It was a beautiful evening in early summer, and my mother and sister asked me to accompany them to one of the testimony-meetings which I have already described. This meeting was very similar to the others, with one notable exception:—it was here that I saw and heard, for the first time in my own experience, the “gift of tongues” exercised.
Long before I had even heard of Mormonism, I had frequently thought how wonderfully useful this gift must have been to the Apostles. One of the great difficulties encountered by the missionary is learning the language of the people among whom he works and lives. To be able to dispense with all this labour, and to be understood wherever he went, must have lightened the mind of the holy man of half its load; and naturally, when I heard that the Mormons had “the Gift of Tongues,” I supposed it was the self-same power of diverse speech as that exercised by the Apostles; and I presume the reader will conjecture with me that it was the same “gift,” or, at least, some imitation of it. How surprised I was when I first discovered the meaning of the term “speaking in tongues” among the Mormons, may perhaps be imagined when I explain what happened at that testimony-meeting.
After prayer, and singing, and listening to several very fervent addresses from some of the elders, Brother Seely had delivered a most impassioned speech, and had hardly concluded, when Sister Ellis, who was sitting near me, gave evidence of being in an abnormal condition of mind, which to me was painful in the extreme. Her hands were clenched, and her eyes had that wild and supernatural glare which is never seen, save in cases of lunacy or intense feverish excitement. Every one waited breathlessly, listening to catch what she might say;—you might have heard a pin drop.
Then in oracular language and with all the impassioned dignity of one inspired of heaven, she began to speak.
I say “speak,” as that term is generally applied to the utterances of the human voice; but she did not speak in the sense in which we always employ that word; she simply emitted a series of sounds. They seemed to me chiefly the repetition of the same syllables—something like a child repeating, la, la, la, le, lo; ma, ma, ma, mi, ma; dele, dele, dele, dela—followed, perhaps, by a number of sounds strung together, which could not be rendered in any shape by the pen. Sometimes in the Far West, in later years, I have heard old Indian women, crooning weirdly monotonous and outlandish ditties in their native tongue. These wild dirges, more nearly than anything else I ever heard, resembled the prophetic utterances of Sister Ellis; save only, that the appearance of the latter was far too solemn to admit of even a smile at what she said.
Ridiculous as this appears when I now write it down on paper, and strange as even then it was to me, there was something so commanding, so earnest, so “inspirational,” if I may be allowed the term, in Sister Ellis’s manner, that I could not wonder at the attention which the brethren and sisters paid to this gifted speaker in tongues.
I now know that these extraordinary displays are by no means confined to Mormonism. People of a certain temperament, excited to frenzy—generally by religious enthusiasm—have in all ages given painful illustrations of this mental disease; as the student who remembers the Convulsionnaires of the middle ages, the Munster Anabaptists of Luther’s time, and the various emotional sects of more modern days, will abundantly bear me witness. But at that time, new in the faith, and believing as I did that, as the Elders said, it was the manifestion of the power of God, as foretold by the prophet Joel, though I secretly felt a sense of repugnance, I tried to combat my better sentiments.
Overcome by the excitement of the moment, Sister Ellis suddenly paused, not so much intentionally as from sheer inability to proceed; and the leading Elders looked round from one to another to see if any one was present who could interpret. The gift of interpretation is very rarely possessed by the same person who has the gift of tongues, and you may often hear one after another arise and “speak,” but there is no one to “interpret,” and the Saints go away unedified. Even when an interpreter is present, there is no authority to determine whether he gives the proper rendering of the sounds uttered, and I have over and over again heard the most ludicrous stories of the comical interpretation placed by some half-witty or half-witted expounder upon these oracles.
When Brother Brigham—then a man who was lowly in his own eyes—first met the prophet Joseph Smith, at Kirtland, Ohio, there was a scene somewhat like the one I have described; and the future leader of “this people,” as he calls the Saints, himself spake with tongues and uttered wonderful things. But even supposing his words at that time to have been of the wisest, we all know from the example of Balaam’s reprover, that it does not require a very high order of intellect to speak in unaccustomed language—and that, too, to some purpose. In later days the exercise of this gift has been discouraged by the Elders, and especially by Brigham Young. Going one day, some years after, to the Lion-House to see a certain member of the Prophet’s little family concerning a subject which lay very near to my heart at that time, we prayed together earnestly and anxiously; when suddenly the lady’s face was lighted up with a supernatural glow, and placing her hand on my head she, sibyl-like, poured forth a flood of eloquence which—although I did not understand a single word that was uttered—I confess sent through me a magnetic thrill as if I had been listening to an inspired seeress. Another of Brigham’s wives who was present interpreted the words of blessing to me, but added: “Do not speak of this, Sister Stenhouse, for Brother Young does not like to hear of these things.” Thus we see that one inspired prophet in the presence of another “prophet, seer, and revelator,” could himself take part at one time in a miraculous manifestation, which in later years he “would not like to hear of,” if it was only one of his many wives who enacted the prophet’s rôle.
But my meeting! I have wandered far away from that. Let me proceed.