WHEN CHRIST STOOD ON AMERICAN SOIL
His Church Established Among the Ancient Americans
DURING His brief period of mortal ministry our Lord the Christ established His Church, with Apostles empowered and directed to administer the ordinances essential to membership and to build up the institution. This was done in Palestine; and from that land the message of salvation was carried into every country known to the inhabitants of the Eastern Continent. In the period immediately following the Lord's departure, the Apostles prosecuted the work of the ministry with such zeal and effectiveness that we read of them: "And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following." (Mark 16:20).
We are expressly informed of the rapid growth of the Church in apostolic times. Paul, writing approximately thirty years after the Ascension, declared that the Gospel had been made known to every nation—"preached to every creature under heaven," by which comprehensive statement the Apostle doubtless meant that the Gospel had been so generally proclaimed in known lands that all who would might have learned of it.
The Apostles had been instructed to go into all the world and to preach the Gospel to every creature, with the assurance that such as accepted their message and were baptized as the Lord had commanded would be saved, while such as rejected the Gospel would be damned.
So far as we know, during the apostolic epoch and for more than a millennium thereafter, the existence of a Western Continent was known to no one in the East. Nevertheless, at that very time and for centuries before, America was inhabited by powerful nations, who exhibited the entire range of attainment from savagery to refinement and culture, and all the gradations from deviltry to godliness.
It was obviously impossible for the Galilean Apostles, by any but miraculous and supernatural aid, to carry the Gospel to the western world, and we find scriptural warrant for the assertion that they did not so.
Nevertheless, the Church of Jesus Christ was established upon the American continent, and that through the personal ministry of the Risen Lord, soon after His ascension from Mount Olivet. The Book of Mormon contains a circumstantial account of this marvelous theophany.
Jesus Christ visited the aboriginal peoples of the Western Continent. His identity affirmed by the voice of the Eternal Father and by His own solemn testimony, the Resurrected Christ, still bearing the wounds of the cross in hands and feet and side, declared that the old order under the Mosaic Law was fulfilled and abrogated in Him; and straightway He proceeded to organize His Church under the new or Gospel dispensation.
He chose twelve men, whom He ordained to be special witnesses of Himself and the Church; and to them He gave authority to administer the ordinances essential to salvation, as He had done on the other hemisphere.