PROVO, Utah — Though Brigham Young has been likened to Moses leading the children of Israel to the Promised Land, Elder John K. Carmack cast him in the role of a latter-day Abraham.

Elder Carmack of the Seventy was the keynote speaker at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute symposium March 20.

"The comparable image I see is that of Father Abraham," he mused. "Yes, the exodus from Nauvoo to the Great Salt Lake was vital and exciting and the comparison with Moses apt. We, like the Jews have done with the exodus from Egypt, look back on that great event with pride, but the portrait of President Young that strikes me as being the full and memorable one is that of a great Patriarch, a father, presiding and directing the work of establishing a people, safe and free to follow their prophet and gospel doctrines in the mountains and valleys that became their Western Canaan."

Abraham, Elder Carmack pointed out, found himself in peril in his homeland, Ur of the Chaldees, and took his family and followers to a land prepared for them by the Lord.

Similarly, "President Young and the Saints found themselves in peril in Illinois," he noted. "The Lord, Jehovah, guided them to a place far away from the nation that had rejected them and whose mobs, unchecked by rule of law or Constitution, threatened their destruction. Even the valley of the Great Salt Lake must surely have been reminiscent of Canaan with its Salton Sea."

President Young fit the Abrahamic pattern, Elder Carmack said, explaining, "Jehovah could ask nothing that Abraham would not do, even being willing to sacrifice his heir and only son through Sarah. With similar complete faith in Jehovah, President Young reflected on what he and the Saints had done: 'I can say, truly and honestly that the thought never came into my mind, in all my labors what my reward will be, or whether my crown would be large or small, or any crown at all, a small possession, a large possession or no possession. . . . All that I have had in mind has been that it was my duty to do the will of God, and to labor to establish His kingdom on the earth."