The Women of Mormondom

by Edward W. Tullidge

"It was with a heart full of thanksgiving and gratitude to God, my Heavenly Father, that I reflected upon his dealings with me and my brethren of the twelve during the past year of my life, which was spent in England. It truly seems a miracle to look upon the contrast between our landing and departing from Liverpool. We landed in the spring of 1840, as strangers in a strange land, and penniless, but through the mercy of God we have gained many friends, established churches in almost every noted town and city of Great Britain, baptized between seven and eight thousand souls, printed five thousand Books of Mormon, three thousand hymn-books, two thousand five hundred volumes of the Millennial Star, and fifty thousand tracts; emigrated to Zion one thousand souls, establishing a permanent shipping agency, which will be a great blessing to the saints, and have left sown in the hearts of many thousands the seed of eternal life, which shall bring forth fruit to the honor and glory of God; and yet we have lacked nothing to eat, drink or wear; in all these things I acknowledge the hand of God."

But even this was eclipsed by the results of the next ten years. Besides the thousands who had emigrated, the British mission, at the culmination of this third period, numbered nearly forty thousand souls. The Millennial Star reached a weekly circulation of twenty-two thousand; and there were half a million of Orson Pratt's tracts in circulation throughout the land. This crowning period was during the presidencies of Orson Spencer, Orson Pratt, and Franklin and Samuel Richards.

Too vast this missionary work abroad, and too crowded its events, for us to follow the historic details; but we shall, however, frequently hereafter meet representative women from Europe, and read in their sketches many episodes of the saints in foreign lands.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE SISTERS AS MISSIONARIES—EVANGELICAL DIPLOMACY—WITHOUT PURSE OR SCRIP—PICTURE OF THE NATIVE ELDERS—A SPECIMEN MEETING—THE SECRET OF SUCCESS—MORMONISM A SPIRITUAL GOSPEL—THE SISTERS AS TRACT DISTRIBUTERS—WOMAN A POTENT EVANGELIST.

And what the part of the sisterhood in this great work outlined in foreign lands?

The sisters were side by side with the most potent missionaries the Latter-day Church found. They made nearly as many converts to Mormonism as the elders. They were, often times, the direct instruments which brought disciples into the Church. The elders riveted the anchor of faith by good gospel logic, and their eloquent preachers enchanted the half-inspired mind with well-described millennial views, but the sisters, as a rule, by the nicest evangelical diplomacy brought the results about. They agitated the very atmosphere with their magical faith in the new dispensation; they breathed the spirit of their own beautiful enthusiasm into their neighborhoods; they met the first brunt of persecution and conquered it by their zeal; they transformed unbelief into belief by their personal testimonies, which aroused curiosity, or made their relatives and neighbors sleepless with active thoughts of the new, and inspired doubts of the old; they enticed the people to hear their elders preach, and did more to disturb the peace of the town than could have done the town-crier; they crowded their halls with an audience when without their sisterly devising those halls had remained often empty and cold.

In the British mission—in England, Scotland and Wales—the sisters had much better missionary opportunities than in America. The vast extent of country over which the American people were sparsely scattered, forty to fifty years ago, and the almost immediate gatherings of the disciples to a centre place, or a local Zion, necessarily confined the missionary movement at home nearly exclusively to the apostles and their aids, the "Seventies;" and thus as soon as the disciples "gathered out of Babylon," American society lost even the little leaven which the elders had inspired in its midst.

But in England, Scotland and Wales, and at a later period in Scandinavia, it was very different. Not merely one local Zion and a score of branches scattered over a score of States, but in the British mission at its zenith of progress there were over five hundred branches, fifty conferences, and about a dozen pastorates—the latter very like Mormon provinces or bishoprics. There the sisters had grand missionary opportunities. From village to town, and from town to city, they helped the elders push their work until this vast church superstructure was reared. With such a leaven as the Mormon sisterhood in Great Britain, converts were made so fast that it was nearly twenty years before even the immense yearly emigration of the saints to America began visibly to tell in weakening missionary operations in that prolific land.

It has often been a matter of wonder how it happened that Mormonism was such a mighty proselyting power in England compared with what it had been in America. The two views presented suggest the exact reason; and in addition to the gathering genius of the Mormons, the very "tidal wave" of the country has swept migrating peoples westward. Three hundred Mormon cities have sprung up on the Pacific slope, just as five hundred branches did in Great Britain, which has required all the gathering energies of the Church for over a quarter of a century to deplete her of these proselyting saints. It was Great Britain that gave to the sisters their grand missionary opportunities.