condition precedent to the re-establishment of the Church in modern times, is obvious. If the alleged apostasy of the primitive Church was not a reality, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not the divine institution its name proclaims.

The evidence of the decline and final extinction of the primitive Church among men is found in scriptural record, and in secular history. In the following pages the author has undertaken to present a summary of the most important of these evidences. In so doing he has drawn liberally from many sources of information, with due acknowledgment of all citations. The little work has been written in the hope that it may prove of service to our missionary elders in the field, to classes and quorum organizations engaged in the

study of theological subjects at home, and to earnest investigators of the teachings and claims of the restored Church of Jesus Christ.

James E. Talmage. Salt Lake City, Utah. November 1, 1909.