We’ve spent the past two days filming at the restored Historic Kirtland Village, mostly in and about the Newell K. Whitney store and at the Kirtland Temple itself. For reasons that we captured on film, Karl Anderson argues that the room in the Whitney store called “the School of the Prophets” can be considered the first temple constructed in this dispensation.
Yesterday, we also filmed at the site on the Chagrin River where the first Kirtland area baptisms were performed, as well as at the stone quarry from which materials were obtained for the Temple. (A partnership between local government and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has created a pleasant park there, heavily wooded and improved with walkways and bridges.)
In that light, I cite a passage from Lorenzo Snow, the well-educated brother of Eliza Snow — a native of Ohio, he studied at Ohio’s very progressive Oberlin College — who would eventually become an apostle and then the fifth president of the Church. Lorenzo was baptized in the Chagrin River in June 1836, by John Boynton, a member of the still newly-organized Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Two or three weeks after his baptism, he went into a grove of trees near his home:
I had no sooner opened my lips in an effort to pray, than I heard a sound, just above my head, like the rustling of silken robes, and immediately the Spirit of God descended upon me, completely enveloping my whole person, filling me, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, and O, the joy and happiness I felt! No language can describe the almost instantaneous transition from a dense cloud of mental and spiritual darkness into a refulgence of light and knowledge, as it was at that time imparted to my understanding. I then received a perfect knowledge that God lives, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and of the restoration of the holy Priesthood, and the fulness of the Gospel. It was a complete baptism — a tangible immersion in . . . the Holy Ghost; and even more real and physical in its effects upon every part of my system than the immersion by water; dispelling forever, so long as reason and memory last, all possibility of doubt or fear. . . .
I knew that [the Lord] had conferred on me what only an omnipotent being can confer — that which is of greater value than all the wealth and honors worlds can bestow.
Posted from Mentor, Ohio
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In