On March 26, 1850, recounting a trip to Nauvoo a few years previously (after the Saints had left the city), Thomas L. Kane recounted the following. Note how the non-LDS showing him around the Nauvoo temple serve as hostile witness for early LDS belief in baptismal regeneration:
They also conducted
me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious Temple, in which they
said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of
an unhallowed worship. . . . They said, the deluded persons, most of whom were
immigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced their
reception here of a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for whomsoever
they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come: That
here parents “went into the water” for their lost children, children for their
parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers: That
thus the Great Vase came to be for them associated with all dear and distant
memories, and was therefore the object, of all others in the building, to which
they attached the greatest degree of idolatrous affection. (Thomas L. Kane, The
Mormons: A Discourse Delivered Before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania:
March 26, 1850 [Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1850], 7-8, emphasis
added)
