Little would strangers, could they have witnessed those seventy-five Saints, without knowing our circumstances; I say, little would they have thought that we were exiles from our homes, going to seek among strangers, abiding places for the winter, in an adjoining county, and by order of the governor, leave the State and go we knew not where, in the Spring. They would naturally have thought us a pleasure party.
On the fifth of March, 1839, after wintering seven miles from Far West, in Caldwell County, we started en route for Illinois, landing in Quincy; we stopped there a short time, and from there our father moved to Warren County, in the same State; from there to LaHarpe, where Lorenzo found us, thence to Commerce, afterwards called Nauvoo.
CHAPTER IX.
Called on mission to England.—Extraordinary communication.—Calls on families of the Twelve.—In Ohio.—Borrows money.—On board a sailing vessel.—In Liverpool.—Writes to his aunt.—Why he is there.—How he came there.—Crossing the ocean.—Terrific storms.—An ocean storm scene.—The calm.—Gratitude.—Arrives in Liverpool.—Manchester.—Birmingham.—Lorenzo says:
Early in the spring of 1840, I was appointed to a mission in England, and I started on or about the twentieth of May. I here record a circumstance which occurred a short time previous—one which has been riveted on my memory, never to be erased, so extraordinary was the manifestation. At the time, I was at the house of Elder H. G. Sherwood; he was endeavoring to explain the parable of our 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 attentively listening to his 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 noonday, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation, as it was shown me, and explains Father Smith's dark saying to me at a blessing meeting in the Kirtland Temple, prior to my baptism, as previously mentioned in my first interview with the Patriarch.
As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.
I felt this to be a sacred communication, which I related to no one except my sister Eliza, until I reached England, when in a confidential private conversation with President Brigham Young, in Manchester, I related to him this extraordinary manifestation.
Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Parley P. Pratt, Orson Pratt, and others of the Quorum of the Twelve, nine in all, were at this time laboring in England, and before leaving Nauvoo, the home of the Saints, I visited several of their families. I found Sister Young occupying an unfinished log hut, with a loose floor, and no chinking between the logs; consequently the sides and ends of the hut were open, leaving the inmates exposed to wind and storms. When I called, she had just returned from a long, fatiguing and fruitless search for her milch cow, which had strayed the day before, and on which she much depended for sustenance for her little ones. On my asking her what she wished me to say to her husband, she replied, "You see my situation, but tell him not to trouble, or worry in the least about me—I wish him to remain in his field of labor until honorably released." Her apparent poverty-stricken, destitute condition deeply stirred my sympathy. I had but little money—not sufficient to take me one-tenth the distance to my field of labor, with no prospect for obtaining the balance, and was then on the eve of starting. I drew from my pocket a portion of my small pittance, and presented her, but she refused to accept it; while I strenuously insisted on her taking, and she persisting to refuse—partly purposely, and partly accidentally, the money was dropped on the floor, and rattled through the openings between the loose boards, which settled the dispute, and bidding her good bye, I left her to pick it up at her leisure. When I called on the wife of Orson Pratt, she said she wished her husband to return home as soon as possible—she needed his assistance.