From Preston Nibley’s Presidents of the Church, we read,

While visiting at the home of Elder H.G. Sherwood, Lorenzo relates that the conversation turned to religious matters. “Elder Sherwood was endavoring to explain the parable of the Savior when speaking of the husbandman who hired servants and sent them forth at different hours of the day to labor in his vineyard.” While Lorenzo listened closely to the explanation, “the Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon me –the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw as clear as the sun at noon-day, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation as it was shown to me: ‘As man is, God once was, As God now is, man may become.’ “

Later in the Improvement Era, Lorenzo Snow published the full poem:

Hast thou not been unwisely bold,
Man’s destiny to thus unfold?
To raise, promote such high desire,
Such vast ambition thus inspire?

Still ’tis no phantom that we trace
Man’s ultimatum in life’s race;
This royal path has long been trod
By righteous men, each now a God:

As Abra’m, Isaac, Jacob, too,
First babes, then men—to gods they grew.
As man now is, our God once was;
As now God is, so man may be,—
Which doth unfold man’s destiny.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The boy, like to his father grown,
Has but attained unto his own;
To grow to sire from state of son,
Is not ’gainst Nature’s course to run.

A son of God, like God to be,
Would not be robbing Deity;
And he who has this hope within,
Will purify himself from sin.

(Lorenzo Snow, “Man’s Destiny,” Improvement Era, June 1919, pp. 660–61.)