On October 5, 1875,
Eli Pierce was sitting in a railroad telegraph office smoking an old Dutch pipe
and reading a novel. Though a Latter-day Saint, he was not attending the
semiannual general conference of the Church because, as he said, “I did not care
to be.”
Eli was not a
church-goer. He smoked cigars; in fact, he said, he bought them by the thousands.
He gambled, swore, and drank. He had scarcely read a dozen chapters of
scripture in his life and had never preached a public discourse. “Nature,” Eli
said of himself, “never endowed me with a super-abundance of religious sentiment
or veneration.” IT seems that was an understatement.
All of that
notwithstanding, one of Eli’s friends was attending conference and heard Eli’s
name read form the pulpit. Eli was being called to serve as a missionary in the
eastern United States. The man ran out and immediately sent Eli a telegraph with
the news. When Eli received the telegraph, his first thoughts were, “I marveled
and wondered if the church [was] not running short of missionary material.”
What he did next is
truly remarkable. “As soon as I had been informed of what had taken place, I
threw the novel in the waste basket, the pipe in a corner and started up town
to buy [scriptures], [and] have never read a novel nor smoked a pipe from that
hour. [I] sent in my resignation . . . to take effect at once, in order that I
might have time for study and preparation.”
And then Eli records
this:
Remarkable as it may
seem, and has since appeared to me, a thought of disregarding the call, or of
refusing to comply with the requirement, never once entered my mind. The only
question I asked—and I asked it a thousand times—was: How can I accomplish this
mission? How can I, who am so shamefully ignorant and untaught in doctrine, do
honor to God and justice to the souls of men, and merit the trust reposted in me
by the Priesthood?
Determined to serve,
Eli was mocked by some of his friends. They said he would not last six months.
They were wrong.
Eli arrived in
Pennsylvania and went to work. At first he did all he could to avoid speaking
in public, but in time things changed. Speaking of him and his companion, he
wrote, “Through prayerfulness, humility, and persevering faith, we soon
obtained the coveted testimony, [and] were greatly blessed of the Lord in
freedom of speech and delivery, and we became known in that locality as ‘the boy
evangelists.’”
It was on that
mission that Elder Pierce had a remarkable experience He was called on to bless
the youngest child of the branch president. The mother, however, was
embittered, and refused to allow her dying child to receive the blessing. “Not
wishing to intrude,” Eli wrote, he and the branch president retired to an upper
room in the house to pray for the baby’s life. The angry, suspicious mother
sent one of her holder daughters to watch them. Elder Pierce then reported, “In
a secluded chamber we knelt down and prayed earnestly and fervently until we
felt that the child would live and knew that our prayers had been heard.”
Turning around, they
saw the girl standing in the doorway, staring fixedly, but not at them. She seemed
to focus on a certain point in the room. She said nothing until her father
spoke to her. And then she asked, “Papa, who was the other man there?”
Her father answered, “That
is Brother Pierce. You know him.”
“No, I mean that
other man.”
“There was no other,
darling, except Brother Pierce and myself. We were praying for Baby.”
The girl shook her head
and said with perfect composure, “Oh yes, there was. I saw him standing between
you and Mr. Pierce and he was all dressed in white.”
Elder Piece
concluded, “The baby was speedily restored to perfect health.”
“The Lord requireth
the heart and a willing mind” (D&C 64:34), and when we give it to Him, oh,
the good He will do. (Mark D. Ogletree, “Eli H. Pierce,” in Glenn Rawson and
Dennis Lyman, eds., Signs, Wonders, and Miracles: Extraordinary Stories from
Early Latter-day Saints [American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications, Inc.,
2015], 65-67. Ogletree gives as his source, Biography
and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow, pp. 407-13)
