![\"David](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/10\/276px-King_David_in_Augsburg_Cathedral.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cCome, Follow Me<\/em> \u2014 Old Testament Study and Teaching Helps (2026): June 8-14: 1 Samuel 8-10; 13; 15-16 \u2014 \u201cThe Lord Looketh on the Heart,\u201d<\/em>\u201c<\/a> written by Jonn Claybaugh<\/p>\n Once again, Brother Claybaugh generously contributes a concise and helpful set of notes for students and teachers of the Sunday School curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In today\u2019s edition of the Deseret News<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cFaithful Answers for Difficult Conversations:\u00a0Why more Latter-day Saints are turning to FAIR for help navigating hard questions about Church history and doctrine\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n On the first full day of our recently concluded tour of England, we drove by the former location of the dockyards where Charles Dickens went to observe a group of Latter-day Saint converts preparing to depart across the Atlantic Ocean for Zion. \u00a0I meant to repost the following in connection with that, but, under the press of jet lag and other matters, I didn\u2019t. \u00a0I\u2019ve always loved the story and what with taking a \u00a0Third-Generation Unit to the swimming pool more than once (where I play a remarkably inept monster who is continually thwarted by the ever-multiplying but amazingly timely superpowers of the 3GU) I\u2019m running out of time available for blogging (and other necessary things) today. \u00a0So I share again something that I first posted here back in 2019:<\/p>\n In June 1863, the passenger ship\u00a0Amazon<\/em>\u00a0set sail from London for America with nearly 900 Latter-day Saint emigrants aboard. \u00a0However, just before she weighed anchor, many Londoners\u2014including both government officials and clergymen\u2014came to take\u00a0a look at the Mormons<\/a>, up close and at first hand, as well as at\u00a0their traveling arrangements. \u00a0One of these visitors\u00a0Charles Dickens, the famous author of such works, by that time, as\u00a0The Pickwick Papers<\/em>\u00a0(1837),\u00a0Oliver Twist<\/em>\u00a0(1839),\u00a0Nicholas Nickleby<\/em>\u00a0(1839),\u00a0The Old Curiosity Shop<\/em>(1841),\u00a0Barnaby Rudge<\/em>\u00a0(1841),\u00a0A Christmas Carol<\/em>\u00a0(1849),\u00a0Martin Chuzzlewit<\/em>\u00a0(1844),\u00a0Dombey and Son<\/em>\u00a0(1848),\u00a0David Copperfield<\/em>\u00a0(1850),\u00a0Bleak House<\/em>\u00a0(1853),\u00a0Hard Times<\/em>\u00a0(1854),\u00a0Little Dorrit<\/em>\u00a0(1857),\u00a0A Tale of Two Cities<\/em>\u00a0(1859), and\u00a0Great Expectations<\/em>\u00a0(1861). \u00a0He is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of Victorian England.<\/p>\n Dickens spent several hours on board the Amazon, quietly observing the Saints on the ship and interviewing George Q. Cannon, a member of the Twelve who was serving at the time as the president of the British Mission. \u00a0(Elder Cannon would go on to serve as a counselor in the First Presidency to Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow.)<\/p>\n A month or so after his visit to the\u00a0Amazon<\/em>, Dickens published an account of it in an essay for the periodical\u00a0All the Year Round<\/em>\u00a0(4 July 1863), titled \u201cThe Uncommercial Traveller.\u201d\u00a0 In his essay, he remarked that virtually all of the emigrating Latter-day Saints were tradesmen and craftsmen and their families, people of the working class. \u00a0He was worried\u00a0about what these British converts to Mormonism might encounter when they actually arrived in Utah. \u00a0(He was surely familiar with the horror stories going around England at the time \u2013 which would continue for the next several generations \u2014 about the theocratic \u201cMormon kingdom\u201d in the remote North American west.) \u00a0But he was deeply impressed by what he had actually seen. \u00a0The emigration was thoroughly well-organized, calm, orderly.<\/p>\n \u201cI went on board their ship,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the\u00a0Amazon<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0side feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.\u201d Of the Saints\u00a0themselves, Dickens confessed\u00a0that, had he not known they were Mormons, he would have described them as, \u201cin their degree, the pick and flower of England.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The story has been told a number of times in many places. \u00a0The proximate source for my entry above was an article in the March 1980 issue of the Ensign<\/em> by Richard L. Jensen and Gordon Irving, entitled \u201cThe Voyage of the Amazon<\/em>: \u00a0A Close View of One Immigrant Company.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Cooking on a gas grill out on a patio \u00a0while looking through the pine trees down upon a small fjord of Puget Sound not far below. \u00a0Can mortality ever be much better than this? \u00a0Unfortunately, though, it\u2019s not always<\/em> like this. \u00a0Not for most of us, most of the time. \u00a0(For too many, it\u2019s not at all like this. \u00a0Ever.) \u00a0But I think this evening of Gerard Manley Hopkins:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>\n