President [Joseph F.] Smith said that if the seventies generally could be convinced that they were simply elders with a special calling as aids to the Apostles in preaching the Gospel in foreign lands, and their minds could be disabused of the idea placed thereby the teachings of the late Elder Joseph Young, President of the Council of Seventy, to the effect that the Seventies were Apostles, some of them would not perhaps feel as they do now. Brother Cowley related a conversation he once had with the late President John Taylor, to the effect that a man holding the office of an Elder has all the authority necessary to preach the Gospel, and believing this to be true, thought the Elders should not be ordained Seventies in a wholesale way as they were now being ordained, but that they should be chosen according to their fitness to become aids to the Apostles. President Snow remarked that when elders were ordained seventies no more Priesthood was conferred upon them, but that they were merely called to work in a special field.
[Source: Journal History, as quoted in Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835-1951, Electronic Edition, 2015]
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