"Mormon" Doctrine Plain and Simple; Or, Leaves from the Tree of Life

by Charles W. Penrose

These laws and ordinances will be made known to the inhabitants of this planet, either in the flesh or in the disembodied condition. They will have the opportunity of receiving or rejecting them on the agency given to man, that a just judgment may be rendered in the great day of accounts. But ordinances, such as baptism, the laying on of hands for confirmation, ordination, marriage, etc., belong to the corporeal sphere. They are set for the state of probation.

Water is an earthly element, or compound of elements, and the blessings ordained to flow from the death, burial and new birth, typified by authorized baptism therein, cannot be secured in any other way. Millions of earth's sons and daughters have passed out of the body without obeying the law of baptism. Many of them will gladly accept the word and law of the Lord when it is proclaimed to them in the spirit world. But they cannot there attend to ordinances that belong to the sphere which they have left. Can nothing be done in their case? Must they forever be shut out of the kingdom of heaven? Both justice and mercy join in answering "yes" to the first and "no" to the last question. What, then, is the way of their deliverance?

The living may be baptized for the dead. Other essential ordinances may be attended to vicariously. This glorious truth, hid from human knowledge for centuries, has been made known in this greatest of all divine dispensations. It is indeed light in the midst of darkness. It shines in the depths of the shrouded past, illuminates the mystic future, and reveals the infinite love of God and His tender mercy over all His works. It explains the meaning of scripture texts long considered difficult and obscure. It links by loving ties the living with their dead. It shows why the fathers "without us cannot be made perfect." It opens the way of redemption for the hosts of departed heathens. It brings together in one all who are in Christ, even though parted by the vail that is drawn between the physical and spiritual spheres. It gives men and women the power to become "Saviors on Mount Zion," Jesus being the great Captain in the army of redeemers.

In God's house all things are done in order. There is a right way and a proper place for the administration of ordinances for the dead. The living relatives of those who have departed without an opportunity of obeying the earthly requirements of the plan of salvation, if they have themselves been born of the water and of the spirit, stand in the name and place of the departed and receive the ordinances to be placed to the credit of the dead. Either sex represents its own. Men are not baptized for women, nor women for men. The first-born son in each family has rights of priority connected with this vicarious work if he has proven himself worthy. The ordinances must be administered by those having authority, being set apart for the work, and must be duly witnessed and properly recorded. The books on earth must tally with the records in heaven.

The place for these administrations is in a temple built to the Most High God, after the pattern revealed. The baptismal font, like the brazen sea in the temple of Solomon, is placed in the basement, under the place where the living are wont to assemble, typifying the place for the dead, all things spiritual having their correspondence with things natural. That which is done on earth, according to the divine instructions, is acknowledged in heaven, and is of force and effect in the world to come. Herein is manifested the power of the Holy Priesthood, loosing or binding on earth, and it is loosed or bound in heaven, all according to the commandments and revelation of the Most High through Jesus the anointed.

This principle of proxy runs like a thread of gold throughout the entire robe of salvation. Christ is the proxy of blood for the whole race of sinners. The Spotless One died in the place of the impure. He is the offering for the deadly sin of Adam. He is the propitiation for the evil deeds of a world. The lamb on the smoking altar, the scapegoat turned into the wilderness, the sprinkling of atonement, all the sacrifices of the old covenant, as well as the infinite one of the new, are based on the doctrine of vicarious action and the divine acceptance of authorized substitutes.

The manifestation of this truth in the last dispensation came from the Prophet Elijah in the temple built to the Almighty by the Latter-day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio. On the third of April, 1836, he who was caught up to heaven without death, appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, and committed the keys of the power to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers," that the earth might be saved from a curse. The living are thus authorized, under prescribed conditions, to act for the dead, and the fathers in the spirit world look to the children in the flesh to perform for them the works which they were unable to attend to while in the body.

Here is the peculiar blessing upon the heads of the Saints in the grand, culminating and completing dispensation of the fullness of times. To labor for the redemption of their progenitors until every lost link in the line of their ancestry, back to the Abrahamic stock from which they originally sprang, shall be taken up and welded into the perfect family chain. Herein is seen one of the blessings attending the perpetuation of a man's name in the earth; to die leaving no seed being considered in olden times, among the people of God, one of the greatest of calamities. Indeed the glory and dominion, and joy and rapture of the future state will be found to have intimate relation to the family condition, and the promise to Abraham of a numerous posterity was not merely of earthly portent, but reached into the exaltation and beatitudes of eternal existence.

This glorious doctrine bears the key to the sphere within the vail. It regulates the communion of the living with the dead. It saves those who receive it from improper and deceptive spirit communications. Tidings to the living from their friends who have passed away do not come in disorder and confusion, nor by the will of men or women, whether corrupt or pure. Order is maintained in all the works and ways of God. Knowledge that is needful concerning the spiritual sphere will come through an appointed channel and in the appointed place. The temple where the ordinances can be administered for the dead, is the place to hear from the dead. The Priesthood in the flesh, when it is necessary, will receive communications from the Priesthood behind the vail. Most holy conversations on all things pertaining to the redemption of the race, belong in the places prepared in the temples.

The Saints in the flesh are required to use all due diligence in obtaining their genealogies by the means at command, and a spirit has moved upon men in the world to collect and perfect and publish the records of their ancestors, by which, thousands upon thousands of acceptable names have been obtained, and the work of vicarious baptism already done is immense. But that which remains to be accomplished is so vast, that no mind, unless illuminated by the light of God, can see how it can ever be performed and perfected. Yet it will be done, and blessed are they who aid in the heavenly labor! With what joy will they be greeted by the spirits of their progenitors when they meet them in Paradise! What honor will crown their brows in the day of reward and compensation! They will stand among the saviors, and shine among their kindred who are redeemed, like glorious suns in the heavenly constellations!