My First Mission

by George Q. Cannon

It was a busy time, and I was only able to hold one meeting during the week. But on the next Sunday I had a most excellent time. Five were baptized and confirmed, and the spirit was powerfully poured out upon all present; many were stirred up to repentance, their hearts were touched and the tears coursed down their cheeks. Brother James Keeler, who had been stopping in Lahaina, was with me that day, he having reached there the previous day. Our joy was very great, and I thought it one of the best days in my life.

We held meetings during the week, and on Sunday I baptized and confirmed six persons.

It was in much weakness that I labored in the ministry; but I began to taste a joy that I had never before known, and my heart was filled with praise and gratitude to the Lord for deeming me worthy to receive the Priesthood, and to go forth on a mission.

Nineteen persons had joined the Church at Kula, and I felt impressed by the Spirit to go elsewhere and open other places in which to minister the word to the people.

The news of what was being done at Kula—the new religion as it was called—the new method of baptism—for up to that time the people had been sprinkled—and the doctrine, so strange to them, that God has spoken again to man, and sent His holy angels to minister unto him, was noised about, and there began to be a great curiosity felt by many of the people to hear.

Although the natives of the Sandwich Islands had been taught to read, and the Bible had been placed in their hands, and they had been trained to look upon the sectarian missionaries as their spiritual teachers, yet the religion of these missionaries did not generally satisfy them. There was not the power about the God which the missionaries worshiped that they believed there was about the gods of their fathers. The missionaries taught them that God no longer revealed Himself to men, that prophecy, miracles and the gifts mentioned in the Bible, had ceased.

But we taught the very opposite of all this. We told them God had not changed. He was the same to-day that He was when the Bible was written. His gifts and blessings were for men now, as much as they were eighteen hundred years ago. Man had lost faith, and he did not obey God’s laws, therefore, he had lost favor with the heavens, and the gifts and blessings were withheld.

The Bible upheld us in our teachings, and there was a consistency in our doctrines which pleased the honest.

The most of the natives of the islands supposed the Bible meant what it said; they had not learned to think that it meant one thing when it said another. But after our arrival the sectarian missionaries tried hard to teach them that the word of God had a hidden meaning, and that it was not like other language—a task, however, which, with a plain, simple people like the natives, they found very difficult.

The missionaries had great influence with the chiefs and the government. Their religion was, in fact, the State religion, though not so declared by law; it was popular to be a member of their church, while it was unpopular not to be connected with it.